Strategy & Planning

How to run annual planning as Small Marketing Teams

Strategy & PlanningFor Small Marketing Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Annual planning for a 3-person marketing team means three weeks of spreadsheet archaeology. You pull HubSpot deal data manually, download GA4 exports, screenshot Meta and LinkedIn Ads spend, and paste everything into a Google Sheet that breaks the moment someone adds a column. You're trying to set channel budgets, MQL targets, and content calendars simultaneously — while still running this week's nurture flow in Customer.io. By the time you've stitched together last year's performance, the numbers are already stale and the CEO wants a deck by Thursday. There's no BI tool, no ops person, and no analyst. It's you, a pivot table, and too many browser tabs.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Strategy & PlanningFor Small Marketing Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live annual planning dashboard that pulls HubSpot pipeline, GA4 sessions, and ad spend from Google, Meta, and LinkedIn into one view — no manual exports, no pivot tables

A quarterly budget tracker that shows your marketing spend by channel against plan, with pace indicators so you know in January whether you're tracking toward your Q2 event budget

A shareable annual plan document — channel targets, campaign calendar, budget allocation — that you can present to the CEO and update without rebuilding from scratch every quarter

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Budgeting Knowledge Management Scenario Analysis

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your HubSpot data on a schedule — contacts, companies, deals, and owners — so pipeline and conversion data is always current. Connect Google Analytics 4, Meta Ads, Google Ads, and LinkedIn Ads from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries them live when your dashboard or budget tracker runs. Starch also syncs your Notion pages on a schedule, so any existing campaign briefs or planning docs you've already written feed into your Knowledge Management app.

Prompts to copy

Build me a marketing budget tracker for 2026 with categories for paid search, paid social, content production, events, and tools. Pull actual spend from HubSpot and flag any category that's more than 10% over or under pace for the month.

Create a 2026 annual marketing plan wiki page with sections for channel strategy, MQL targets by quarter, campaign calendar, and budget allocation. Pull in our HubSpot deal data so the MQL-to-SQL conversion benchmarks reflect last year's actuals.

Run a scenario comparison: what does our 2026 MQL plan look like if paid budget increases 20% vs. stays flat vs. drops 15%? Show me projected pipeline contribution under each scenario based on our current HubSpot conversion rates.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect HubSpot in Starch. Starch syncs your contacts, deals, and pipeline stages on a schedule — this becomes the spine of your MQL and pipeline-contribution numbers for the annual plan.

2 Connect Google Analytics 4, Meta Ads, Google Ads, and LinkedIn Ads from Starch's integration catalog. These are queried live, so when you run your planning dashboard you're pulling current data, not a January export you forgot to update.

3 Connect Notion from Starch's scheduled sync so any campaign briefs, OKR docs, or channel strategies you've already written in Notion are available inside your Knowledge Management app.

4 Open the Budgeting app from the Starch App Store. Customize it for your marketing categories — paid search, paid social, content, events, tools — and set your 2026 annual budget by channel. Starch auto-suggests allocations based on whatever spend history it can see.

5 Tell Starch to build a pipeline-contribution view: 'Show me MQLs by channel for the last 12 months from HubSpot, joined against GA4 session source data, so I can see which channels are driving pipeline, not just traffic.' This is the report you used to rebuild every Monday.

6 Use Scenario Analysis to model your key planning bets. Connect Stripe and Plaid if you need revenue baseline; or just describe the assumptions — 'if we shift 20% of paid budget from Meta to LinkedIn, what happens to our MQL volume given current conversion rates by channel?'

7 Use the Knowledge Management app to build your 2026 annual plan as a living wiki — channel strategy, quarterly MQL targets, campaign calendar, budget allocation. This replaces the Google Doc that gets stale the moment Q1 starts.

8 Tell Starch to generate a first draft of your annual plan structure: 'Create a 2026 marketing annual plan with sections for each channel, Q1–Q4 MQL targets based on our HubSpot conversion data, and a budget allocation table. Flag any channel where last year's CAC exceeded $X.'

9 Set up a weekly automation: 'Every Monday, pull this week's HubSpot pipeline updates, GA4 traffic by channel, and spend from Meta and Google Ads. Compare against our 2026 annual plan targets and Slack me a summary of what's on track and what's drifting.' This is your standing CEO briefing, automated.

10 Export or share the annual plan for the CEO review. Use the Presentation Agent (currently in development — request beta access) to turn your plan data into a slide deck, or export from Knowledge Management as a shareable link today.

