Studio Hyperset

Today, we’re excited to release a new tool that can help any organization build, enhance and optimize their marketing plan. MarketingPlanner.io is free and easy to use, and it offers users the ability to set a custom marketing plan budget and select from a diverse menu of marketing initiatives. These include traditional mass media options (such as radio and television ads) and progressive online, content-based options (such as podcasting, ebooks, and infographics).

Marketing Plan Tool Costs

When scoping the marketing plan tool, we found assigning costs to the menu items was a difficult challenge. Costs can vary substantially between industries and vendors, and attempting to assign costs to abstract items like “partnerships” with a simple (daresay reductive) dollar amount is virtually impossible.

As a solution, we’ve instead set costs using a simple, user-focused formula. This formula factors in:

• a user’s gross revenue, budget, or funding
• his/her target marketing budget
• an “effectiveness” score

Regarding the effectiveness score, we’ve assigned each menu item an ascending value of 0-50. (Higher scores indicate increased effectiveness.) This score plays an important role in the costs users see.

We developed this scale, and assigned each menu item a value, using our experience, that of our clients, and a selection of content resources. As we develop the marketing plan tool, we’ll be fine-tuning this score using visitor data and feedback as well as any additional content resources we discover.

In addition to solving the arbitrary cost problem, we hope this cost model helps users generate highly personal plans based on their specific budgets and goals. We also hope these weights give users not only an idea of raw dollars-and-cents cost — which can be misleading and reductive in this context — but also a sense of the weighted value of each menu item.

In an absolute sense, podcasts, for example, may cost less to create and syndicate than mass media ads. But, as one of the most effective items on our menu, the organization would do well to commit more of its marketing budget to podcasts than mass media ads.

This “smart spend” argument is implicit in the costs users see.

To learn more about our cost formula and effectiveness scores as well as the resources we used to frame the tool, please visit the marketing plan’s “Methodology & Resources” section. You can also help us fine-tune the effectiveness scores by taking our survey.