Why Every B2B Team Needs a Documented Marketing Roadmap

Speaker A: If you don't know what you should do, you should be creating thought leadership content and figure the rest out afterwards. But I just see people waste their money so often on what they think is going to turn into this, like, instant flow of leads. If it was that easy, everyone would do it.

Speaker B: Hey, Justin, thanks for hopping on today. Looking forward to talking about my marketing roadmaps. And I think we'll just start big picture for people who maybe, uh, don't know what a marketing roadmap is. Do you want to just explain what it is and why it's important?

Speaker A: Yeah, I'll even start with like, instead of the word roadmap, I'll actually start with the word strategy for a reason. So we turn strategy into a roadmap. But it's always interesting to me. I talk to at least five decision makers within an organization. Net news. So, like, on a weekly basis, I am talking to people I've never spoken to before. CEO, founder, marketing director, VP of marketing. A lot of time, not so much. Cmo. Uh, a lot of our clients are small, scrappy teams. We were. We have a lot of, like, founders that we work with. Sometimes it's someone who's in marketing wearing a lot of hats, what have you. And I asked them what they're, you know, if they have a marketing strategy, and their response is always, yes. Hardly anybody tells me they have no strategy. And I'm like, okay, great. Can I see it? And like, well, well, you know, like, we have a strategy. And I'm like, what does that. I mean, everybody has a stride. I have a strategy of how I would get up in the morning and brush my teeth and get my coffee, but I don't have it written down. I don't have goals for how I wake up and brush my teeth and get my coffee. And so I think that that is a common misconception. When I talk about strategy with an organization, what I want to know is, do you have a strategic annual document roadmap question? You just heard the word you just used. You have a roadmap for the year as to what marketing is going to do, what the goals are and what the tactics are that you're going to roll out to get to those goals. And that I do not see nearly as often. You see that more in a company that has a CMO that has a plan that understands the value of documentation. Because what happens is you have these strategic conversations as an organization, and if they're not pen to paper in six months, you're going to have people talking to each other. And, you know, Susie's going to remember it one way and Jim's going to remember it another way. And I thought we were going to do more paid ads, and I thought we were going to do SEO, and I thought we were going to get 10 mqls m a month, but I thought we were going to get five opportunities a week. And if you don't have that stuff all written down, the tactics that are going to lead to outcomes, you really do not have a strategy. You have ideas.

Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. A goal not written down is only a wish, and everyone will be very confused six months later if it's not written down.

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure.

Speaker B: So I think kind of what you're talking about, it seems like it starts with your bigger goal, like, are you trying to get a certain number of leads or business growth this year? So maybe we could dive into that a little bit. How do you go about helping these companies? Like, maybe they already have these goals set, or do you help them decide what maybe a realistic goal would be?

