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After a strategy is devised and implemented, your organization must find balance between the essentials of that plan and the need to be responsive to shifting business conditions. When this balance is achieved, your marketing team can address changes in your operating climate without deviating from the core goals and approach you’ve established.
As you create a strategic plan, whether alone or with a marketing firm, you can build in the flexibility to do the following:
Plan for expected events throughout the year
Depending on your industry, your sales cycle may be greatly affected by the season or specific events. For B2B businesses, this can include trade show schedules and budget cycles, but also events like holidays, because they affect the schedule and attention of your potential buyers. As these dates approach, the tone or delivery of your marketing may need to be adjusted somewhat to make an impact.
Plan for unexpected events
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to anticipate all of the situations that may arise in your organization or industry, and a strategic plan can’t account for what it can’t anticipate. So couple it with a plan for how your marketing will respond in a crisis. While the specifics of your actions will depend on the situation, having guidelines in place will help your organization bounce back faster, ultimately keeping your strategy on track.
Anticipate new changes to products and services
It’s likely that your organization’s offerings are not static. Thanks to internal research, client feedback or competitors’ actions, the products and services you’ll be marketing a few years from now will probably look different from what you’re working with today. As you create your strategic plan, identify the areas that should stay constant and those that may be shifted in the event of a new release or update to your products or services.
Respond to key findings from data and analytics
As we often discuss here, data and analytics should guide every aspect of your marketing. Every digital marketing campaign your organization runs should be carefully tracked and adjusted in real-time based on your data. That may mean drastically altering or even halting an underperforming campaign, or redoubling efforts for a successful one. Add regular check-ins with the data and appropriate adjustments to your campaigns into your strategic plan, so that they become a foundation of your work, not an afterthought.
Balance the creation of timely and evergreen content
Your strategic plan undoubtedly includes digital content creation, but does it include guidelines for including both timely and evergreen content? Timely content is important, as it performs best when your audience recieves it when they are most receptive to it.. Evergreen content has a variety of benefits for your thought leadership, and can also provide a deep bench of content to draw on for your email and social media marketing. By balancing your time and resources creating content with an immediate impact and content that you can use for years, your strategic plan sets your organization on the road to digital success.
An actionable strategy that accounts for these needs is just one of the key aspects of a strong brand. For more on how your organization can be its best, read our white paper, 10 simple truths about strong brands.
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A strategic plan should be the foundation of your marketing, but it needs to be translated into actionable tactics in order to generate success. Making the jump from plans to actions can be easier said than done, but a strong marketing partner can work with your organization to create a strategic plan and convert that plan into tactics that drive results. Let’s take a look at how the following aspects of your strategic plan need to be put into action:
Marketing goals
Your strategic plan has marketing goals at its core, but goals mean little without planning out the steps that will take your organization there. You can state that you want to increase the number of leads collected by a certain percentage in the coming year, but to actually do so you need to break down what that goal requires in terms of marketing actions, resources, benchmarks and more. This is the first step in translating your strategy to tactics: establishing the short-term actions that build into long-term goals.
Measurement and KPIs
In addition to marketing goals, your strategic plan should lay out the KPIs you will track and how you will measure them. In the move from strategy to tactics, this tracking becomes more concrete. Your marketing firm will establish benchmarks toward your plan. This is also the time to establish measurement for all tactics (tracking URLs, set-up in Google Analytics or other tracking system, etc.) and determine data sources (Google, publisher data, third party ad servers, etc.).
Brand positioning
If your brand positioning is part of your strategic plan, it should address your competitive differentiators, market niche and brand strengths, and how your marketing efforts address these three elements as a foundation for reaching your audience with effective messaging. On a tactical level, that’s a complicated process, and may involve the creation of various forms of marketing content, segmenting your audience and planning the distribution of that content to them.
As you move from strategy to tactics, your partner will help plan the use of your messaging in new marketing assets, advise on the allocation of resources and time for creation and distribution, and, again, set up a process for tracking success and making adjustments based on data as necessary.
