The Key Elements of a Strategic Marketing Plan

Most traditional B2B companies don't lack effort in their marketing. In fact, they're busy. But it's not strategic. A marketing plan for us is clarity through alignment with sales so that you measure what matters to drive results.

Welcome to Driving Growth, the go to market podcast for traditional B2B businesses that are looking to build systems to create predictable revenue. In short, turning their company into a revenue factory. I'm your host, Steve Whittington, president of Roadmap and a believer in one simple truth. Sustainable growth is not an accident.

It's engineered. And my company Roadmap, is a builder of go to market systems. On today's show, this is part two in a series that we're doing. And we did a sales plan in the first part.

Just to recap on that and to now we're doing the partner of the sales plan, which is the marketing plan and a roadmap. We believe that the two of them, although they're often done independently within organizations, should be looked at as one overall revenue plan. And if you've listened to the first episode, you're going to hear a repeat of some of the things, from a sales plan that are in to the marketing plan, which really ties into the fact that they ought to be one plan executed together.

So here's the thing that we see is that a lot of folks, don't have a plan in place. They don't have a marketing plan. In fact, a marketing, tends to be almost like, a support appendage of sales. Like, here, do these tasks get these done?

We need a new brochure, that sort of stuff. So when you don't have a plan, marketing becomes kind of random acts of content. When sales says, hey, could you push this out? We're going to the show.

We need to promote that. We're going to be at this show, you know, and then, of course, there's complaints about the lead quality and the website's not converting. Trade shows don't have a follow up strategy. And, you know, at the end of the day, if you're operating that way, your sales forecast is more of a hope cast.

And we've talked about that. So growth when it happens feels like luck. And you can't measure ROI. You can't forecast what's going into your pipeline or how many leads that you need to go into your pipeline.

And of course, then sales and marketing aren't aligned and and you don't know what to do more of or what to stop doing because you don't have a plan to measure it against all things to get better, need something to measure against you? Need something that you need a hard edge to measure against, to actually quantify what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong. So you're busy. You're very busy chasing all these tasks that sales are assigning to you, but you're not strategic.

And a plan creates clarity on what you need to be doing. It answers who are you targeting? What revenue numbers are you trying to hit and support? How many deals are needed to actually hit said revenue?

Or how many units need to be sold? That sort of stuff quantifiable? What do you need to do to get those deals or units shipped? How many quotes issued?

How many meetings? How many, how many new, partners added to your network? And and then how are the what are the channels that you're going to do to generate all this kind of stuff? So without a plan, marketing is just a cost.

It's something that you spend. But with a plan, marketing becomes a driver of the revenue engine. So I'm going to take you through step by step how we build, marketing plans for folks. And it's this isn't theory.

This is the hard execution of how we go about doing it. So start we start number one with revenue and the sales math needed and marketing needs to begin with. That you need to have alignment with sales, and you need to understand the sales math that you're supporting in your marketing plan. So no tactics math.

And you need to know what the annual revenue target is. What? How many? You know, your average quote or deal size, what the close rate is, the sales cycle length, the required pipeline coverage.

You need to understand that mathematical model. Now, we went over that in the previous episode talking about that. But just to reiterate, marketing needs that just as much as sales. So for instance, if your revenue target is $2 million and your average deal or average quote is $25,000, you need 80 deals now or 80 quotes now, you need to know what your conversion rate is.

Now, let's just pretend that you convert at 25% of quotes that you issue. So you're going to need to have 320 quotes generated. How the heck do you do that? How do you support that as marketing to get that into the pipeline for sales to execute upon?

That's the question that needs to be answered. If you're building a marketing plan. So really what happens is that marketing isn't about just building awareness. You're responsible for contributing to a defined number of quotes or meetings, something very actionable for sales to execute upon.

If you don't have the math in place, you really don't have a plan. No math, no plan. So if you've started with your math, the next thing you need to know is, of course, you really have to understand your ideal client profile and the buyer's committee. Within that ideal client profile, you need to know your customer so that you can narrow your focus as to who you're going to be marketing to.

