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Marketing Management

MARKETING MANAGEMENT FUNCTIONS

Are your marketing programs swimming or sinking? To survive in such a densely competitive market environment it is necessary for business owners to know customer needs and align business activities to those needs. Getting started with (or overhauling) your marketing programs is just as important as maintaining & measuring AND managing them for the long term.

Even if you have a marketing manager, hire a marketing agency, or outsource your campaigns & programs – you need to be informed enough to make key decisions that have to do with keeping those programs on track. Management is key, and that means you need to stay on top of it.

If you are a small business, you might be wearing all the hats, which means you are the manager and the action-taker at the same time. Either way this is a short guide packed with info to get you managing your marketing.

If you haven’t noticed, we talk about a lot of marketing related topics, it’s kinda our thing.

Here’s what we will be talking about in this example of content marketing:

Learn about the main idea and understanding of marketing.
Ways to manage your marketing programs effectively.
Different steps of the marketing management functions & processes.
Learn something about the decisions marketing managers have to make.

Of many things, marketing is primarily about the market and customer orientation of the whole company. An alignment of your branding in the minds of your customers. Marketing focuses on mutually satisfying customer and business needs in a competitive environment. Looking at some marketing definitions, in a more formal way, we can understand the world-wide accepted definition.

The American Marketing Association states that, marketing is an organizational function and set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to the customer and managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.

Daily business and practice of marketing management is often misunderstood. People might say marketing is advertising but marketing management goes beyond this simplistic perception.

Marketing management includes the customer-oriented philosophy of the whole company.

ALIGNING YOUR MARKETING WITH CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS

As markets become more and more competitive customer orientation is key for success. If the customer has the choice between company A&B they will be attracted by the company which fulfills the needs best. Therefore, companies have to look at customer needs and desires in a competitive environment, and they have to satisfy customers by fulfilling these needs.

Increasing customer orientation leads to higher customer satisfaction rate and higher loyalty with lower acquisition costs. Orienting your company to the right customers is the first step to properly managing your marketing programs and people.

Orienting your company to align its marketing with customer sentiment, opinion, affinity, and many more things comprising your marketing strategy will help you understand what all will need management or oversight.

Simply put, a business can not survive or grow without marketing, but many businesses do marketing in the wrong ways, which also ends in the same lack of results.

Let’s learn how we can make our marketing easier, and with less resistance by using marketing management, but first, understanding what good marketing concepts are.

Marketing should be implemented as a function within the company, so all the marketing knowledge and expertise is bundled in a department, or a team. In addition to that, marketing is also a set of cross-functional processes.

That means marketing orientation and customer orientation should be included in R&D, production, service, and fulfillment, so marketing managers have to understand that the customer orientation is anchored in all the departments within the company.

HOW TO START MANAGING YOUR MARKETING PROGRAMS

Marketing management can be explained by this planning process:

Start with a situation analysis, we look at markets, customers, and competitors, and at our internal situation. Then we will derive marketing goals from that analysis.

The goals we determine will be implemented by defining marketing strategies or tactics. The marketing strategies will be achieved by designing marketing activities, the so-called marketing mix.

Then we establish a marketing organization (or marketing team) and a marketing controlling process, this is the marketing management part of the process. So, let’s look at things you need to do to start managing your marketing efforts to get better results.

Start with an analysis of our internal and external environment. Looking at the internal business environment means we have to identify strengths and weaknesses regarding meeting customer needs.

When looking at the external environment, we have to identify and analyze the competitive relevant market.

Once we know what the situation is inside our organization and outside of it, we have to analyze the customer needs, which is a big starting point within the external analysis.

We need to look at our branding and products in comparison to the competitors, in addition to the market analysis we have to care about influencing factors of the macro market environment.

The analysis of the macro marketing environment is called pestle analysis that means that we have to look at political-economic, geo-political, social-ecological and legal influencing factors. All of the macro factors can have trickle-down effects on micro markets.

The internal and the external situation analysis will lead to the so-called SWOT analysis.

While we combine internal strengths and weaknesses and the external opportunities and threats, we are getting ready for implementation, but before taking action we need to consider building management into these.

Actions without orientations will lead to misleading direction for marketing goals. Marketing goals should fulfill different functions.

First of all, marketing goals should give orientation, second, they should coordinate activities within the marketing department and within the company, and third they should motivate decision-makers to achieve the goals, and finally marketing goals should fulfill a control function such as one or more KPIs. That means activities and strategies and their achievements should be controlled by having defined goals that your management of marketing can track the performance of.

DEFINING MARKETING KPIs YOU NEED TO MANAGE

By defining marketing goals, we can differentiate between economic and psycho-graphic goals. Looking at the economic goals, we have revenue KPIs with profitability goals.

We could define market-share as a goal, or sales volume, or the contribution margin.

Before being able to achieve these KPIs & goals, we have to change something in the customer’s mind and therefore we have to address the so-called psycho-graphic.

Brand awareness is to create a special image of our business that the customer is willing to consider our product, that could be a marketing goal. On a side note, branding strategy is important, so important in fact, it should be centered around your customer profiles & orientation.

Satisfaction goals are important to look for to create a loyal customer, therefore the interplay of psychographic goals and economic goals are important for the marketing planning and management.

