7 Steps to Building Your Annual Marketing Plan
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Tips & techniques for building your annual marketing plan. Includes a free Marketing Planning template (Microsoft Excel, download with no form: https://b2bhebeisen.com/2016/10/04/free-template-for- building-your-annual-marketing-plan/).
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7 Steps to Building Your Annual Marketing Plan
- 1. F R E E M A R K E T I N G P L A N N I N G T E M P L A T E I N C L U D E D © B O B H E B E I S E N W W W . B 2 B H E B E I S E N . C O M How To Build Your Annual Marketing Plan www.b2bhebeisen.com October 25th, 2016
- 2. Step 1: Use a Great Marketing Plan Template Download this Annual Marketing Plan template (free download, no form) https://b2bhebeisen.com/2016/10/04/free-template-for- building-your-annual-marketing-plan/ www.b2bhebeisen.com
- 3. Step 1: Use a Great Marketing Plan Template What makes this Marketing Plan Template so great? It allows you to… 1. Build a plan fast 2. Prioritize your budget by campaign and by tactic 3. Delegate planning projects to your staff 4. Load-balance the calendar 5. Present the plan to your stakeholders and staff Download this Annual Marketing Plan template (free download, no form) https://b2bhebeisen.com/2016/10/04/free-template-for- building-your-annual-marketing-plan/ www.b2bhebeisen.com
- 4. Step 2: Prep & Research Analyze past results to learn what worked and what did not What tactics were successful? What media properties and events worked best? What is your definition of success (lead gen/closed sales/brand exposure)? www.b2bhebeisen.com
- 5. Step 2: Prep & Research Synch with stakeholders, make sure your priorities are aligned What are your most important marketing objectives? Least important? What are your most important personas? Least important? www.b2bhebeisen.com
- 6. Step 2: Prep & Research Establish your annual budget Ask your manager what your budget is! Or back into your budget by knowing your business needs and your cost per lead, marketing lead waterfall, average deal size, and sales revenue targets www.b2bhebeisen.com Using the Waterfall sample here you would need 156 MIs (form fills or contacts captured at events) to yield each win. If each MI costs $100 then budget $15,600 for each win worth $89K marketing contri- bution to revenue.
- 7. Step 2: Prep & Research Establish your annual budget …In the absence of that, set a “planning budget” for yourself: Use last year’s budget/spend (+/- 10% depending on the company outlook), or… 7% - 8% of gross revenue, or… Check the financial statements of your key public competitors and match their spend www.b2bhebeisen.com The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends setting your marketing budget at 7% - 8% of gross revenue
- 8. Step 3: Plan Your Baseline Costs Sunk costs, regular recurring costs: Foundational costs like Marketing Automation fees, CRM fees, Website hosting fees Predictable, regular recurring costs like agencies and contractors Other stuff (analysts, association memberships, holiday gifts for customers, give-away items for trade shows, etc.) www.b2bhebeisen.com
- 9. Step 4: Plan Your Events Big-ticket activities with firm dates established well in advance Use the planning calendar of the Marketing Plan template to build pre- and post-event marketing programs around each event www.b2bhebeisen.com
- 10. Step 5: Allocate Budget to Each Campaign The majority of your budget should be divided up among your major campaigns Campaigns are typically created based on vertical market or persona www.b2bhebeisen.com
- 11. Step 6: Reserve “Unplanned/Opportunistic” Budget Reserve a small amount (10% per quarter?) for discretionary spending. Use it to… Experiment with new opportunities (“let’s sponsor that new analyst report”) Double-down on campaigns that are working well (“congratulations on that great webinar, here’s $5K to promote the recording!”) Invest in small programs that reward sales people who “get it” (“we’re going to host a seminar in your territory!”) If you are asked to reduce budget in a down quarter, the discretionary budget is an easy first cut www.b2bhebeisen.com
- 12. Step 7: Refine Continually Update your plan with real invoiced costs (and claw back any savings and re-plan it!) Track results throughout the year If tactics or markets are underperforming, reallocate budget to activities more likely to succeed www.b2bhebeisen.com
- 13. More Info & Resources Marketo Marketing Plan MS PowerPoint slides (free download, must fill out form) Good for collecting statistics about past performance and packaging them up as a foundation for your strategy http://pages2.marketo.com/ProgramPlanningTemplate-SocialMediopolis- Oct2016.html SiriusDecisions “Anatomy of a B-to-B Marketing Plan” webinar (free, must fill out form) Good for high-level strategy setting and presentation http://go.siriusdecisions.com/2106_Summit_Track_Sessions B2BHebeisen.com Annual Marketing Plan MS Excel template (free download, no form) This is where the rubber meets the road. List all your marketing activities and costs, categorize them by campaign & tactic, plot them on a calendar, and make sure your activities align with your strategy https://b2bhebeisen.com/2016/10/04/free-template-for-building-your- annual-marketing-plan/ www.b2bhebeisen.com
Notes de l'éditeur
- If you are not measuring and tracking the results of your marketing activities in today’s day and age then you should step into the time machine and head back to 1980 and then you might stand a chance of being a successful marketer. It is our responsibility to track results, to do more activities like the ones that succeed, and do less of what does not succeed. Run your reports and review your dashboards. What worked in previous years? What tactics were successful? What media properties and events worked best? What is your definition of success (lead gen/closed sales/brand exposure)? This is not to say your entire plan should be dictated by these results. Sometimes the empirical results don’t accurately capture the true value of an activity. And you should have some appetite for taking risks on new and untested opportunities, and for tweaking the dials to improve the execution and turn a previously unsuccessful tactic into a success.