11 At each quarter close, update your Budgeting app actuals and re-run your Scenario Analysis with the new HubSpot conversion data. The plan stays live instead of becoming a January artifact nobody reads.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

2026 Annual Planning — November 2025 cycle

Sample numbers from a real run

Paid Search (Google Ads)	180,000
Paid Social (Meta + LinkedIn)	140,000
Content production (contractors, tools)	60,000
Events (2 field events + 1 conference)	55,000
Marketing tools & software	25,000

Your 2026 marketing budget is $460,000. In past years you built this in a Google Sheet: you'd download HubSpot deal reports, eyeball last year's ad spend across three platform dashboards, and estimate channel ROI from memory. This year you told Starch: 'Pull our 2026 MQL-to-SQL conversion rate by source from HubSpot, join it against GA4 channel data for the last 12 months, and show me cost-per-MQL by channel using our Meta, Google, and LinkedIn Ads spend.' The output showed LinkedIn Ads at $310 cost-per-MQL versus Meta at $190 — but LinkedIn deals closed 40% faster. That single view shifted $30,000 from broad Meta prospecting into LinkedIn retargeting and a second field event in Chicago. The Budgeting app now tracks that $460K against actual monthly spend pulled live from your ad platforms, with pace indicators by category. You brief the CEO every Monday with an automated Starch summary instead of spending Friday afternoon rebuilding a slide.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

MQL volume by channel (monthly actuals vs. annual plan target)

Cost-per-MQL by channel (paid search, paid social, organic, events)

Pipeline contribution — marketing-sourced deals as % of total HubSpot pipeline

Marketing spend pace — actual vs. budget by category, month-to-date

MQL-to-SQL conversion rate by source, tracked quarterly against plan assumptions

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Looker Studio + manual exports

Free and flexible, but someone has to own the data pipeline — every new metric requires a new connector or a fresh export, and it breaks whenever an API changes or a team member changes credentials.

HubSpot reporting + spreadsheet planning

HubSpot's native reports are good for CRM data but don't pull in your ad spend or GA4 sessions, so you still end up stitching the actual annual plan together in a Google Sheet that nobody updates after Q1.

A BI tool (Tableau, Metabase, Looker)

Purpose-built for this kind of cross-source analysis, but requires a data warehouse, someone to model the data, and budget a 3-person team typically doesn't have — and it won't write your annual plan document or run your Monday briefing.

Notion + manual planning docs

Great for the written plan and campaign calendar, but it's a static doc — you manually update the MQL targets and budget numbers, and it has no live connection to HubSpot or your ad platforms.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — quarterly budgeting, knowledge management, scenario planning all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does Starch actually store our HubSpot deal and contact data, or is it just reading it live?

Starch syncs your HubSpot data on a schedule — contacts, companies, deals, and owners — and stores it in Starch's database. That's what makes the annual plan dashboard fast and lets you query across a full year of pipeline history without waiting for a live API call every time. Your ad platform data from Google Ads, Meta Ads, and LinkedIn Ads is queried live from Starch's integration catalog when your app runs.

We use Customer.io for email, not HubSpot. Can Starch connect to it?

Yes. Connect Customer.io from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live when your app runs. It won't be a scheduled sync the way HubSpot is, but you can pull campaign performance data into your annual planning dashboard or use it in automations.

Can Starch pull from Amplitude as well as GA4?

Connect Amplitude from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live. If you need data that Amplitude doesn't expose via its API — say, a report view that only exists in the UI — Starch can automate your browser to pull it. No API needed for browser-reachable data.

Is our marketing data safe? We're passing HubSpot deals and ad spend through here.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today — that's worth knowing if your company has compliance requirements that mandate it. If your team is comfortable with SaaS tools generally and doesn't have a strict audit requirement, the data handling is standard modern SaaS. Worth a conversation with your IT or legal contact if you're unsure.

Can Starch replace our weekly pipeline-contribution report that we currently build manually?

That's one of the most direct use cases. Tell Starch: 'Every Monday at 8am, pull this week's HubSpot pipeline updates and MQL volume by source, compare against our annual plan targets, and Slack me a summary.' Starch runs it automatically. You stop rebuilding the same report every Friday.

What about the CEO presentation deck? Can Starch build that too?

The Presentation Agent — which turns a text description into a slide deck — is currently in development. You can request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, your annual plan lives as a shareable Knowledge Management wiki that you can walk the CEO through directly, or export and format manually.

We don't use Plaid or Stripe. Can we still use Scenario Analysis for marketing budget planning?

Yes. Scenario Analysis uses Stripe and Plaid when you want the financial baseline to reflect actual revenue and burn — useful if you're modeling marketing spend against company runway. For pure marketing budget scenarios (what if we shift $30K from Meta to events?), you describe the assumptions directly to Starch and it models the output against your HubSpot conversion rates. No Stripe or Plaid required.