Marketing goals should be made of KPIs with substance, and not based on meaningless “vanity metrics”. Marketing goals should include the following elements;

increase awareness
Increase interest
Increase lead capture & inquiry
increase revenue
increase awareness by 10% in the next 12 months
increase awareness by 10% the next 12 months in Germany

KEEPING MARKETING PROGRAMS UNDER CONTROL

Which marketing strategies are appropriate for the achievement of the marketing goals?

We have to develop marketing strategies and plans for the achievement of these marketing goals. in marketing literature, you will find a lot of strategy typology with a lot of recommendations to develop marketing strategies, but there is no right and no wrong way to do this – you just need to understand the core concepts.

A successful marketing concept we would like to show developed to structure growth strategies can look at existing markets and new markets and at existing products and new products.

You can grow with a market penetration strategy, for example, by cross-selling if you want to grow in new markets with your existing products you might go international, so market development means that you approach with your existing product.

Develop new products for your existing customers that is called product development strategy.
Approach new markets with new products, and that is called diversification.

Strategy typology, developed by Michael Porter, was on how to create competitive advantages and he differentiated between two main types of strategy.

1 – Create a competitive advantage by being the cost leader in the market. That means the company has the lowest price for a reasonable quality of a product.

2 – The opposite is the quality leadership, so to create competitive advantages by having the best quality in the market for a higher price indicates the so-called quality leadership strategy.

Michael Porter indicates that both strategy can take place in the mass Mac market and Indonesia market so a quality can be profitable in a mass-market but also in a small focused niche market in addition to growth strategies and competitive strategies we can mention a lot of war strategy types like branding strategies or timing strategies all of these strategies were developed will be a basis or platform for the implementation of marketing measures or marketing actions.

What measures can be taken to implement the marketing strategy?

We have to look at the so-called marketing mix the marketing mix consists of all the measures which we can Implement to make our company customer oriented the classical marketing mix consists of the product the price and place and promotion and was in all these areas we have to implement measures which makes our company more customer oriented

The product policy is often called The Heart of the marketing mix was out having a customer-oriented product or service most of you will fail to satisfy customer needs Visions to be made in the product policy area it’s about product innovation it’s about product differentiation and sometimes you have to eliminate products from the market

What you have to make more decisions it’s about branding off the product or service is about packaging and offering additional services always product activities should be coordinated to satisfy customer needs price policy is about setting the right price and the right conditions to attract customers

It’s about setting a price for a new product or changing the price for existing products giving price promotions or Price bonus what changing the price in a dynamic way also price differentiation is a main topic in the area of pricing so the objective of pricing policy is to meet the willingness to pay of the customer and in competitive environment

Decisions in the area of place or distribution policy a targeted to the question when and where our customer will get the product within the distribution policy area we have to consider two types of decisions first we have to define the right distribution Channel there’s a variety of options to design a distribution Channel take a physical store or an internet shop or a mail-order option the second main area of decision is how to design the physical flow of the product to the customer this is all about designing the logistical Channel so defining the right distribution policy will lead to the answering the question when and where our customer will get the product

We have to decide how to communicate or customers this is the communication policy area they also main decisions to make first of all what is the right Communication channel is it print newspaper mailing or the internet second we have to be signed about what to tell to the customer so it’s about the content for the communication campaign this area are mostly advertising agency will help the company to design and advertisement or campaign for the communication policy all the communication measures should be coordinated to address the customer groups in a efficient way

Finally all the communication channels and the content of the companies should be coordinated and targeted to the customer segments which are defined in our situation analysis house with marketing be organized and we can look at the different options

first of all we can Define responsibility for coordinating our marketing activities of the product level bald product management could also be that we try to build responsibilities around our core customers it’s called key account management

another way is that marketing managers are responsible for which has what countries and then we can Define responsibilities by looking at different marketing functions like product development pricing distribution communication it is important that the marketing organization supports the idea that marketing is an overall philosophy of the company

KEEPING YOUR MARKETING UNDER CONTROL

Why should marketing be controlled?

Looking at the overall marketing planning process and what we have read so far, you will finally see that marketing controlling is also an important part to control strategies and measures which we have defined and implemented is one essential part to make a marketing management more effective and efficient

Marketing control tries to define the main marketing metrics and the key success factors and marketing controlling gives feedback to all the decision-makers which are involved in the marketing management process.

TOOLS FOR MARKETING MANAGEMENT

Whether you have a small or wide scale marketing campaign, there can be an assortment of tools, such as digital marketing tools, that you will need to effectively manage those campaigns. Tools used to measure marketing can be as simple as a sheet of paper, spread sheet, or a time management software. In terms of digital marketing tools you will need for online marketing, take some of the following examples.

Points of Access

Google Drive
Dropbox

Templates

Images
Print designs

SOPs

Marketing tactics, step by step

Dashboards & Spreadsheets

Base Camp
Slack

Data Visualization

Google Analytics
Ahrefs

MARKETING TASKS YOU CAN DELEGATE TO OTHERS

For big organizations, a marketing team is necessary. For medium or small businesses, you may not need a marketing team, but every business, no matter how big or small, needs a marketing manager.

As a marketing team manager, or an entrepreneur, it is your job to think about the marketing of your firm or brand on a high level, meaning that you, yourself, should not get caught up in too much actual implementation. Your primary objective is to make sure the main objectives are on track.

For organizations with marketing teams, you can assign tasks in relation to the strengths of team members. For smaller businesses, you may only have one or two people who must keep up with everything. In either case, organizations and small business can take advantage of the help from outsourcing or an agency.

