Email and digital marketing expert Ryan Phelan has some actionable advice for strategic planning in 2021. Why is 2021 different from any other year? Because of what happened in 2020, of course. “Somebody asked me the other day if I planned to take a trip this year. I used to travel regularly for both work and pleasure, but I spent 2020 on the ground. I answered, ‘I don’t even know what’s going to happen tomorrow, let alone in six months.’”

Strategic planning this year has to be agile as never before and has to leave room for the unexpected. Unless you have an enterprise-scale marketing organization, Ryan advocates shrinking your goals to one, achievable, high impact goal per quarter. Much more than that is going to be unrealistic, and it gives you space to turn around if the unpredictable happens.

He also suggests shelving the 12-month plan. Break your year down. “In other years, we could plot out an entire 12-month calendar. This year, spend your planning day dividing your year in half – call the halves H1 and H2 – and think about what you would like to do in each half. Subdivide each into quarters if that helps. This has another benefit – it forces you to narrow your vision and focus your energy.”

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MarTech Today’s “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” examines the market for B2B marketing automation software platforms. This report includes profiles of 13 leading B2B marketing automation vendors, capabilities comparisons, pricing information, and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing.

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Citrix, the digital workspace platform, this week announced a definitive agreement to acquire Wrike, the collaborative work management solution for $2.25 billion. The aim is to integrate the Citrix digital work platform, which supplies the tools employees (and especially remote employees) need to get work done, with Wrike’s portfolio of workflow, collaboration and management tools.

The overall environment will be cloud-based and will enable structured and unstructured collaboration, team collaboration, and document-based collaborative workflows.

Why we care. The digital work management space has been on fire for months now, with Adobe spending $1.5 billion to acquire Workfront back in November, and Salesforce dropping a reported $27.7 billion dollars on Slack in December. Expect more movement and consolidation on this front.

Scott Brinker of HubSpot and ChiefMartec started a discussion on LinkedIn yesterday by citing a Treasure Data/eTail report on CDPs in the retail/consumer sector  — and specifically the finding that no less than two thirds surveyed expected to build their own custom CDP rather than buy one off the shelf.

Of course, one question immediately raised, as marketing consultant Jordie Van Rijn pointed out, is “what a ‘custom CDP’ is.” NTE Growth Hacker Odd Morten Sørensen asked if building their own meant building “from scratch,” and Tealium CMO Heidi Bullock piled on by asking what “from scratch” meant. 

We thought the finding was surprising: after all, it’s widely suggested that brands turn to CDPs once their own data storage or data lake projects overwhelm them — or at best, become repositories for data that can’t be actioned. CDP heavyweight Tasso Argyros of ActionIQ (who has some skin in the game) seemed to be thinking on the same track: “The high % of build vs buy is due to people defining CDP to mean a data lake with customer data in it. That is NOT a CDP. The CDP sits on top of data lakes and includes a wide array of functionality: from identity resolution to audiencing, journeys, orchestration, customer intelligence and much more.”

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“If you’re like many of the marketers I work with, you’re feeling disconnected these days. Coherent thoughts and strategic planning can be hard to come by when you can’t focus on the work at hand. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.” Ryan Phelan, co-founder RPEOrigin.com.