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. So some companies do, some don't. We get a lot of people who come to us and they do have goals. And then I have a lot of people who come to us and they say things like more. And I have to understand what more means. Is it more leads, more revenue, more opportunities, lower cost, you know, acquisition cost, what does more or better? What does that mean? And then what you need to do is based on the outcomes that you're driving towards. Then you need to develop the tactics that you're going to go after. This is one of the, the valuable components. I think it comes with doing strategy in this way. And we're very lucky that at our organization, we've acquired agencies over the years that give us a lot of different skill sets. So we are able to look at this in an agnostic way. The challenge is, if you go to an SEO agency, they're going to recommend you do SEO. If you go to paid media agency, they're going to recommend you do paid medium. So you either need to go to someone like us who's going to be more, uh, consultative in the way that we make recommendations, or you need to do this yourself, which is you need to look at the outcomes that you're driving towards. That is where you need to start. What are we trying to do with marketing is I have people come to me, they say all sorts of things. Like, they're like, they come to me, the first thing they say is, we need new messaging. Great. Sounds good. We acquired a messaging branding and design agency. We have those skill sets. We are happy to work on messaging with you. What led you to decide you need to work on your messaging? And they're like, well, we have a goal this year. If we want to increase our leads per month by, you know, 2x, we're at 5, we're at 10 leads per month. We need to get to 20 leads per month. That's our goal for the year. And so we need a new, we need new messaging and a new website. And if they go to a new messaging, if they go to a website messaging company, you know what they're going to say. Great, sounds good. We will go, uh, we will build you a website and we will get you a new messaging. And then what's going to happen is like, more likely than not now will there, could there be an uptick? If you have your audience hitting your, the, the correct ICP hitting your website and they're just not converting because your messaging is wrong and maybe you see an uptick, but more likely than not, you are not going to see the increase. And what you actually needed to do was take a look at the, do you want new messaging and website? If yes, we need to have an honest conversation. But that likely, if our roadmap says 2x leads, that likely is not going to contribute to 2x leads. And so it's always balancing budget with outcomes and then what the tactics are and that you need to do now, uh, you need a website, you need proper messaging that, that's 100% accurate. But if you have limited budget, have a website, maybe you need to just work on messaging as you write content and learn more about your icp. And uh, you don't need a website refresh. Maybe you're standing up, landing pages that you're running ads and, and campaigns to. So it's all about balancing, but it needs to start with outcomes, then you need to build your tactics out of that. And I see things also on the other side, which is that I have people who come to us and they say, you know, we get paid and it's not working. And I'm like, okay, so what are you doing? So are you just running ads? They're like, yeah, we're just running some ads on LinkedIn, direct response ads. And I'm like, are you, what kind of content are you creating, kind of offers are you putting out there? I get looked at with a blank stare. And I think that's also an issue, which is that you don't have this kind of comprehensive marketing solution in place where it's like, here's the outcome. So we need content, we need to be running campaigns. All this stuff needs to work together. And that's what the roadmap should do. Should look at the outcomes first and then what is our best way that we can create. So you have outcomes and outputs? Uh, we have start with our outcomes and what's the best way that we can do as many things with the budget that we have available. Because again, our clients don't typically have huge marketing budgets. In many cases they're, they're like, you know, we have an internal marketer or two or maybe three. We have limited budget with what we're doing on the paid side. But we need to prove roi. Our clients don't typically have like big giant runways of like we got a bunch of VC investment. A lot of our, a lot. Most of our clients make money, which is great. You know, they, they come to us, they're not just VC backed, they can go light money on fire. They actually make money as an organization. So when you make money as an organization versus your just VC backed and trying to make as much noise as possible, you care a lot more about your money too, because it's real money and so they don't want to go and waste a bunch. So what you need is you need to focus on the outcomes, what are our business goals? And everything that you do for marketing needs to go around those business goals. But that also means some of that stuff is going to be what we call table stakes marketing. You need a good website, you need messaging, you need to have a voice on social media. Okay, but then if we're going to amplify things, we need to make sure those things that we're amplifying are to those goals. So if those goals are, we need leads yesterday. You know, maybe SEO is not the play right now, you know, maybe going and uh, you can still sprinkle in content, what have you, but maybe you need to get something that's going to do, that's going to provide results more quickly. And that's why you need to take a, that agnostic view into what it is that you're doing.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's a lot of like table stakes marketing. We talk about that a lot, but we also call it like a flywheel of your marketing. And there's a couple things you can do, but kind of there's so many things you should be doing to help your business grow. Like you don't just need paid ads or you should Like. Like that example you're seeing. Paid ads probably alone isn't enough to grow your business. But an agency you could plug into one of those flywheels, or, like, if you have, like, an actual marketing team that's handling those other areas, you can plug in an agency just for your branding, like you were talking about before, or you can have an agency plug in and help with everything. If you don't really have a marketing

