CASE STUDY
Enabling Independent Brand Planning with a Unified Roll-Up View
Travel Chapter is a a leading UK vacation rental agency that manages a large portfolio of self-catering properties, from cottages and castles to unique stays like boats and treehouses.
Vacation Rental Industry | Multiple Brands | Large Team | 1 Lead Plan, 4 Nested Plans
THE CHALLENGE
We purchased Annum as a solution to our siloed way of working; we have a large marketing department with discrete teams, and we were trying to join them up to ensure more collaboration and less duplication of effort.
I’m not even sure how many marketing calendars we had – every team had their own way of working and, as a central planning team, we lacked visibility of these.
In terms of our planning process before Annum, we were ambitious but ineffective – we were struggling to make real progress due to lack of visibility.
IMPLEMENTATION
Learning how to use Annum took less than an afternoon – Patty kindly ran me through the setup and, with the help of the setup sheet, we were up and running after a couple of hours.
“The ability to have nested plans was a really strong selling point for us. We work across many different brands and loved that we could see these brands together and separately, making the platform effective whether we’re working cross-brand or cross-channel.”
– Ruth King, Senior Marketing Planning Manager, Travel Chapter
PLANNING WITH ANNUM
Now integrated planning is so much easier – while we are still a very busy department, teams can piggyback off each other’s efforts to avoid duplication, and we are able to add campaign layers to all planning now which all teams have visibility of. This is ensuring we are all moving in the same direction and with the same aims, even if our execution is different.
It has provided visibility of all marketing activity which wasn’t possible before, and it has allowed for a central source of truth for key campaign dates and aims. As a large team spread across the country, it has also allowed remote workers to feel more connected, which has been an unexpected bonus.
The hierarchical set-up of Annum’s initiatives has allowed for clarity around our strategy from both a brand message level as well as smaller monthly focuses, ensuring everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet. With the ability to tag each tactic to an initiative, we are better aware of the overall strategic focus of our activity.
“By having one central view of all activity, we are able to spot opportunities between channels and work more effectively, e.g. if a certain message is pushed on one channel, we can jump on that for other channels meaning we work more efficiently.
Before Annum, we did not have the visibility that allowed us to do this.”
– Ruth King, Senior Marketing Planning Manager, Travel Chapter
IMPACT
Our reactive marketing has improved since purchasing Annum, as we are able to spot gaps in the calendar and align channels to maximize messaging around seasonal or cultural moments.
Our CMO has much more visibility of our marketing efforts now, as we are easily able to screengrab or export upcoming activity. We also screenshare the calendar during all marketing planning meetings to ensure alignment.
If you are struggling to align activity across channels or brands, this is an excellent tool to bring everyone on the same page. It is intuitive and admin-light to use, which means that it’s not going to be a big time drain to keep updated either.
Enterprise marketing planning that aligns everyone around a central source of truth.
Learn how Annum can transform your planning process.
