One model with seven modules
Many marketing setups are separate tools that share a login. Planifold is one model. A budget line knows which objective it pays for, a customer analysis updates the KPI you already track, and the calendar shows when a promotion and a media schedule fall in the same fortnight.
Set objectives for the company, break them down by department and team, and see whether any budget is paying for each one.
- A key result is a measurable outcome that shows whether an objective is on track. Each has a baseline, a target and a direction, and Planifold works out progress for you.
- Health rolls up through the levels. A company objective does not show as green while a team objective beneath it is failing.
- An objective with no key results shows as “not measured”, because there is nothing yet to judge it by.
Plan spending by department, account and line, with twelve months of phasing that adds up to the yearly total.
- Each line can name the initiative it pays for. Lines without one are marked.
- Variance is the difference between what you planned and what you spent. You can sort it by amount or by percentage.
- You can compare scenarios, set department envelopes, and move money between lines. The move asks you for a reason.
- You can import a spreadsheet. The assistant suggests which column matches which field, and you confirm the mapping before anything is saved.
Plan media and see reach and frequency worked out from published formulas, with each assumption listed.
- Reach is the share of an audience that sees a schedule at least once. Frequency is the average number of times each of those people sees it.
- Every calculated figure opens to show its working: the formula, each input, and what each input is based on.
- A line with no reach estimate is left out of the reach totals, and the page tells you so.
- Share of voice compares your spending with everyone else’s in your market. Planifold needs you to enter the competitor spend, so until you do, the figure shows as not yet available.
Plan offers and press pitches on the same calendar as your media schedule, so you can see where they overlap.
- Promotion results include redemptions, extra revenue, the cost of the discount and the margin left over.
- Lift is the extra sales a promotion produced compared with a baseline. The baseline names its method, because comparing with last fortnight and comparing with stores that had no promotion give different answers.
- The assistant drafts PR pitches and does not send them. You mark a pitch as sent after you send it yourself.
- If the assistant cannot find a figure in your workspace, it leaves the field blank.
A KPI, or key performance indicator, is a number you track over time. Each one has a single written definition.
- A definition is required. When two teams quote customer acquisition cost (CAC) at each other, the disagreement is usually about what the number includes.
- A library of common metrics comes with definitions already written.
- You can record a series of readings, set targets, group KPIs on boards, and add dated notes explaining why a number moved.
- You cannot change a KPI’s unit once it has readings, because that would change the meaning of every reading already recorded.
A trade area is the region your customers come from. You can draw one by drive time, by radius or by hand, and see what falls inside it.
- Geocoding turns an address into a map position. Planifold records how precise each match is, because a match to a building and a match to a postal code centre are different quality.
- Overlap between trade areas is calculated exactly, so you can see how much two locations compete for the same customers.
- The white space view lists sites that nobody has ranked as unassessed, which means their demand is still unknown.
Upload a customer file and Planifold reads it without keeping it. It works out cohorts, retention, lifetime value and acquisition cost.
- A cohort is a group of customers who first bought in the same period. Retention is the share of them who buy again in later periods.
- Customer identifiers are hashed as the file is read, which means they are converted into codes that cannot be turned back into names. The original file is deleted after it has been read.
- Retention has three common meanings, and the results can differ by about a factor of two. Planifold states which one it is using.
- Cost per customer matches your actual spending to actual new customers. It lists any spending it could not attribute and does not spread that spending across the rest.
- Cohorts that are too small to be reliable are hidden, so you do not act on a rate based on a handful of people.
The assistant suggests changes, and you decide
You can ask it to build a budget from last year’s spreadsheet, draft objectives from a strategy document, model a fifteen percent budget cut, or write the quarterly narrative. It shows each change as a diff, which is a line-by-line comparison of before and after. You can apply all of the changes or only some of them, and you can undo them for thirty days.
Every figure the assistant produces is labelled estimated or assumed, with its reasoning attached. It cannot label a number as measured. If you ask what a budget cut would do to awareness, it tells you what the cut does to the money and says the effect on awareness is unknown. It can give an estimate once you provide an elasticity, which is a figure for how much awareness changes when spending changes.
Begin with one task
You do not need to fill in the whole model to get value from it. You can import a budget, upload a customer file, or enter the objectives you already work to. Planifold then lists whatever is still unmatched.