Timing
Your strategic plan should give a broad overview of the timing of marketing activities. Then, when working from that strategy, your marketing firm will map that general timeline out into day-to-day activities. At this stage in the process, a strategic initiative like “build thought leadership through contributed content” becomes an actionable plan. Monthly and quarterly plans are broken down into daily and weekly steps toward the completion of each activity.
Do you want to learn more about strategic plans and how a marketing partner can help you establish one and put it into action? Contact us today.
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Last week, Movéo’s director of data and insights, Jiani Zhang shared her expertise on the topic with the team at one of our biweekly CRAVE sessions. Today, we’re bringing you highlights from her talk.
As your organization and your new marketing firm work together to create a strategic plan, one of the best tools you have to aid in goal-setting are benchmarks. Benchmarks provide a context for your marketing measurements, giving your team a view of how you stack up against your competitors and how successful your campaigns are relative to each other. Let’s take a closer look:
Numbers without context mean nothing
Without benchmarks, your team cannot draw meaning from the data you collect. Say you’re looking at the performance of a banner ad, which has a 0.08% clickthrough rate. This number seems very low intuitively — it’s under one percent. And yet, once compared to Google’s benchmark for banner ad success, 0.06%, it becomes clear that the banner ad in question is actually significantly outperforming the average.
In a similar way, benchmarks provide the basis for evaluating and setting goals in your strategic plan and in individual campaigns. When planning your marketing, test whether your goals are achievable based on your results to date. For example, perhaps your first instinct is to set a goal of gaining 2,500 leads in the next quarter. Take a look at your past performance and do the math. What conversion rate would this require on your landing pages? If it would require a 30 percent conversion and you’re currently achieving a 5 percent conversion rate, it’s time to reconsider and set a more realistic short-term goal.
Benchmarks can also help your team decide on whether a given campaign idea makes any sense at all. Consult past reports or industry data on the cost of a lead in a certain type of campaign, and compare it to how much each lead will bring back to the organization. If the margin is too small to be worth pursuing, or if it in fact would cost more to acquire the leads than they would bring in, your organization can easily cross that campaign off your list.
Sources of data for benchmarks
As you craft a strategic plan or work with a marketing partner who will craft one for you, there are several valuable sources of information that your organization can use as benchmarks.
These include:
Your own historical data. In many cases, the best predictor of your organization’s future success is its past performance. You should be able to vouch for the accuracy of the data, and it will be consistent with your organization’s unique circumstances. These data are particularly useful if your organization operates in a niche market, has a unique business model, consistently performs far above or below industry standards, or is significantly larger or smaller than your competitors. The downside? These data don’t provide contextual industry and competitor information when considered alone.
Industry data: To learn about your industry, consult the work of research firms, industry analysts and industry associations. While information from these sources will contain sampling and self-reporting biases, they still offer an excellent look at your industry as a whole. Ideally, your marketing team or partner firm will consult several sources of such research to gather the fullest picture of the industry.
Competitor data: Data from competitive intelligence sources such as SimilarWeb give your marketing team a glimpse into the web traffic of your competitors, including referral sources and keywords. This information is most reliable when you are dealing with sites with large amounts of traffic, as smaller data sets are more prone to show an outsized impact from a few outliers. All the same, the direct measurement tools these sites employ make them valuable sources to consult for benchmarks.
Media vendor data: If you are working with a media vendor, the vendor can provide volunteered website data from industries and companies. These data allow you to truly compare “apples to apples” by looking at the same tracking approaches your organization uses across others in your industry. These analytics can offer valuable insights that you can use to shape marketing decisions.
To learn from these data sources and create useful benchmarks, conduct thorough research using all these sources, but always bring it back to focus on your own organization. Make sure to take into account any major changes in your organization or industry that will make past data a poor predictor of future outcomes.
For more insight into the role of data and analytics in modern marketing, read our white paper, The new marketing value chain.
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As we discussed last week, the beginning of a new marketing partnership is all about goal-setting. During this process, your organization and your partner firm will have to discuss each other’s expectations. This is the best time to make sure you are on the same page about critical areas of your work together.
At the beginning of your partnership, expect these three conversations with your marketing partner:
Projected timeline
In all these conversations about planning and goals, it can be easy to forget the long buying cycle of B2B purchasers. Marketing is a process — no marketing firm can deliver hundreds of qualified leads overnight.
