Operationalizing Keen
All-in-one Power
Keen is a uniquely powerful platform for marketing measurement, planning, and revenue forecasting. Digesting everything Keen offers, and fully leveraging this information to align your brand’s stakeholders to benefit your brand isn’t an overnight exercise.
The most successful adopters of Keen follow a crawl-walk-run approach to integrating the platform into their processes.
From Measurement to Optimization
Creating a model in Keen enables you to do three distinct things, all at once:
Measurement: The model produces information on historical executions: what percentage of the business they’ve driven, how profitably each channels has been, how influential the environment was, and how you’ve built your brand with these efforts. These insights, alone, are very valuable to your organization.
Onboarding Checkpoint: Key Insights Review.
Create a report from the Historical Performance Template to understand high-level trends and channel-specific insights.
If you’re looking for even deeper education on the marketing principles that drive this performance, supplement with the Analysis 101 Template.
Forecasting: With a model in hand, you can start to confidently forecast performance for upcoming years.
Onboarding Checkpoint: Current Plan Forecast
Upload your current marketing plan using the Forecast a Plan objective.
Optimization: Building plans in Keen brings you to the ultimate value: adapting your marketing plans to deliver the greatest possible value from each dollar invested.
Adoption Checkpoint: Scheduled Plans
Create linked plans further into the future, using the optimization objectives.
Tip: Most brands use the Optimize a Budget objective to transition from forecasting to optimizing. Read more below.
Integrating Insights Into Planning
Optimizing vs Forecasting
Keen offers five different objectives for planning, three of which optimize your marketing plan based on an overall business goal, and two of which produce a performance forecast but do not include an optimization component.
Optimization Objectives: Optimize a Budget, Hit a Target, Maximize Profit
Forecasting Objectives: Forecast a Plan, Status Quo
Learn more about each objective here.
Early in your use of the Keen Platform, you’ll likely want to focus on the forecasting objectives, for several reasons.
Planning naturally requires lead time.
If your brand operates on a January-December calendar, and it’s April, you may already have your marketing plans fully fixed for the first half, and only have wiggle room for certain tactics in the back half.
Using a fixed plan helps calibrate Keen’s projections with any existing internal forecasts.
If your leadership team is expecting marketing to drive $2M in contributed revenue to the business this year, but Keen’s forecast says your plan will drive $1.5M, you’ll gain a lot of valuable information in working to reconcile those.
There’s plenty of institutional knowledge to integrate into optimizations.
If there are major competitive changes or price pressures heading for your brand, reflecting these in your plans is crucial in understanding how you can weather them while remaining profitable.
If certain channels play a strategic role (like an emerging brand running a television ad to gain awareness, or an established brand who has committed to minimum spends with a retailer) those need to be explicitly acknowledge alongside profit-based optimizations.
Blue Sky Optimizations
By understanding “blue sky” optimizations you can better understand the fundamental dynamics of your business. And, over time, you can move away from fully “locked-in” investment allocations to push for further growth.
The Sweet Spot
Even when you’re successfully planning well in advance of purchasing deadlines, your go-to-market strategy will blend Keen’s full-optimized data-driven recommendations with real-world business constraints.
In Keen, this looks like an optimization objective paired with tactic-level constraints.