Now we talk about how to define your ideal client profile in episode five, but really it's like you get the formal graphics of the industry, revenue size, sales, team size, whatever might be relevant to actually define what that organization is in B2B that you're marketing to. And of course, you know who it is that you need to speak to the buyer's committee within that. And so what this does is when you get really, really narrow on who it is that you're selling to, you can have a clear message and not wasted budget.

You define you define your ICP. And three things happen. Your messaging sharpens, your targeting improves, and your sales team close faster because they're getting the right kind of leads back. Right.

Clarity creates efficiency. So step two is really, really dive in to defining your ideal client profile and the buyer's committee within it. It's a mountain with no top. You can't do this enough and you have to do it continuously.

Hey, we'll get back to the show in just a minute, but I wanted to tell you about a new resource that we have available. It's the go to market readiness index. It combines all our research. In 2005 that showcases where the industry is at with their go to market readiness and what best in class looks like.

So if you're interested in seeing where you stacked up, go to roadmap agency.com/resources GTM Readiness Index Report and download your copy today. And now back to the show. Okay.

So now on to step three. We've got the overall goals and mathematical model sorted out. We really have deeply understood our customer. And you're getting into well how is marketing serving servicing those sales goals.

How does marketing really really align with sales not operate beside it or like fuzzy fuzzy relation. So when you look at that mathematical model, you are going to know some critical numbers, like how many quotes are going to be needed to be issued. You end up hitting your overall revenue goal. So the question becomes what motions that say marketing is responsible for?

How many? How many of those are needed? So how many? How do we get those quotes?

How many leads are needed to get that amount of quotes, for instance? Right. So you could have inbound motions which are from, you know, various marketing efforts, digital marketing or stuff coming through the website, phone calls coming in, that sort of stuff. You've got inbound that marketing is responsible for.

What's the number that marketing needs to bring, because sales is going to be doing their thing as well through outbound methodology. So what is the combined number and who's going to do what. So teams that get this right actually will have a service level agreement between the two sides. Marketing degrees to bring you this many sales.

And sales is going to bring this many leads as well. So marketing is going to bring this many leads and sales is going to be this this many leads. And together we're going to hit that number that we need. Now.

It's when when this happens is, is that it goes from, you know, shared KPIs of how many quotes or how many discovery calls, how many opportunities created, how much pipeline value, how much close revenue you have that shared goal. It's no longer the old adage of, well, marketing is producing some sort of content out there. Sales goes and builds their own deck and does their own thing. No, it's like you're all working together.

So the content that marketing is creating has to be generating inbound leads or helping support generating the inbound leads, going going into the decks to help close for sales, that sort of stuff. Everything's shared and alignment happens. And that's where fall downs occur. When marketing doesn't align with sales.

Okay. So alignment with sales has been achieved. You've got a service level agreement in a place as to what you need to provide to sales for us to hit our overall revenue goals. So now you've got to think strategically about what you're going to be focusing on.

That's going to hit those results. And this could come into usually like you want to have 3 to 5 areas that you might be focusing on. So big area that marketing needs to do is what are we doing for demand generation to get leads, to create quotes. Right.

And there might be support that's needed because of the service level agreement you have with sales that, hey, we got a support account based marketing, for sales to be able to do their account management, to do the land and expand function that they're going to be doing. Right. And there might be some sales enablement that you need to do. There could be customer retention, expansion, thought leadership, brand authority.

The thing of it is, is that you only have so many resources, so you want to keep it pretty tight, but you want to make sure that you have clear objectives, what systems are required and what does success look like. So you can move to the next phase of actually building these out with structure initiatives and KPIs. So you can quantify and you can see which ones are more efficient. That's going to be helping you reach your goals.

So having to find those focus areas you now go, okay, how do we build these out with KPIs? Okay. So that's be the step. Step five right.

And so okay one of our focus areas is that we're going to be doing some sales enablement. And within that we have to make sure we optimize our website so that sales has a more effective tool to help them sell. Okay. So how do we measure that.

Well, we want to increase conversion rate. And then what is the KPI? Well, we have to get a certain amount of clear leads from the website, for what we're trying to achieve. So.