We are talking about delegating things like:

Social media updates
Adding new photos to the website
Adding or editing pages on the website
Keyword research
Consumer studies
Market studies
Performance reporting
Agile adjustments
Agile pivoting

WHEN TO HIRE A MARKETING MANAGEMENT AGENCY

Most business owners are well aware of the key points of interest to measure that reflect marketing ROI, but most business owners may not have all the time or detailed knowledge to either get or analyze the data.

A big chunk of the marketing management role is to understand and identify tactics or campaigns that show signs of falling flat, and inputting that data back into the strategy, templates, SOPs, etc.

So, if you are having trouble realizing what your marketing data is telling you, or you simply do not have time to analyze, react, & make changes – then you need the help of an agency to address those needs.

FAQ about managing your marketing

What do you mean by marketing management?
The American Association of Marketing defines marketing management as the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion and distribution of ideas, goods and services in order to create, exchange and satisfy individual and organizational objectives (Grönroos, 1989).

What the marketing concepts?
Commonly known as the 4 P’s of marketing, they are: Price, Product, Promotion, Place, concepts.

What are the 7 principles of marketing?
The seven principles of marketing are: product, price, promotion, place, packaging, positioning and people.

What is the role of marketing manager?
Marketing managers are responsible for developing and measuring the marketing programs for their organizations.

Glossary of terms related to marketing management

AIDA (marketing)

Arrow information paradox

Article marketing

Article video marketing

Attack marketing

Bargain bin

Business-to-business

Business-to-consumer

Business-to-government

Cause marketing

Copy testing

Cost per conversion

Conversion rates

Customer lifetime value

Customer relationship management

Decision making unit

Disintermediation

Double jeopardy (marketing)

Double loop marketing

Emotional Branding

Engagement (marketing)

Facelift (product)

Fallacy of quoting out of context

Fine print

Flighting (advertising)

Growth Hacking

Heavy-up

Inbound marketing

Inseparability

Intangibility

Integrated marketing communications

Low-end market

Marketing communications

Marketing experimentation

Marketing exposure

Marketing information system

Marketing mix for product software

Marketing speak

Mega marketing

Name program

Next-best-action marketing

Nielsen ratings

Out-of-box experience

Perishability

Permission marketing

Price Analysis

Product lifecycle

Product lifecycle management

Promoter (entertainment)

Q Score

Relational goods

Representative office

Response rate ratio

Return on event

Return on investment

ROI – Return on Investment

SEO – search engine optimization

Share of Wallet

Soft launch

Solutions Marketing

Sports Entertainment

Square inch analysis

Sweeps period

Top of mind awareness

Visual merchandising

White label

What others have to say about marketing management

http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/marketing-management.html

Content Marketing

CONTENT MARKETING PLANS & STRATEGY

A business that creates valuable, relevant, and informative content that is catered to its audiences becomes the authority of a market or industry. A business that promotes valuable content in effective ways can take the majority share of new business. This goes for big brands as much as it applies to small businesses.

The most fundamental aspect of creating content is defining and understanding the importance of content marketing. There’s a lot of noise about content marketing today, everyone’s talking about it. There is a ton of content out there about the topic but a lot of marketers are not totally sure how to define content marketing and how to fit it as part of their marketing strategy.

Content marketing is the process of creating valuable, relevant content to attract acquire engage your audience. This is just one of the many possible definitions of content marketing but it’s one that we think define and exemplify some of the great aspects of content marketing can do for your business.

Marketing your content is a critical aspect of being visible in today’s digital world so while there’s an abundance of information out there on the internet for your customers they are sifting through thousands and hundreds of messages each day. Whether it’s doing their own research online or a push messaging that’s coming across from marketers’ emails that are coming into their mailbox – there’s a ton of information out there and it’s extremely difficult for you as a business owner to get through all of that noise.

We also live in a multi-device world your customers move seamlessly through their laptops to their phones to their tablet and they can carry information around with them in their pocket able to access it any minute at any time in a 24/7 world.

Because there is such an access to information and tons of these multi devices it is difficult for you as a business owner to get heard from your customers and we live in a multi-channel world as well, so not only are your customers accessing information on multiple devices they’re also accessing information across channels.

What we mean by, your customers are on social media there, on search there, on your website pages and on review sites like Yelp and Google – there’s a ton of different channels today that your customers live and as a business it’s important to be present and be relevant on all those channels.

All of this information in these multi devices / multi-channels equals attention scarcity. What that means is your customers attention is divided among all of these different areas and therefore the attention that they actually have for you and your messaging is scarce. Content marketing helps you actually break through that noise because you’re providing relevance, leadership and you’re differentiating your brand from all the other brands out there.

By creating valuable relevant, educational content you can be seen in front of your customers on those different channels, on those different devices, and become that trusted resource through all of that information.

Content marketing has qualifications so as you’re thinking about planning out your content marketing strategy and after thinking about content marketing in general for your business make sure that these seven elements are present.

1 – Content marketing engages individuals on their own terms. This means being available and being relevant where your audience live. It’s a concept of multi-channel Multi-Device. Some may call it “omni-presence”.

Content marketing is based on interactions with your buyers so you should be creating content that is relevant to what your buyers want to hear, what they’re searching for.

Content marketing should tell a continuous story and should tell not only your business story but also the story of your customers and it does have to be a story.