So, even as you discuss the great success your partnership plans to generate in the future, you should not lose sight of the projected timeline for marketing growth. Your partner firm should be able to provide a plan that shows the following:
- A timeline of their planned work
- An explanation of how each tactic will generate leads
- Regular benchmarks for measuring marketing success
- A strategy for how your marketing will build on each success and grow over time
If you have any questions about their plans, the beginning of your partnership is an ideal time to discuss the plans and make adjustments that make sense for both your organization and your marketing firm.
Impact on sales
These first few months of a partnership are a critical time to set expectations on the impact new marketing efforts will have on sales. As a member of the internal marketing team, your role will include communicating these expectations to the sales team and to your supervisors. If they have unrealistic expectations, you will want to work with the marketing firm to determine what portion of the sales department’s expectations are feasible, and on what schedule they are attainable.
This is also the time to establish what your marketing partner will need from the sales team. Your partner firm may require access to past sales data in order to create an effective plan for targeting new leads. They will also want to ensure that your CRM is properly integrated with marketing automation software and that there is productive marketing-sales alignment.
Budget
By the time you begin work with a marketing partner, the budget has been set and agreed to. However, you may still have questions about what it covers and how it will be used, and now is the time to iron out any concerns or confusion.
For example, how will priorities and allocations of resources shift if something comes up that you want your marketing partner’s help on? How and when will you be billed for one-time marketing expenses that fall outside the scope of the budget? By discussing any questions that remain early in your partnership, you can establish a clear roadmap for your ongoing work together.
Are you looking for a new marketing partner? Learn more about how Movéo can help your organization by calling us today.
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When beginning a new marketing partnership, you’ll discuss with your partner firm what you’re looking to achieve, both in the short and long term. Being able to clearly articulate your goals, no matter how lofty or far-off they may seem, is essential for the firm to get a sense of your priorities, where they can best spend their time and how much they can realistically achieve for you. They may have suggestions of their own on goals to work toward as well.
But here’s the question for today: what if you’re not sure what your marketing goals are? Today, we’re taking a closer look at a few ways you can create meaningful marketing goals for your internal team and for your marketing firm:
Make your goals actionable
You may have entered into a marketing partnership with a vague goal for your company: something along the lines of “we want to bring in more money” or “we want everyone to know our name.” It’s a great start, but these aren’t yet the kinds of goals we want to be working towards. Why? Because those statements are so vague, there’s no way to craft a meaningful marketing strategy around them.
Take some time to figure out why you want these, and how you want to get them. Do you want current customers to spend more money and refer others, or are you looking to reach a new group? How much new money do you want to bring in, and in what time period? When you take the time to answer these questions, you can make a statement like “we want to bring in more money” into an actionable goal like “we want to bring in $500,000 from referral customers by 2018.” Now that’s something we can plan toward.
Operate within the realm of reality
In order to best motivate your employees and keep your tactics on target, your marketing goals should be achievable. A strong marketing goal isn’t easily within your grasp, but it can be reached with effort. Don’t set your marketing up for failure by declaring that you’ll generate an impossible number of leads in a given time frame, or that you’ll achieve a given reach for a fraction of the usual cost and effort. Instead, find balance. Look at your marketing resources and set goals that are achievable and set a sustainable pace of growth.
Keep goals worthwhile and related
Ask yourself, “What is the purpose of this goal?” Will it improve your reputation or broaden your reach? By how much? Consider the ROI of your marketing when setting goals, so that you don’t overinvest in a project with little impact just to say you did so. Rather than pushing for a disparate set of goals at one time, take a look at all of your ideas together and select the ones that reinforce each other and create the best total impact.
Learn from past successes and failures
Work with your marketing partner to evaluate historical marketing data from your organization and set goals based on past performance. What has been working? What hasn’t? What KPIs have you been tracking, and are you still interested in them? The more robust data on past performance that you can offer, the better informed your goals will be. You may even find that areas you’ve been focusing on—say, generating new leads—is doing well, and it’s time to divert focus to another area of marketing to ensure your brand is uniformly strong.
