Marketing planning doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does need to be purposeful. After years of working with B2B companies, I’ve found that successful marketing plans always start in the same place: your business objectives.
Here I tackle the simple steps to connecting the dots between your business objectives and a marketing strategy that performs. What does “perform” mean, you ask? Follow the steps outlined to define that for your unique business needs.
Step 1: Start with Your Business Goals
Before you dive into marketing tactics or get excited about new channels, pause. The first and most critical step is ensuring your marketing strategy aligns with your overall business goals.
These typically include:
- Revenue growth targets
- Market segment diversification
- New market expansion plans
- Existing client portfolio objectives
Your business goals should always have a clear revenue component. Maybe you’re aiming to grow revenue by a certain percentage from a specific segment, or perhaps you want to diversify your client base. Whatever your objectives, they need to be crystal clear.
Step 2: Develop Marketing Planning OKRs That Matter
Once you have your business objectives defined, it’s time to determine how marketing can help achieve them. I typically break marketing objectives into three key categories:
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Brand Building
This encompasses everything from awareness and visibility to thought leadership and expertise. You may want to track metrics like:
- Growth of organic search traffic
- Website performance
- Social media engagement
- Share of voice
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Demand Generation and Capture
This is where math becomes crucial. Let’s say your business has a revenue goal of $1 million from new clients. Marketing needs to work backward:
- How many new clients does this represent?
- How many opportunities do we need to win those clients?
- What is the average time to close for each opportunity?
- How many leads are required to generate those opportunities?
Your funnel metrics—leads, opportunities, and new clients—should mathematically ladder up to your business OKRs. Simple!
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Existing Business Growth
If your business has goals around expanding existing customer relationships (and most do), your marketing strategy needs to support these. But note: as with any objective, if growing existing business isn’t a company priority, don’t create marketing goals around it.
This is a great time to think about an Account-Based Strategy if that is your goal. An ABM approach is a great way to focus on the expansion of existing customer revenue, and setting objectives will help you craft a really focused strategy.
Step 2.5: Make Sure Your Goals Are SMART
A friendly reminder at this step… when creating your OKRs, ensure they’re SMART. SMART goals are critical to your success because you can measure progress and stay focused on the areas that truly matter.
So once you’ve developed your OKRs, run back through them and check for the following SMART criteria.
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
If you’ve done a good job here, you should also be in a position to build reports and dashboards, and ultimately socialize progress on a regular basis.
Step 3: Allocate Your Budget
Budget allocation doesn’t have to be guesswork. Some aspects can be very mathematical. If you know each lead costs $100 to generate, for example, and you need 100 leads to hit your revenue goal, that’s a $10,000 investment. For demand capture in established markets, you can rely on historical data to make these budget decisions.
If your goals are centered more around brand awareness or expanding into new markets, your investments might need to increase in those markets to help achieve your goals.
You also want to define your budget based on your company stage. For example, early-stage startups should budget anywhere from 15-20% of revenue to marketing. This would include new project launches or divisions as well. If you’re in more of a “Growth” phase in your business, think about allocating around 10% of your revenue to marketing. Established companies with an existing marketing practice that is looking to maintain steady growth should invest around 5-7% of revenue in marketing.
Don’t start a new year on the back foot because you don’t invest in your own success!
Step 4: Start Mapping Your Marketing Calendar
Here’s where so many companies go wrong: they start with the marketing calendar. They jump straight to planning events, content, and campaigns without doing the strategic groundwork first.
Effective marketing planning means mapping your initiatives based on the objectives already set and the budget you have to reach them. From there, you can plan your big campaigns around:
- Product marketing cycles and development timelines
- Thought leadership opportunities
- Market expansion plans
- The customer journey
Step 5: The Power of Editing
One of the most important pieces of advice I can give: edit, edit, edit. It’s better to do fewer things with a bigger impact than try to be everywhere and do everything. Use your objectives as a filter—does each planned initiative directly support your goals?
Step 6: Ensuring Cross-Organizational Alignment
The final crucial step is socializing your objectives and plans internally. Marketing can’t be the only department that agrees with marketing’s objectives. You need alignment across:
- Sales
- Product
- Customer success teams
- Executive leadership
If each department’s objectives ladder up to the overall business goals, this alignment should come naturally. If you find misalignment, use this as an opportunity to collaborate and get everyone working in the same direction.
The Bottom Line
Strategic marketing planning isn’t about creating the longest list of activities or being present on every possible channel. It’s about understanding your business objectives, creating aligned marketing goals, and focusing your resources on the initiatives that will drive the greatest impact.
Start with strategy and customer understanding first, and the tactical execution will become much clearer—and more effective.
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