It has to be a narrative that’s interesting and engaging. Make sure that content marketing is the right fit for your channels so you need to create different types of content for different channels.

One type of content that’s great for social media channels might not be right for email marketing or paid programs so make sure that the content you’re creating is channel specific.

Your content has a clear purpose. This means that all content you create should have a goal and should have a purpose in mind. You’re creating content for thought leadership, brand awareness, lead generation, all of these things make sure it has a purpose.

Your content marketing has predefined metrics. You should be creating content with goals in mind whether that’s x number of new customers maybe it’s new followers on social networks whatever your metric, make sure you determine those before you go in and actually create that content.

Content marketing is almost always evergreen, meaning it keeps in mind your entire life cycle. When you think about different content, it should last months or years. You want to think about content as an arc that spans multiple quarters so that you can get the most bang for your buck.

Some additional stats to keep in mind as you’re thinking about your content marketing strategy and as we define content marketing further.

CONTENT BUILDS RELEVANCE, BRAND TRUST & LOYALTY

71% of consumers trust solutions that provide useful information without trying to sell something, so your content should be educational for the purpose of building that trust in building those relationships overtime.

62% of consumers trust solutions that provide information and best practices for tools they spot. You want to teach your customers how to use your products and services better yet, you want to teach them best practices and you want to educate them. Overtime this will enable a lifelong value.

Life long relationship-building from your customers definition of content marketing and the qualifications takes some time to sit down and determine how you can fit your content marketing strategy into each of these sections.

By mapping out your reasons for content marketing and defining what content marketing means for your business, you can truly create a content market strategy from A to Z. Understanding the benefits of content marketing is critical to creating a content marketing strategy that works for your business.

A lot of the marketing activities that you partake with your company such as attending a trade show, doing a banner ad, paying for a pay-per-click ad, this is all essentially renting attention – you’re paying a fixed fee to rent the audience of another vendor. For instance, if you’re at a trade show you’re paying a certain amount of money to have a booth and to get the benefits of that audience from that trade show.

In contrast to paid advertising, content marketing is like owning your own attention – you’re creating that thought leadership and how your creating that content in-house even though initially there might be a spend to begin with you are gaining your own attention over time.

you’re promoting your own content
you’re creating your own audience

Essentially it is like owning your own attention – you’re not continuously spending money on renting other people’s thought leadership in the audience that they have built.

BRANDS NEED TO BECOME CONTENT PUBLISHERS

Brands today need to become their own publishers and content marketing is how to do that. Create your own thought leadership because your audience is out there doing their own research – they’re downloading information online and why not be the place where your customers are finding that information.

Why not be the creators of that research and that’s how brands today become their own publishers.

Some additional benefits for content marketing

Content builds organic awareness through search and social channels. You want to be available when your buyers are searching. They’re doing that research so you want to make sure that your content is front-and-center and by creating content you build that brand awareness so that when your buyers do search your content then your educational materials come up.

People are more likely to purchase from companies who they trust. By creating that content and becoming an educational resource you start to build that relationship and build that trust, therefore if a customer is constantly searching out content on a certain subject and your content is the content that is continuously coming up. When that customer is ready to make that purchase, they will most likely find your content and think about you first, and that’s how you’re building that trust when it comes to purchasing decisions.

With organic content you can reach more buyers at a lower cost, unlike renting attention where you’re paying to rent other people’s audience. The return on content happens over a longer time even though you have an initial spend. Because your content is evergreen, it’s built to last and because you’re building your own audience and owning your own audience you can reach more buyers at a lower cost over time.

Start thinking about how content marketing can help your business overtime, take these benefits and approach internal stakeholders so that you can start reading that plan for content marketing.

HOW TO CREATE A CONTENT MARKETING PLAN

Now that you have a solid plan in place you have to start writing and editing to actually get that content done, writing content can be extremely hard work and building a repeatable process helps.

Let’s have a look at some steps to take in order to build a repeatable process so that you’re ensuring all your written content is consistent, on brand, and that is engaging.

Step 1 – Find a subject matter expert, first, determine who in your organization knows about your topic and then you can schedule and record a brain dump session weather in person or over the phone. We are asking the subject matter expert various questions about the topic, essentially having them do a brain dump. If there is no subject matter expert, be prepared to do the research yourself.

Step 2 – Create an outline, creating an outline is extremely important to keep you organized and on track with your content creation. Make sure you include your thesis in this outline, your thesis this is the point you’re trying to get across with your particular content asset. Make sure you set up different sections, particularly if it’s an ebook and then socialize your outline to people outside of your content team to make sure that what you’re writing about make sense and it’s the right thing.

Step – 3 Write your first draft, this is arguably one of the most difficult parts to content creation make sure your thesis is clear, make sure the thesis is clear up front and that’s clear throughout your document. Also make sure you’re constantly referring back to your main point, and break your content up with headings. it’s important to break your document up in this way so you know where each section lives. Use lots of bullets, lists, and numbers, this is important for scannability knowing that your reader won’t necessarily read every single word of your document. By using bullets and list it could be easy to scan. Make sure you have an intro and conclusion; you want your document to flow in a logical order from start to finish.

Step 4 – Always review, this is an extremely critical part of content creation. The more people you have review the better off you are so typically having one or two people review each draft, more if you have the ability. Each person will generally catch different mistakes, refer to a style guide, make sure that you have a style guide created that goes over tone and brand and then you’re always referring back to that. Always copy and edit for grammar and structure, you want to make sure your content is grammatically correct and you want to make sure it’s structurally sound.