Your firm can also make recommendations based on industry expertise, and share strategies that they’ve seen work for similar organizations.
For a look at how Movéo helped one brand move from far-off goals to a new website, read our case study on Hallstar.
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Your first quarter working with a new marketing firm is a critical time of collaboration. It’s the time when you get to shape what your working relationship will look like on the day-to-day level. In that process, each team has important roles to play in the following areas. But to ensure that you start your marketing partnership off on the right foot, it’s essential to set your own expectations about what’s needed—as well as what is and isn’t going to happen—during the first few months. Here are a few things you can expect to be doing in the first quarter of your new marketing partnership:
Setting your initial marketing goals
Goal-setting is a key aspect of the first quarter of a marketing partnership (and one we’ll take a closer look at in Thursday’s blog). You’ll probably start off the quarter talking to the team about what you’d like to achieve in the first quarter and the first year of your partnership. As you begin to think about what goals you have for your marketing, gather any data on past marketing performance to help you better understand where you’ve been and where you realistically can go in the next few months.
Frequent collaboration and communication
As a first step, your marketing firm will want to take a deep dive into your past work. Whether they’re crafting a strategy for your brand or executing one you have created, in order to kickstart a successful marketing partnership, your marketing partner needs to master your brand’s tone, style and character. Whether you are looking to make a shift in your brand’s tone and style or continue in a similar vein, this approach will allow your firm to grasp where your brand stands now.
As your marketing firm begins to create assets for you, they will seek thorough feedback in the early days. They will use this feedback to refine their understanding of your needs and style, so that in the future this process will become streamlined. You should provide honest and constructive criticism and suggestions—they’re learning your brand voice, and your insight into that is invaluable! What’s more, hold your firm to a high standard. These early months are when you’ll be setting expectations with them as well, so you need to let them know what kinds of content work for you and what doesn’t. If you can clearly describe your needs and let them know what’s working and what isn’t, you’ll be on the same page going forward.
Shared terms and processes
In addition to sharing this feedback, you need to make sure that you and your marketing partner share an understanding of key marketing terms. Do you define a qualified lead the same way? When you talk about given metrics, are you really referring to the same things? Now is the time to make sure that your language is aligned—it will save everyone a lot of confusion and frustration in the future. Take note: you’ll also want to make sure that marketing and sales are aligned in the use of key terms, especially when an integrated CRM is involved.
You also need to be sure you share any processes you have internally with the team. Do you organize files in your marketing automation system in a certain way? Do you love Google Docs and hate sharing Excel files? Let them know. They’ll be receptive to your needs, and you’ll be able to keep internal processes in place.
A monthly timeline
It can be disappointing embarking on a new marketing partnership, signing the contracts, beginning work and then finding that those leads you expected to see coming in aren’t there yet. Don’t worry if this happens: marketing takes a long time to set up and fully deploy, so the results aren’t instantaneous. However, you should get a sense from your marketing team about how long it will take before you start seeing results.
At the beginning of your partnership, set up a timeline for each month of the first quarter. Together, hash out what you can expect from them each month in terms of content, communication and growth metrics. Can they help you forecast when leads will start coming in, and how much growth you can expect to see? Can you track what they’re up to through a tool like Asana or Basecamp, or will they give you weekly updates on what they’ve accomplished? This way, you’ll know what to expect and avoid any surprises going forward.
Are you looking for a new marketing partner? Take a look at our approach to branding.
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If you’re looking to work with a new marketing partner, it’s important to prepare so you can start the partnership off right. A partner firm will need a fair amount of information about your goals, strategy, past successes and failures and more in order to craft a plan that will benefit your organization.
Make sure you know the answers to the following questions so that you can start your marketing partnership off on the right foot.
