The “Plan” page is designed to help you create, manage, and improve your marketing mix on an ongoing basis. It is one of InfiniGrow’s most important, and powerful capabilities.
You can use the "Plan" page to get immediate answers to critical questions, such as:
Where do I stand with my tactical/strategic objectives?
What is the impact of increasing or decreasing the budget for a specific marketing channel?
What is the future impact of my marketing initiatives?
Answering these questions gives you a way to create a feedback loop between your historical data and your expected output - you’ll be able to plan your budget, see the expected outcome of your plan, and adjust your plan accordingly.
In this guide we'll review:
Setting up our budget preferences
The Summary widget
The Budget Planning section
Let’s start!
Budget Preferences
Before we dive into the Plan page, please make sure that you have inputted your yearly budget, under your Preferences page. The budget will be used to track your allocated, spent, and unallocated budget across the year.
Channel constraints: You can also input minimum or maximum budgets per channel to stay in control of your budgets across channels.
The Budget Overview Panel
At the top of the screen, you can quickly see your current budget, spend, and additional high-level information.
Invested: The budget already spent this far, over the year.
Planned: The planned budget that was allocated to specific campaigns (meaning, if you allocated $1,000 to a LinkedIn Demo Request Campaign)
Allocated: The planned budget that was allocated on the channel level (meaning, if you allocated $1,000 to LinkedIn Ads)
Unallocated: The remaining budget which was not yet committed, based on your yearly budget which you’ve entered on your Preferences page.
Q/Y Sums: Toggle on to add summary columns to your plan, so you can easily see your spend across channels, per quarter, and throughout the year.
Edit: Click Edit to switch your plan to Edit mode, and easily make budget changes across channels and dates. You can also easily add channels to your marketing plan.
The Budget Planning Section
The Budget Planning section liberates you from the static and disjointed nature of marketing planning on spreadsheets and gives you a way to quickly build your budget, generate forecasts, and ensure that your progress is constantly tracked with InfiniGrow’s Plans Vs Actuals.
Marketing Channels: A dropdown of all of your marketing channels. Any marketing channel that you’d like to incorporate into your plan can be added via the Edit button in the Budget Overview panel.
Total: A summary row, showing you the total budget per month
Hovering over any of the cells allows you to switch into Edit mode and make changes to your plan. To easily make changes across channels and cells, use the Edit mode as described above.