Step – 5 Write a second draft once you have your first draft created and you have all of your edits incorporate, all of them read over it an additional one to two times to ensure that the final copy. Then make sure all your stakeholders have seen the copy, make sure everybody knows that the content is correct and everybody that needs to I signed off on that content.

Once you have your final draft then you’re ready to send to design, if you are business owner with a small budget or a small team consider working with lean content creation. Most business owners or marketing managers are on a budget that’s simply a fact and you have to be more with less, especially with increasing demands on marketing teams and content marketers.

Today we’re being asked to do more with less resources, so how can you get it all done?

You can create one large content asset, slice and dice it to create additional smaller supplemental pieces so that you can get more content with less.

MULTIPLY & GROW YOUR CONTENT MARKETING

Let’s take a look at how this works in action

1 – Create a big content asset, a piece that you’ve put a lot of effort into. This could range anywhere from fifty to a hundred-sixty pages in length, if you have the time it’s worth the time. From this one piece you can generate a ton of additional content. If you can generate a ton of additional content, that’s just more for all of your programs.

2 – Create eBooks from the chapters of a piece of “cornerstone” content, so we took that one piece and we broke out each of the individual chapters to create digital ebooks each of them has different covers and different titles that they differentiate themselves. You can see the comment seemed going throughout all the ebooks however they are shorter and they are on different topics, so it is more content that you can sort out and promote.

3 – create pieces that are smaller, more digestible parcels of content that range in length from about one to two pages go throughout your cornerstone piece of content and pull out items that you think could make a good cheat sheet or guide. This is a simple, easy exercise that was about one to two pages and then mapping lead generation to your sales funnel. Some of these can even be printed out by your readers the idea is to give them something easy to digest and scannable.

4 – create visuals you to extend the life in the value of your cornerstone content campaign. You want to make sure that you’re creating visuals from each of these pieces. A visual could be an infographic, slide deck, or a workbook. Remember you’re just taking the same content and the same statistics that you’ve used in your cornerstone piece and you’re just repurposing it in a different and more engaging or visual way. Either are great assets for you to share on social media as well as email campaigns.

5 – create a video take the content from your cornerstone piece and create a fun video, this doesn’t have to be something that’s highly produced. It could even be a video created on your iPhone or something that your created in-house; the idea is just to have an interesting engaging and fun supplemental piece of content to promote your written content asset.

6 – create blog posts from your cornerstone content, you can create dozens of blog posts from the content. Just slice and dice it out based on what would make sense for your blog. As an example, for the cornerstone content piece of “guide to website lead generation” we generated about 3 to 5 blogs that we spaced out over the course of two to three months. Your blog content can go on forever, so certainly keep this in mind as you’re writing.

Now you know all of the steps that it takes to trade a cornerstone content piece and slice the content out to generate more with less.

Sit down with your team to determine what your topic should be, and get to writing once you have figured that out. Creating the written content, then it’s time to send it to design for either images, website blog, video production or the additional mediums you can break it down into.

CREATING VISUALLY ENGAGING CONTENT

Good content should be complimented by good design, all of your content should be highly visual. It’s an important part of creating content in today’s market, but how do you make all of your content visual?

Let’s go over a few content design guidelines to keep in mind when creating your content for marketing.

First, make sure that your logo and icon usage is on brand and correct, you need to take into consideration typography. You might have a certain font that is appropriate for your brand. Make sure you’re consistently using brand colors, even though you can be creative with your content design, you want to make sure it looks like your company is in on brand. You also want to use photography and image styles that also make sense for your brand and that are engaging.

Some major types of content visual design like an ebook lead magnet for example, your e-book cover should be visually engaging, this is how you’re going to get people to download your ebook or PDF. The design and presentation are what’s going to attract them to your content.

The cover, the title, should be clear, make sure that you don’t have lots of different design around your title that obstructs it. Make sure your title is clear at all times, watch for proper templating, keep your design clean and make sure that your interior pages are extremely clean and easy to read.

Then use images that relate to the content, something that you need to be aware of is having images throughout any piece of content. Do not use images that have nothing to do with the content, and make sure your images are relatable.

Let’s go over infographic design. Graphic design should be engaging and shareable, this is definitely your opportunity to be creative. Consider a theme for your infographic and make sure that your statistics are presented in an interesting but legible way. Make sure it’s clear what those stats are so that your readers don’t have any questions, and then don’t make your infographic too long in that people have to scroll down quite a bit. Don’t make it way to copy-heavy.

CONTENT MARKETING SCHEDULE

Now that we’ve broken down all the different content concepts you can then start to formulate what your content marketing mix is going to look like.

Once you have a good idea what types of content you will be creating, next you have to plan your editorial calendar. Before you create your content calendar you need to think about your content mix what are the different types of content you’re creating and how are you going to fit them in your plan.

An editorial calendar also helps you increase visibility across your organization so that people in your company know exactly what content you’re creating and when. The content mix that we spoke about earlier, you should organize based on different teams depending on who you’re creating content for.

Any ongoing campaign, you have to keep in mind strategic initiatives that should all be on your editorial calendar. There are many calendar options, basically you just need to make sure that you’re putting them down into a calendar form, you can use a calendar in your content management tool like Google Calendar that you can share with folks across the organization. Or a Google spreadsheet in Google Drive, even if you don’t necessarily want to put it in a calendar form or your marketing automation calendar. Many marketing automation platforms today have calendar functionality that you can integrate your content mix.