Speaker A: team, and if I even go away from the agency component, I think what you're saying is spot on. So I think when you don't have a defined roadmap, it's pretty much impossible to have that flywheel effect. And I don't want to speak for you, Bailey, but we work closely enough together that I believe I know what you're saying. But when we were talking about the, uh, flywheel, it's when you have this roadmap laid out, you are able to look at things that play off of one another. So I'll just use an example. So if we take. We do a lot of podcasts, we're on one right now. Take this podcast episode. You can create a video out of it. You can create a blog post out of that video. You can use that video on organic social, as well as you can use it on paid. Then from there, you can ask people in an ABM campaign if they want to come on the podcast or check out the podcast along with an offer, and then you can run ads to those people. There's a lot of things that you can do when you don't have a defined strategy. What I find that people do is they focus so tactical. They're like. When I say tactful, it's, like, focused, very channel focused. Like, we have. We are working with this company. They do our SEO, and it is working. Okay. We are working with this guy. I talked to somebody yesterday. Like, we're working with a paid media agency. They have generated nothing. I'm like, okay, are you creating content? Like, what else are you doing around the paid? And they're like, I don't know. They're just running paid for us, and it's not generating anything. We're just getting junk. I'm like, I believe you. I absolutely believe that is true. And I don't even know if that person is doing anything wrong. It sounds like you don't have a roadmap. What is your marketing strategy? Well, we're just trying some things. Uh, and, like, it took everything in me to just say, like, you should stop if you want to try things. I mean, here's a big recommendation for people. If you want to go out and try things, do them yourself. Stop spending money to go out and like experiment with little tactics. They're going to fail. It's like the same thing of when somebody says they want to try out paid and they want to do $500 a month.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You're just going to take five. It's not enough. You're just going to take $500. You just throw it in a trash can.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And so Instead keep your $500. Or in this other circumstances, like stop paying for paid. You're not getting anything, you're not doing enough. So instead like AI is free. You can go out there, you can ask AI all you want. You can learn about a lot about marketing. You want to test stuff as a business owner or like the person who I spoke with, um, you know, she's like kind of a business manager. She's doing a lot of different things. Marketing is one of them. Have her go out and experiment. But it's not paying the paid media person because you're not doing enough. It's so tactical based. They're just going to get you zero. And so you're just wasting your money. If you want to test you are a business owner or a small team, you need to go test yourself. Don't just like, hey, yeah, we're going to spend like $2,000 a month on like this small paid agency. We're not going to give them anything for content. We're just going to kind of see what they get. Spoiler. You have a $15,000 a month, $150,000 a year solution. They're gonna get you zero. Like they're not going to get you anything. You're not spending enough. So what you need to do is you need to take a step back. You need to not just, yeah, we're gonna like sprinkle in. Let's do like two to three months with like this paid consulting agency person. We'll like sprinkle that for a little bit. Then we'll do like four months. If that doesn't work, we'll do like four months with like an SEO person that I found, you know, on upwork and we'll see how they work. Those people. You're going to waste, first off, you're going to waste six months and you're going to get zero out of that. And so instead what you need to do is you need to take a step back, you need to build a road map and that is a documented marketing strategy. We call it a roadmap. The more like, I don't want to say common term but like if you went and you talk to anybody on the, on the street and you were to say what it is, it is a documented marketing strategy and you need to have that and you need to be able to refer back to it. What are you trying to do for the year? It doesn't have to be for the year. It could be for six months, but it probably needs to be at a minimum of six months. Here's what we are trying to do over the course of the next 6 to 12 months and here is how we're going to do it and here are the results that we're hoping to get. And then you need to evaluate if it worked or not. But going around and like, because people just think that if you sprinkle dollars in marketing, and I see this parrot a lot and I don't disagree with it to an extent. Like I think there is an extent that is you should be always doing something in marketing, you should be sprinkling dollars around. But I don't think that you should be just sprinkling dollars around to consultancies and to different people without having some sort of goals and you know, well defined approach to it.

Speaker B: Yeah. If you're not sure what to do next, you got to test things internally. Don't spend money on consultants or just focus on content. You can never lose with content. That's probably going to be your lowest investment just to, to get started.

Speaker A: Then you use it in so many places. Like I do agree, like I think that if you don't know what you should do, you should be creating thought leadership content and figure the rest out afterwards. But I just see people waste their money so often on what they think is going to turn into this like instant flow of leads. If it was that easy, everyone would do it. If I or anybody else could say for $2,000, for $4,000, whatever it may be, that with certainty I can get you 2x return on investment like that in two months, that person who could do that, first off, they would do it for themselves and they would be a billionaire. It's very simple. Like this stuff takes work, it takes thought, it takes getting creative and unique and it takes you some time. Marketing is not just something that you can walk around and, and just sprinkle a few bucks here and there and all of a sudden your business is going to grow. And I think that's a common misconception. And in Many cases, it comes from not having a defined, documented marketing strategy that, what, when we happen up, call it a marketing roadmap that's 100 pages, documents your ideal customer. It documents what your competitors are doing and what areas they play. And we see that all the time. People come to us to like, I want to, you know, compete on paid. And I'm like, do you see what your five biggest competitors are spending on paid? You're telling me you want to spend 500, they're spending $25,000 a month, you want to sit, you want to spend 500amonth on paid, and you think you're gonna win. Maybe we need to take a different approach, and maybe we need to reach out in direct capacity where we're sending emails and we're not just running paid. So it's very interesting when you take a look at all that stuff and then you craft the roadmap based on that. And it's not as easy as just plugging it into AI and saying, create a roadmap for me. But at the same time, for many people, that could at least be a start versus going around and just saying, like, here, SEO person, here's $2,000 a month. Bring some leads. I don't know.

