How to decide your marketing priorities when everything feels urgent

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Why prioritisation matters when everything feels urgent

Founders and marketing leads rarely suffer from a lack of ideas. The real challenge is deciding what to do next. When sales need support, product wants a launch, the board asks for more leads, and social demands content, it can feel like everything is critical at once. Without a simple method to choose, teams spread themselves thin, budgets get diluted, and momentum stalls.

This article gives you a practical, repeatable way to decide your marketing priorities, even in high-pressure weeks. It works for small and mid-sized companies with limited resource, and it helps you defend your plan with clear logic.

The core principle: focus beats speed

Speed without focus wastes money. Focus with steady pace compounds. The goal is to reduce WIP, choose fewer initiatives, and finish them properly. That is how you unlock meaningful results and cleaner reporting.

A simple prioritisation model that works

Use a hybrid scoring model that blends RICE and Cost of Delay. RICE helps you estimate impact. Cost of Delay forces you to factor time sensitivity. Together, they produce a sensible order of work that stands up in leadership reviews.

Step 1. Define the business goal for this quarter

Write one sentence that anchors everything. For example: increase qualified pipeline by 25 percent, lift repeat purchase by 10 percent, grow awareness ahead of a funding round. If you cannot state the goal simply, do not start prioritising.

Step 2. Capture constraints and non-negotiables

Note hard deadlines, legal or seasonal constraints, product release dates, and must-do activities you cannot ignore. Keep this list short so it does not swallow the plan.

Step 3. Build your initiative backlog

List every candidate initiative in one place. Include a short description, primary objective, target audience, and success metric. Examples: refresh the website conversion journey, launch a partner webinar series, test a new creative for paid social, create a comparison page, run a PR moment around a report.

Step 4. Score with RICE

For each initiative, estimate four things:

Reach. How many of the right people could this touch in the period you can deliver it.
Impact. If it works, how strongly will it move the primary metric, from 0.25 to 3. Use realistic, conservative numbers.
Confidence. How sure are you about your estimates, from 0.2 to 1.
Effort. How many person weeks will it take across the team and partners.

Calculate a RICE score: (Reach × Impact × Confidence) ÷ Effort. This rewards high potential work that is achievable with your current capacity.

Step 5. Layer in Cost of Delay

Now add a time factor. Ask: what is the value lost each week if we do not ship this. Consider seasonality, sales cycles, PR windows, paid contract terms, and product timelines. Give a simple rating from 1 to 3. Multiply your RICE score by this factor to create an adjusted score that respects urgency without letting it dominate.

Step 6. Map effort and sequencing

Plot initiatives on a two by two: Effort on the horizontal axis and Adjusted Score on the vertical axis. Prioritise high score and low to medium effort items. Sequence dependencies so work can flow without blockers. Limit your WIP to protect quality.

Step 7. Allocate budget by objective and channel

Split your spend by business objective first, not by channel preference. A simple starting point for growing companies is a 60, 30, 10 split across awareness, acquisition, and retention, then adjust by sector and growth stage. Within each objective, distribute budget across the channels that best reach your audience and match your creative capacity.

For planning, marketing mix modelling resources are useful context on balancing brand and performance. See Think with Google on MMM.

Step 8. Set quarterly commitments and monthly sprints

Translate the top five initiatives into a quarterly plan. Lock priorities, owners, budget, and success metrics. Run monthly sprints to deliver, measure, and iterate. Keep a short backlog of next candidates in case a slot opens.

Quick scoring sheet template

Write the quarterly goal. Keep it to one sentence.

List candidate initiatives with a short description and the primary metric.

Score Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. Compute RICE.

Add Cost of Delay, from 1 to 3. Compute Adjusted Score.

Sort by Adjusted Score. Sense-check capacity and dependencies.

Choose the top five. Park the rest for later review.

Common mistakes that derail prioritisation

Counting opinions as data. Anecdotes help, but decisions need numbers, even rough ones.
Optimising for activity rather than outcomes. Busy does not equal effective.
Spreading budget too thin. Five underfunded projects rarely beat two well supported ones.
Ignoring the website and CRM while overspending on paid. Fix the basket before buying more traffic.
Skipping post mortems. If you do not capture learning, prioritisation never improves.

What good looks like

In a strong plan, every initiative ladders into the quarterly goal, every owner knows what success means, and your budget supports the few things you have chosen. Weekly updates report on progress to outcome, not just tasks. Agencies and freelancers have briefs that map directly to the plan, so execution stays aligned.

Useful budget guardrails

Protect brand building. Reserve a fixed percentage for awareness to stabilise demand over time.
Keep a 10 to 15 percent test fund. Use it to learn, not to chase shiny objects.
Review allocation quarterly. Shift money toward proven channels and formats.
Benchmark your split with credible sources such as HubSpot’s guidance on marketing budgets and coverage in Marketing Week on protecting budgets.

Aligning agencies and partners to your priorities

Share the one page plan and the scoring logic with partners. Build briefs that include the quarterly goal, the problem to solve, the target audience, the single minded message, and the KPI that decides success. Set a review rhythm so the team can recommend trade offs when data shows a better route.

For a deeper look at briefing, read how to brief your marketing agency for success.

Measurement and reviews that keep you on track

Define no more than five KPIs for the quarter. Tie each to one initiative and one owner.
Use a simple weekly dashboard. Show result versus target, plus one clear action.
Run monthly reviews. Decide whether to continue, scale, fix, or stop each initiative.
Document insights and update your backlog.

Final checklist

One clear quarterly goal.
Top five initiatives with owners and budgets.
RICE and Cost of Delay scores captured for each item.
Monthly sprints and a fixed review rhythm.
Agencies aligned with clear briefs.
Dashboard focused on outcomes.