Your editorial calendar should be available to marketing, sales, customer service, executives or anybody else who wants to know what specific content that you’re creating.

Here’s a few examples of different types of content calendars

1 – a detail spreadsheet could be useful if you have multiple different content types you want to include the status production start and completion date maybe you want to say what business unit this is for your persona resource section type if you have lots of different items that you need to put in a calendar for sometimes a spreadsheet type format works great counterexample

2 – is within a content management platform this one is from divvyhq this one has an actual calendar format where you can toggle based on specific do days what calendar so what business unit for a team member to sign to content type content strategy no matter how you decide to organize your editorial calendar and what you include in your calendar make sure it has that content mix that we spoke about and that everything is organized so go ahead write down your plan and put it in a calendar before you start promoting your content you need to determine your gating strategy what is Jaden getting means putting a form in front of your content for the purposes of gathering lead content information

Now that you know you’re gating options, sit down with your team and stakeholders to determine what makes sense for your unique business case before you actually go out and promote your content.

You need to outline your promotion strategy, once you publish your content online you then have to promote it through various channels.

PROMOTING YOUR CONTENT

Let’s go through step-by-step what you need to think about when outlining your promotion strategy.

1 – create a strategy document, once you’ve published a piece of content you must send out a strategy document to your team that outlines and includes the following items:

about the audience the content piece addresses
the different goals at the content piece addresses
the thesis that’s included in the content throughout
the table of contents if available
the buying stage that the content was created for
any promotion suggestions that you as a content team might have

2 – always score your content, you can use your marketing automation tool to score your different content types. You can often toggle to score Up and Down based on the importance of your content piece but by scoring your content, you can help determine how close a person who downloads it is to being a customer.

3 – meet with your stakeholders, you want to set up some time with your various promotional teams to go over goals and to describe to them what the asset is about and what it should be used for. Set up some time with your demand generation teams, social media, your online marketing teams, product marketing, and public relations.

4 – create a promotion plan, to work with each team stakeholder and create an overall promotional plan for each content asset. For large assets, consider meeting weekly or bi-weekly until launch. Assign a project manager, this might be yourself or it might be a member of the promotional team. Then, ensure that team member stays on task over time.

5 – make sure your plan is multi-channel, you want to be where your buyers are. Your buyers might be on social media, they could be on your website, but wherever they are be sure that your promotion plan touches all these areas by promoting your content on multiple channels. You can ultimately maximize your exposure, and also remember to promote content on appropriate channels for the content type as not all channels make sense to promote every single piece of content on. Then always test your promotion strategies, you might think that you want to promote content on a certain channel, but then discover if it’s not the best channel for that particular asset.

Now that you sat down with your stakeholders and outlined your promotional plan it’s time to actually get promoting.

Let’s talk about ads. You can promote content throughout your website using banner ads, and other images, consider promoting content on your product pages where applicable.

MAKE YOUR CONTENT CONVERTIBLE

Now that you have your content published on your website, it’s important to think about how to optimize it for conversion. Promoting content on your blog is a great way to get any new content asset in front of your audience, your blog attracts early-stage buyers and is great for lead generation. Eyes get on your content and it’s a great place for social ready content to live, do not discount the importance of your blog when it comes to promoting any new content.

Promoting content on your blog enables you to drive even more traffic to your blog and your content over time so let’s go over a few tips for promoting content on your blog.

Don’t just promote your ebook, give your audience actionable takeaways. This means when you write a blog post that promotes a new ebook don’t just say, hey here’s our new ebook and then included downloadable blank. Make sure that you’re taking valuable content from within that ebook and making a standalone blog post that way it’ll be a piece of thought leadership in and of itself.

Use bullets and headers for easy skimming, this is for your blog as a whole. Most people won’t sit there and read a blog post word for word, so make sure that you include multiple bullets and different headers so that your reader can easily skim through the post.

When it comes to content marketing, don’t take yourself too seriously remember that social media is a place where people congregate to share their thoughts and ideas and it could be a personal Network that you’re sharing your content. Organic isn’t enough on its own and don’t be afraid to boost your presence, it’s one thing to post your content organically through your social channels but you want to put a little bit of paid boost behind your content in order to optimize it for conversion and get it seen by a lot more eyes.

Focus on valuable content and solid offers.
Create strong call to action, when you post a content asset make sure that your audience knows exactly what to do, whether it is to download an e-book or share an infographic, or fill out a form.
Always provide value, make sure that the content that you’re posting on social media is educational and helps your audience do their job better.

Never forget that social platforms are a two-way street, make sure that you’re constantly listening to your audience and taking their feedback into consideration.

CONTENT MARKETING FOR SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

Let’s go over different social networks and ways you can promote your content on those networks.

Facebook is a great place to promote your content. Facebook as a highly visual medium, and so it lends itself very well to content promotion. You can promote your content to organic posts on your company page, you can also promote those posts by putting some paid ads behind each of those organic post for additional boost. You can create Facebook ads that appear on the newsfeed, you can promote your content by trading custom cover photos that appear in back of your profile image, you can also create apps and tabs that would also appear on your business profile page. Somebody could click on a tab and download content by filling out a form.

