In today’s highly digital, ever-changing world, businesses that sell to other businesses (B2B) face a multitude of marketing channels, tactics, and platforms as options to reach their target. The good news is that there are many ways to reach your target audience effectively – the bad news is that the best path is often unclear.
“We are all over the place,” the business owner of an eight-year-old consulting company confided. “Our content feels stale, our emails seem to go into some black hole, and frankly, we’re not sure if we’re even talking to the right audience.”
We see and hear this all the time.
Oftentimes, companies come to us when they think they have pinpointed the silver bullet that is going to fix everything – a new website, an updated brochure, or getting noticed on the latest social media platform. While their instincts may be useful, making an informed assessment about how to proceed with marketing outreach begins with the true silver bullet – the strategic marketing plan.
A strategic marketing plan creates an intentional blueprint for growth. It gives your company’s mission a carefully crafted voice coupled with well thought out delivery mechanisms. It articulates your optimal outreach strategy and outlines the tactics that will best reach your business objectives. It also helps keep you focused, with clear measurement tools to track campaign effectiveness – allowing room to make decisions about “what’s next.”
Recently, after 5280 completed a client’s marketing plan, the company’s president said, “I knew going into this that there were so many things we could do in order to market our business. Now, we have an actual plan containing the RIGHT things to do and how to get them done.”
A good strategic marketing plan contains three main elements which are broken down into the more granular insights necessary for relevant outreach, as well as good decision making:
- Framework
- Objectives
- Tactics
Framework
The framework of your strategic marketing plan encapsulates the bigger picture of your company’s reason for existence and who you serve. It clearly defines your company’s vision and mission which ultimately get aligned with succinct statements that communicate your unique value proposition and differentiation. These finely tuned messages become the foundation for all communications moving forward, speaking to your specific target audience in a way that stands out from the competition. In order to do this effectively, the plan considers:
- Your company’s goals
- Your target audience and unique personas
- What challenges they want to solve and the desired state they want to achieve
- Where they find their information and how they make buying decisions
- Your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT)
- The competition – what they are doing right and how you stand apart
Objectives
Setting your strategic marketing objectives comes next. These provide clarity regarding what you want your marketing initiatives to achieve for the company. Some examples of marketing objectives include:
- Increase brand awareness
- Launch a new product
- Attract new clients
- Increase customer loyalty
- Increase sales
We recommend defining three strategic marketing objectives with measurable goals so you can focus on the marketing efforts that will enable the most growth.
Tactics
Once you know the objectives you want to achieve, tactics are the specific marketing initiatives, campaigns, and outreach efforts that will be deployed. While many owners come to us with a list of what they think they should be doing, notice that the development of tactics comes only after all the planning work has been completed. This is key to maximizing your marketing budget because the heavy lifting done in the planning stages provides a more complete picture of your company’s situation and opportunities which then drive the right tactics. Tactics involve not only the specific activities to be deployed, but also the channels, timelines, and budgets related to achieving your marketing objectives.
Once the plan is in place, the execution work begins. We implement tactics in 90-day, agile sprints. Shorter periods don’t provide enough time for a tactic to demonstrate its ability to perform towards the goals. Conversely, allowing too much time to pass curtails the ability to be responsive to new trends and market shifts.
“The marketing activity from 5280 Accelerator has driven more activity to our LinkedIn profiles and to our website. It’s clear that we’re more front of mind with our target audience and they’re thinking about our brand more,” commented one of our clients after their latest 90-day review. “You’ve helped us be much more purposeful and consistent with our communications to the marketplace.”
Everyone wants a silver bullet, and the strategic marketing plan is just that, providing a solid foundation and a great return on your investment. It is an actionable roadmap with clear and measurable objectives that directly tie to specific business goals. Helping companies get to their next level of growth is our expertise and passion. We’d welcome the opportunity to partner with you to develop your custom silver bullet towards growth.