And so when you look at that and you look at the investment that you're going to be putting into that, and you look at the ROI and the efficiency of that, and you have to stack that up, say against, okay, we're going to do demand generation ads, and we're going to be doing that, and we're expecting to get this many leads. And you look at the investment that you can kind of start to understand what is more efficient, because we all have limited time and budget. So you want to go through that exercise to understand the efficiency of the various different, initiatives that you're going to be doing.

So clear, clear structure initiatives with KPIs, when you're picking these focus areas. Okay. So that being said, you've done that kind of stuff. Execution comes down to now how are we going to get through this?

How are we going to get this stuff out? This is where you really have to really pick your lanes, define your channels. So, you know, trade shows is a channel, social on various different social channels. Being LinkedIn or say, meta could be a channel that you're going to be doing.

Email is a channel that you can get your message out on as well. And of course, you know, something like a podcast is a channel per se, if that, if that's what makes sense for you. But you really have to define your channels and your cadence. And of course, there's going to be the structured KPIs around what you're doing along each of these to get that message out and build awareness and actually drive incoming leads, which then turns into revenue and gives you the ROI and the efficiency of each of these different initiatives and the channels in which you're executing them upon.

Now, all this said and done, none of this stuff can live independently. So when we look back of what we've done to build this plan, you know, we've got our goals, we've understood our customer, we're aligned with sales. We've we've defined the areas of focus. We've created KPIs to sort of think about what's the most efficient.

We've picked the channels and cadence and what we're expecting to get out of those channels. Now, you can take all these pieces and you can build campaigns. Most organizations have seasonality to the business. So there could be a spring BI, or there could be a fall top up, that kind of stuff.

If you're just looking at how you got to push your inventory to, say, a network, or there's the natural buying cycles that your customers go through. So you want to take all these things that you're doing and organize them into campaigns. And these campaigns need to be integrated, integrated across the channels that you've chosen, across the teams, across all your different assets. Website tradeshows, sales enablement tools, you know, cell sheets, all that sort of stuff.

All has to be organized so that you have an integrated campaign that you can look at the impact that you get, and you can force the conversation around one kind of thought. So full recap. After you have all this stuff in place, you cannot you have to come back. You cannot forget the customer.

Come back into your customer life cycle. Your campaign to be complete has to go full circle and understand. Once you get them, what do you do to onboard them? Do you?

What do you have for, account management? In fact, we do a full a full episode on this on episode 11 On Account Management about how you turn customers into strategic partners. So your marketing plan needs to be supportive of your ongoing customer lifecycle strategy. And, and all of this stuff can be looped into how you can have referral programs, how you tell your customers, maybe there's some case studies that can come out of customers, but this all becomes part of your overall marketing plan of that virtual circle of customer understanding and working within your customer base, and actually providing information to your sales team to support them in the customer lifecycle management.

So there was a lot that came at you in this episode, but if you can take nothing else from this episode, remember this checklist a real marketing plan for traditional B2B companies has revenue targets and sales math. It has very clear defined ICP and buyer personas. It has shared sales and marketing KPIs. It has 3 to 5 strategic focus areas.

Your defined initiatives with KPIs, so you can measure the efficiencies of what you're doing with your limited resources. You've got a channel strategy and cadence with purpose of what you're pushing out there. You put that together in a campaign calendar so you can look at it all, and you tie it all together with understanding customer lifecycle and retention strategy. Last and not least, this all has to be organized with timelines and ownership, accountability, and of course, a budget.

If it doesn't have all this stuff, it's not really a plan. It's just activity. You're being busy. You're not being strategic.

You don't need more tactics. You need clarity. Back with math, with structure. Build a marketing plan that is tied directly to revenue.

Growth stops feeling accidental. It becomes intentional. That's how you drive growth. If you've liked what you heard, go to roadmap agency.

com/podcast to download the Revenue Factory Toolkit, in which you will receive mathematical models and a framework for building your go to market system. Also subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. With new episodes dropping the first and third Wednesday of every month. I'm Steve Whittington, thanks for listening.

Keep building your revenue factory one brick at a time.