Goals and strategy
1. What are your CEO’s top business goals for the company this year? What about long-term?
2. What are your top three marketing objectives for this quarter and this year?
3. How do you currently measure success?
Marketing performance to date
4. What marketing tactics are you currently using?
5. What past marketing efforts have shown strong results, positive or negative?
6. Do you or have you ever used a marketing automation program? If so, which one?
7. Who are your target customers? Are you reaching them?
8. How are you currently segmenting your audience?
9. What is the average ROI of each of your main marketing tactics?
10. How are you aligning marketing tactics with business or sales goals?
Partnership expectations
11. What is your budget?
12. Are you looking for a strategy to guide internal marketing efforts, or a team to create and implement a new marketing strategy?
13. Who is leading your marketing internally? Who do they report to, and who are the main members of their team?
14. Do you prefer to communicate via email or phone?
15. Who will be the main point of contact in this partnership?
16. What would you like to accomplish in the first three months of our partnership? What about in the first year?
Thinking through these questions ahead of time won’t just help your new partner firm, it will also help you organize and better understand your needs and expectations internally before you engage with an outside partner.
For more ideas on how to strengthen your marketing, visit our white paper library.
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In a recent Crave session at Movéo, Vice President of Creative Technology Dave Cannon spoke about the power of marketing automation software. Marketing automation tools allow marketers to build relationships with customers and potential customers by streamlining time-consuming marketing tasks into an efficient system. Any worthwhile marketing automation program will also integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to ensure that marketing can smoothly hand-off these nurtured prospects to sales.
Do you understand “marketing automation” as more than a buzzword? Here are a few things to know as you build your marketing strategy.
What marketing automation programs can do for you
Marketing automation programs, which include Act-On, HubSpot, Marketo and Pardot, generally offer the following capabilities:
- Email marketing
- A/B testing
- Landing page design and publishing
- Search engine optimization
- Visitor tracking
- Audience segmentation
- Reporting
- Lead scoring
By combining each of these capabilities in one program, marketing automation enhances your ability to gain deep insights into both individual contacts and contact behavior as a whole. Which emails do they open? How do they behave on your site? What content have they downloaded? These findings can help you analyze your audience in a much more powerful way than disjointed data points from multiple sources.
Moreover, marketing automation allows you to (of course) automate marketing tactics to better reach contacts and make your processes more efficient. Think of automated email workflows, in which you can schedule emails to be sent out to different contacts based on time and eligibility criteria. A lead who downloads a white paper on your site, for example, may be scheduled to receive a follow-up email with another piece of content designed to nurture them further down the marketing funnel. By thinking strategically about your send criteria and consistently checking workflow performance to determine what’s working and what falls flat, your marketing gets more targeted and efficient.
Why lead nurturing and lead scoring are so important
According to SiriusDecisions, 80% of prospects deemed “bad” by sales teams go on to buy within 24 months — possibly from your competitor. Lead nurturing keeps your brand top-of-mind with contacts who aren’t ready to make a purchase now, but who can grow to trust your brand over time. Nurturing activities include email marketing, social media marketing and more, all with the aim of moving unqualified leads further through the funnel. Again, marketing automation programs make it possible to refine nurturing activities through precise targeting.
When you have such thorough data on each of your leads, you can create a lead scoring framework to track which of your audience members are ready to be passed to Sales. Leads may gain or lose points based on how they’ve interacted with your content, website or emails, so you can quantify their interest and potential to turn into a customer. Lead scoring can make a major impact on your marketing: MarketingSherpa has found that organizations using lead scoring average a 77% lift in lead generation ROI over organizations with no lead scoring system in place. Lead scoring tells you when prospects are or are not ready to be contacted by Sales, but it must be paired with lead nurturing in order to help leads become qualified.
Individual marketing automation programs each have their strengths and weaknesses, so finding the one that best fits your organization’s needs is key. For our take on what program would be best for your organization, how to optimize your current marketing automation program or how to implement a new one, contact us.
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When searching for a new marketing partner, your organization will find a wide variety of firms ready to offer their services. Do you know what you’re looking for in a marketing partner? Read on to learn how to separate the firms that can offer you what you need from those that won’t be a good fit.
Qualities to look for in a marketing partner
While every organization will be looking for something slightly different in a marketing partner, there are some overarching qualities that every company should prioritize. Your organization should seek a firm that:
Has experience in your industry
While any new partner will need to get up to speed on your specific organization and needs, one who has knowledge of or experience in your industry offers significant benefits. They can bring to the table a wealth of insights about your audience, competitors or even sales strategies. They can also contribute knowledge gained from similar marketing campaigns to save you the time and effort associated with a more trial and error-focused approach.