Twitter is a very fast-moving social network and also a great place to promote your content. You can promote your content via organic tweets from your business Twitter profile, you can promote those tweets using paid ads, you can also promote your content hashtag by using promoted. You can also use Twitter lead generation cards where you can actually have somebody fill out a form or poll through Twitter itself (this also works on Facebook) using their information and they can download an e-book, or something you offer.

LinkedIn is particularly useful for the B2B market as people are generally on LinkedIn for business purposes. Here are the different ways you can promote your content through LinkedIn. You can use LinkedIn updates from your company page and then you can sponsor those updates to get additional reach and visibility. You can create LinkedIn ads which appear on the right-hand side of your LinkedIn profile or in the newsfeed section, and you can also join LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your particular topic and promote your content through those groups.

SlideShare is a perfect place to promote your visual content such as slide-decks and infographics. You can also optimize your SlideShare postings for search engines by using keywords in the description fields also offered the opportunity to include lead generation forms that sync automatically with your marketing automation tool.

Pinterest is also a highly visual medium that’s great for promoting types of content like infographics and slide decks or images. On Pinterest you can share your content and engage your audience by creating boards and pins. Pinterest is particularly great for a b2c marketing audience but also works well for being B2B especially if you’re creating a variety of visual content.

Note that all social channels won’t necessarily work for every single content so be very particular where you post your content, but take your content post on social media and engage your audience.

One of the best ways to get your content out in front of your audience is promoting it via email. increase the reach of your content by promoting it on email. Let’s go over a few tips on how to make sure your content emails are engaging and relevant to increase open rates.

Always segment your email lists the send content only to people who will find that content relevant.

Design your emails to be engaging, you want to make sure that the people that are reading your emails find your emails engaging and want to download the content asset inside. Create a custom header by using the design of your content asset, make sure you include brief copy with bullets. You want to make sure that your email is easy to scan, include a strong and a clear call-to-action and then create a hero shot of the content asset.

Send an email to your entire database, so hopefully you have a large marketing database and once you publish a new piece of content send an email out to your entire database using the segmenting rules discussed above.

Consider a sponsored email, a sponsored email is when you pay a trusted vendor to send out an email including content on your behalf. Be careful here and make sure that you’re only using vendors that are not only reputable that have a target audience that matches your target audience.

CONTENT MARKETING & PROMOTION

Add your new content to your lead nurturing programs. If you’re using marketing automation, you should be nurturing your leads once they hit your database.

Make sure to add any new content into relevant segments to ensure that even people that have already been in your database for a while receive your content. Email is a fantastic way to get your content in front of an audience.

If you remember to segment or tag make sure your email is engaging and relevant. You can increase the chances of content downloads using pay-per-click ads to promote your content. PPC ads are highly targeted paid ads that drive traffic to a custom landing page where you can generate leads and you can use your content to do so.

Let’s go over a few types of ads that you might want to take into consideration for marketing your content.

1 – Search engine ads appear on a search engine (like Google or Bing) and are targeted based on keywords.

2 – Display banner ads appear on various websites and are targeted based on demographics.

3 – Re-targeting ads appear on a network of websites and are behavior based, these look very similar to banner ads however they are based on if someone has previously visited your website content.

With pay-per-click ads you pay only as a visitor clicks on your ad and you can target your ads using traffic behavioral metrics and search criteria. There are various tips for using PPC ads for content promotion. First of all, consider using high-value mid-stage content for your ads, because you’re spending a lot of money in your ad program you want to make sure that you’re only using the best relevant content.

Your ad should have a fun visual or engaging copy, this will make a difference whether the banner ad or a search engine ad. For search engine ads in general, you can only include copy so you need to make sure it’s engaging.

Banner ads can have a fun visual creative.

All ads should go to the landing page, the content piece you are promoting. Your ad should not just go to a website homepage. A landing page that shows your lead exactly what they should be doing, particularly if it’s downloading a piece of content, you want to make sure that you’re collecting all of their information in an online lead capture of some kind.

All landing pages for your ads should have a form, a means of capturing visitor information, however simple as possible – there must be an exchange of equal value.

Take your high-value content and determine what types of ads might be appropriate for a promotion because ads can get quite expensive, our advice here is to ensure that you are only choosing your best content that shows buying intent because spending money on promoting content that is information based can cost you down the line, as most customers in the info phase are not ready to buy yet.

Create your ad copy and develop your custom landing pages, either on your own website or with a custom landing page builder, and purchase some ads on the appropriate networks. We will get into how to setup and optimize your ads in other articles.

We would like to mention that if your call to action from an ad is a phone number, that you are using a call-tracking system that provides individual phone numbers for your ads.

MEASURING CONTENT EFFECTIVENESS, ROI & ENGAGEMENT

It is time to start measuring the engagement of your content, but first, we have to start by defining your measurement goals. Many business owners don’t often think about ROI during content creation, you must think about how to measure your content before your content is even created. If marketers aren’t aligned on metrics among the teams happens if you’re creating content in a silo, one team might be tracking one metric and the other team might be tracking another metric, and then markers don’t know how to measure content effectively because content marketing is a relatively new or discipline.

With many businesses, and marketing firms for that matter, there aren’t established measurements in place but measuring content can be done even if you have already started content marketing & promotion.

Establish goals and measurement estimates up front every time you create a content campaign. You need to determine what you’re hoping to get out of that content piece in terms of measurement.