- Don’t forget to take an informal “gut check” with your stakeholders and understand, from their perspective, what has been the most successful. At the end of the day you will need to present your plan to your boss and your sales leaders to gain their approval and enlist their support. They might have perceptions that don’t match up with the analysis of your results data. Now is the time to understand stakeholder perceptions and priorities and perhaps debunk their perceptions -- do not wait until after you’ve invested hours and days carefully constructing your marketing plan and then have them rip it to pieces. Do you understand the priorities of your boss? Your sales leaders? What audiences and personas are most important to them? What KPIs do they expect you to hit? Make sure you understand this before you start building your plan. Make sure your campaign mix and spend reflect these priorities (or at least be prepared to defend why it does not). The two most important outcomes of this synch exercise is to gain a collective understanding of priorities: What objectives will your success or failure be measured upon? Is it lead gen? Measurable marketing contribution to sales revenue? Awareness? Customer retention, or expanded revenue from existing customers? Market penetration? What audiences/personas are most important? Will you have a horizontal approach where you are targeting a common title/job function across all industries? Or are you trying to penetrate specific industries with a vertical market approach? Is there a single decision-maker in each organization or do you have a strategy for influencing different levels of authority and different roles? The answer to these questions will dictate your marketing mix, content strategy, and media strategy. You will probably want to categorize your activities into campaigns that focus on each discrete audience/persona.
- It’s impossible to create a marketing plan if you don’t have a budget. Get a budget from your boss. Or if that’s not available for some reason, set yourself a “planning budget” based on your marketing lead waterfall, average deal size, and sales revenue targets.
- Here are some options for setting a planning budget: Use last year’s budget/spend. Plus or minus some percentage (10%? 20%?) depending on how well the company is doing or the expectations for growth in the coming year. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, set your marketing budget at 7% - 8% of gross revenue (http://smallbusiness.chron.com/percentage-gross-revenue-should-used-marketing-advertising-55928.html). Check the public financial statements of your primary competitors and use something comparable.
- Before you ever run a single campaign there are baseline costs you might as well account for right off the bat. These are fees and expenses that are fairly steady and easy to predict, such as SaaS fees for Marketing Automation, website hosting, etc. Also, if you have retainer based advertising or PR or PPC agencies, plug in those costs right off the top. Any other nagging sunk costs you can think of? Might as well get them in there right off the bat or you will be scrambling to find money for them later. Things like analyst contracts, association memberships, give-away items for trade shows & sales call leave-behinds, website domain renewals, etc.
- Most companies have a handful of trade shows that everyone knows they want to attend. Trade shows tend to be big-ticket activities with dates that are established well in advance. Get them in your plan ASAP because there is usually an advantage for early commitment (discounted exhibit fees, the best selection of promo packages, early booth selection). Similarly, get your sales seminars and customer events into the plan ASAP. These events require advance planning so put them in as placeholders if you don’t have all the details (“TBD but I know we want to do one or two per quarter” or “TBD but we always do our user group meeting in the Spring”). Another advantage of getting them into the plan early is you can load-balance your marketing calendar. Events are resource intensive. They take a lot of budget, so you won’t want to load them all into the same quarter or your marketing spend will look out of whack. They also require staffing to plan it and work the event. Putting them into the calendar lets you visualize the staffing requirements and make sure you line up the staffing commitments required to execute properly. And finally, you usually want to do pre- and post- event marketing (event promo packages, emails, content development, product launches, etc.) so the calendar portion of your marketing plan allows you to map out those campaigns.
- OK, so now that you’ve entered your infrastructure costs and your events into the plan, your budget has a couple of big bites taken out of it. Take (most of) the remainder of the budget and divide it up among your key campaigns (remember our discussion about key personas a little while ago). Give more budget to your most important campaigns. Now that you’ve “bucketed” money for these campaigns, you can get tactical. What are the best media properties that can deliver these audiences? What promo packages do they have? What kind of marketing content do you need to create to appeal to each of these audiences (if you can’t create it yourself then allocate some budget for contractors or for content creation from those key media properties). At this point you will see that your plan is coming together very quickly and you will start to feel relieved and excited! Don’t stop! The devil is in the details so keep diving down into your activities. Give some thought to the Buyer’s Journey and make sure you have activities that are properly sequenced to generate new leads and then move them down the funnel to convert them to hot sales leads (when you show that kind of sequencing to your sales stakeholders their heads will explode with anticipation).
- It's always good to have a little bit of budget (10% per quarter?) you can use to double-down on a campaign that is performing well, or to throw at a good looking opportunity that comes up. You can use this discretionary budget as a carrot for your marketing staff (“great work on that webinar, here’s another $5K to promote the recording”) or for sales stakeholders (“thanks for working so hard at that trade show, I’m going to invest $10K for a seminar in your territory because I know you will kick butt and close some sales”). If you're asked to cut budget during a down quarter, this "unplanned/opportunistic" budget is an easy first cut because you haven’t paid it out in advance or invested a lot of time or energy yet to plan it.
- As I said earlier, it is the marketer’s responsibility to track results, then do more activities like the ones that succeed, and do less of what does not succeed. The Marketing Plan template linked here is intended to be a working document you should use all year long. Update the costs as they become final and record the results. Adjust your tactics and activities based on your results as the year goes by.