Pairs data-driven insights with creative
Your organization doesn’t just want a firm that offers robust data collection and analysis or creates compelling creative assets. No, you want to work with a marketing partner that combines both, and that understands the new marketing value chain. You want to work with a marketing partner that knows how to glean insights from data and use them to inspire effective content and compelling creative.
Shares your goals and values…
Any organization you partner with should share your goals and know how to take steps to achieve those goals, in terms of sales, audience recognition and more. Similarly, it’s important to find a marketing partner that shares your overall values, so that you can trust them to make decisions that your organization can stand behind.
…While offering an outside perspective needed to make difficult decisions and take results to the next level
Ultimately, one of the biggest benefits of a marketing partnership is the ability to gain an outside view of your organization and its efforts. When selecting a marketing firm to work with, ask each firm you consider a number of questions. How do they see your organization from the outside? How will they work to make sure they can continue to share an outside view even as they work closely with your organization? How will they use this view to push your organization to consistently improve?
What to insist on from a marketing partner
No matter what else you seek in a marketing partner, there are three things every organization should expect and demand. They are:
Quantitative objectives
In addition to your own internal goals for a marketing partnership, it’s important that your partner firm establishes growth objectives that match your organizational business goals.
Clear metrics
Once those objectives are set, your marketing partner must track the appropriate metrics to measure their progress. Work with a partner who sets benchmarks to track progress against.
Systematic reporting
Those metrics must then be clearly and regularly reported to you, the client. Talk to a marketing partner up front about how and how often they will report on the metrics they track. A good marketing partner will provide data that is meaningful to your organization, not just numbers out of context.
To read about how Movéo helped one client establish a metrics reporting framework, read our Molex case study.
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A marketing partnership can be an excellent investment, especially if it’s started at the right time and set up for success. Hiring a marketing partner gives you access to marketing experts so that you can focus on your own area of expertise.
In order to start a marketing partnership off on the best possible foundation, you need to have certain things already established internally and be ready to turn over key marketing functions to an outside team. It won’t serve either your organization or your partner firm well if you are not already at this point.
Here are a few things you will want to have in place before engaging with a marketing partner:
- Confirm your budget. A marketing partner often needs some time to establish a strategy and test campaigns before you will see clear results. As such, you’ll want to have the budget to establish a real relationship with a marketing partner over the course of a long-term engagement.
- Determine who will support their work internally. A marketing partner can do better work when they have a go-to point person at your organization who can approve content and act on key insights. Get things in order within your organization before seeking a marketing partner so that you can get the best return on your investment.
- Solidify your organization’s marketing goals. While a marketing partner can be an invaluable resource in helping to figure out tactics and strategy, you can’t come into the conversation cold. If you don’t know what you want, they won’t be able to apply their expertise to help you get there. Instead of asking a marketing partner to build a strategy on a shifting foundation, solidify your internal goals and objectives before hiring.
Questions to ask before hiring a marketing partner
In order to make a smart decision when choosing a new marketing partner, and to set that new partner up for success, you need to already know the answers to these questions.
- Are you looking for an experienced consultant to create a new marketing strategy that can be implemented in-house or a firm that can serve as an extension of the marketing team?
- Do you already have a good idea of where your marketing could improve, or are you looking for an expert to tell you?
- What is your budget?
- What are the top three things you expect from a marketing partner?
- Who will be the main point of contact for a new marketing partner?
- How will you ensure clear and timely communication with a marketing partner?
- What marketing skill sets do you already have internally, and which do you most need in a partner? (i.e., design, content creation, analytics, strategy)
- Do you already have a marketing automation solution or will you be looking for a marketing partner to recommend and set up such a program? What about data collection and analytics?
- Does your sales team have a CRM that the marketing partner can access and integrate marketing programs with?
- What are your quantifiable and qualitative goals for a marketing partnership?
If you have questions about what a marketing partner can do for you, give us a call.
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