As a practitioner of marketing, I have a very large toolkit of tactics that I can deploy for the companies I work with. Great marketers take the time to assess business objectives, budget, marketing structure and roles before recommending a single tactic within their tool kit.

A marketing plan is an essential exercise that marketers can use to bring all of their resources and ideas together to create a roadmap for themselves and their teams. Here are four steps I rely on to create a B2B marketing plan:

1. Crunch the Marketing and Sales Numbers
2. Know your Buyers and Corresponding Value Props
3. Create a list of all Marketing Tactics (traditional and not so traditional)
4. Keep it Lean and Agile

Crunch the Marketing and Sales Numbers

To all the twenty-something future marketers, understand this…modern B2B marketing is more math than creative.

The first thing I do when I sit down to craft a plan is look at historical marketing and sales performance, when applicable, to get the benchmarks that will guide our plan. I look at:

• Lead Source (By Leads, Opptys and Won Business)
• Campaigns  (By Leads, Opptys and Won Business)
• Cost Per Lead, Cost Per Opportunity, Cost Per Acquisition (Total, By Lead Source and Campaign)
• Lead to Opportunity % (Total, By Lead Source, By Campaign)
• Opportunity to Close % (Total, By Lead Source, By Campaign)
• Average Contract Value
• Average Sales Duration

There are plenty more data points (both qualitative and quantitive) we can track from a tactics level…but the above are the key metrics I use to plan and forecast. Once I have those benchmarks, I use a Demand Generation Calculator to determine how much demand we need to generate to meet our revenue targets and corresponding budget.

Know Your Buyers and Value Props

Before you recommend the placement of a single dollar, you need to be able to answer:  who am I selling this to, what problem are they trying to solve and how is my product or service going to solve that problem.

Here are a couple of great resources I’ve utilized along the way that help with persona building and product positioning:

• HubSpot’s Buyer Persona Template
• Pragmatic Marketing: A Look at Clarity in Positioning (and many, many more of their resources)

Create a List of All Marketing Tactics

Chances are…once you run the numbers you’ll realize you don’t have the budget or bandwidth to deploy every single market tactic in your toolkit. And you know what, you shouldn’t anyway. It’s good to have an itemized list of all of the tactics to choose from but which ones make the cut are reliant on a couple of things:  what’s working (we should do more of that) and what channels are my buyers using to learn about my product or service.

You can determine the channels by doing analysis around: digital profiling, industry publications, associations, trades shows, competitive analysis, client surveys, etc. When you know what your buyer looks like, a little MacGyver goes a long way to determining what are the best channels to devote marketing dollars to.

Keep it Lean and Agile

Your marketing plan should be concise and easy-to-pivot. Plan for that. Unless you work for a corporation where annual planning is the norm, you will be pivoting your marketing plan by the 6 month point.

The first marketing plan I did was pages upon pages of detailed analysis, text, recommendations, etc. My most recent marketing plan was 10 pages of Powerpoint. What I learned over time is that the details are best kept in the day-to-day execution of the function. No one on the Board, or executive team for that matter, wants to see a presentation about how you’re using online chat to drive demand (sorry). Keep those details between you and marketing team.

Now that it’s Q4…Happy planning, marketers!

For more information about creating your B2B marketing plan, contact 3 dots marketing, info@threedotsmarketing.com.