Speaker B: Yeah. So what kind of things would you recommend people include in a road map if they're just getting started? Like, what. What would be the main things that should be in there?

Speaker A: Yeah, so I. The way I usually say it is that there should be. There really should be two major things. And there. There's a lot that can be in there, but it needs to be. It needs to start with the outcomes. What are you driving towards? And then it needs to be, what are we going to do to get there?

Speaker B: That's that simple.

Speaker A: Very simple. And then what you. If you want to build off of that, you define what you're going to do to get there based on where, uh, who are your ideal customers? Where do they consume content? What do they care about? What are they going to be interested in? How can you help them? What kind of offers can you create to get engaged with them? And what are your competitors doing? Where do you see open field for you to play? You know, is there a lane for you to be able to reach out to these people? Is there messaging that you can use to talk to them? That's really what it is. I mean, it is. What are the, uh, we do this as a business, and we do. We look at two major things. We look at the annual goals, and then we break it down by a quarter, quarter at a time. So, uh, here's our annual goals in the first quarter of working together. Here is, here are the actions that we're going to take and then we will iterate on those actions the next quarter and next quarter, next quarter. And that is your, you know, annual. Hitting your annual goals. You don't need to have everything mapped out for the year. You don't need every single action you're going to take for the year. But you need to know what are you striving for for this year and what high level approaches are you going to take. And then this quarter, here's what we're going to do. I mean we're EOS through and through. You could probably hear it if you, if anyone is listening. And you, you know, eos, you set your annual goals, you break it down by quarterly rocks, and then you review it on a weekly and monthly basis. I mean it's very, I don't want to say it's very simple because I don't. I think that's oversimplifying it. But, but it is not something that I'm going to say that you're going to be like, wow, oh my gosh, that's like so unique and so different. No, I mean really, it's just taking the time and so many people that I talk to, are you taking the time? The answer is no. And marketing becomes an afterthought. But then marketing is also the first thing that's asked, like where, where are the leads? Why aren't we growing? Yeah, it's like, well, if, if marketing is an afterthought, but you want it to spearhead growth within your entire organization, those two things don't equate. You need to put focus on it for it to then increase.

Speaker B: Yeah. It does seem like relatively simple to get started though. A document with your goals and big picture tactics that you're going to take for, for the next year or six months, whatever makes the most sense for your business and then evaluate it every quarter and make adjustments based on what's working and what maybe needs a little more love.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I'm going to simplify this for the audience. The number one way that I would say you can know if you're doing this or not is that if somebody, if I came to you and I said, what is your marketing strategy? Uh, don't talk. What is your marketing strategy? Send it to me. If you can send that to me, I think you're in a great spot, like at a very bare Minimum, if with no conversation, you could send me your marketing strategy. I think that that is where every business owner, every marketing department, every revenue department, they should be able to send that document. And if you do not have that document, one document that says, this is our company's marketing strategy roadmap, dial whatever documentation, whatever you want to call it. If you can't send that document without, like, well, let me explain our strategy to you.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Then I think that you're dropping the ball. I. I mean, I think that that is what is required. And all of our clients, on the strategic side, if somebody were to ask, what is the marketing strategy for this client? I could send you a document. I would not have to open my mouth. You could read everything about them, their competitors, their different customer segments, the approaches that are going to be taken and what the goals are going to be. And I would never have to say a word.

Speaker B: Baller. Move. Love it. Well, I know we're at time, but thanks. Thanks for hopping on and walking through the importance of having a roadmap and breaking it down into simple terms so the audience can evaluate that with their own businesses.

Speaker A: Awesome. Appreciate it as always, Bailey.

Speaker B: Great. Thanks.

Speaker A: Thanks for checking out Tech Qualified. This show is brought to you by New North, a, um, marketing agency that helps turn yours smart, scrappy marketing team into a growth engine. To find out more about New north or check out more episodes of this show, go to newnorth.com techqualified.