Define what you want to measure for each content piece, are you looking for social sharing, are you looking for increased traffic, are you looking to measure revenue? Define exactly what you’re looking for in each piece, and align with all key stakeholders to get their input. It’s important to sit down with all the executives or managers or sales directors in your business to determine what the proper content measurement should ultimately be.

In order to measure the effectiveness of your content you need to have an actual content marketing budget, and that you know exactly how much you’re spending on content because this will determine how well you can compete with others who are also promoting their content, and it makes a difference for the return on investment in the end by putting together a sample budget.

You can better determine exactly what the ROI is on your content promotion over time, and then you should determine what are other marketers measuring in your content.

Many businesses have trouble structuring a content team, this is because it would SEEM that content marketing is a relatively new thing, but it is not. Content marketing has been around since the first time anyone has ever tried to advertise something. Content comes in many forms, not just by text, but also in visual, audio, and animated mediums.

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR CONTENT CREATION?

Many organizations simply don’t know where content should be within the organization and how it should be set up or used to promote the brand. A question that we get asked frequently is, what team within marketing should own content, should the content marketing team, how about product marketing, should it be in corporate marketing, inbound marketing, brand marketing – these are all areas of the marketing an organization that can create content so content marketing could potentially live in any one of these business departments.

All of these different teams or departments create content on a daily basis, and if content gets aligned with only one team, content then gets created in a silo.

Content marketing must be looked at in a holistic way that reflects the brand messaging, the brand look and feel, and the way the brand wants to speak about itself across the organization. What if we didn’t align content with anyone on the team, what if content marketing was actually a neutral team within the marketing organization so that every team can benefit from centralized content that way your organization can have a much more holistic view of content and content gets to be much more strategic.

Instead of accepting whatever your departments or teams can dream up, think about content as a strategic creation of media.

DEFINING THE VOICE OF YOUR BRANDED CONTENT

Make sure that your content is consistent, you want to work on developing your brand voice. Your brand voice presents a consistent experience across channels giving your brand a recognizable persona, this is extremely important because your brand voice will ultimately help you stand out.

There’s a ton of information out there and a ton of noise online, so you want to make sure that content is specific and unique and by developing a brand voice that speaks to your organization your content will stand out from the noise.

You want to create your brand voice persona your brand voice Persona is essentially the feeling that you’ll want your content to convey. Your persona might be conversational, accessible humanistic, educational, authoritative, professional, there’s a wide variety of attributes that you can use to apply to your brand voice.

Brand voice tone is essentially the way that your content will sound. It could be friendly, direct, honest, formal, perhaps its scientific, or humanistic, there’s a wide variety of attributes in ways that your content can sound which creates the sentiment that surrounds your brand messages and voice.

Create a brand style guide, once you have your persona and your branded voice tone all dialed in, you want to put that down on paper so that you your content team and any external writers that work with your company can determine the exact style in which to write for.

For a company style guide, you might want to answer questions such as who is your company, who do you sell to, who makes up the content team, your style, writing tone, specific grammar guidelines, as well as content types and structure. This could be short or as lengthy as you want the more information you put in there the easier it’ll be to train incoming content production members on your teams.

One thing to know is that your tone might differ slightly for each customer-persona as you build out your different personas and learn what each customer avatar likes for their content.

Overall, your brand voice should stay consistent throughout your content, but lean towards the types of personas you have identified and the platforms in which the content is published on respectively.

To define success, a content marketing plan without goals will simply not go anywhere, the goals are critical to ensure that the content you’re creating is the right content.

Meet together with your teams or departments to get their point of view on goals your content can achieve. Your sales dept, for example, might say that if you had content that helps customers better understand our business we would have an easier time making sales.

Ask yourself some foundation questions; Why are you creating content? What programs are you planning on using with your content? What are your short-term and long-term goals for content marketing?

Asking yourself and your stakeholders these questions will help you set a solid foundation for creating a content marketing strategy that is goal oriented.

Define your qualitative goals, these are goals like brand recognition, thought leadership, social engagement, relationship building, trust, these are all extremely important goals to content marketing. These types of goals might not have a monetary number assigned to them, but they are critical. These are goals centered around building your brand affinity & awareness.

Define your quantitative goals, these are goals that actually do have a number associated with them. These might be number of new leads, number of downloads, specific number of social shares, percentage of leads that turn to opportunities, how much pipeline your content has generated, how much revenue, quantitative goals are measurable and should be measured.

You could track your goals in your marketing automation platform, if you have one. This is great for tracking those quantitative goals like number of leads, downloads, and revenue.

Google analytics is great for traffic and conversions tracking. Add your goals to a plan and put it down on paper, you want to socialize your goals with your team. You can schedule weekly or monthly metrics check-in meetings and hold your content accountable to your goals.

You can’t create a content plan within a vacuum, so by showing your organization that you are able to track content efforts to fine details you ultimately get more budget to the metrics that prove the highest ROI.

HOW TO CREATE CONTENT TO PROMOTE

Content creation is a process. Before you can start actually creating your content you need to brainstorm your ideas and create your content. Coming up with content ideas can seem daunting, it is easy to encounter writer’s block when it comes to content, but following some content creation outlines, and looking in certain places for content ideas can get you started.

Before starting, you need to determine what topics you should consider for content and this will vary based on your business. Often, it’s great to start by taking into consideration your business priorities, this could be new markets that you might be trying to launch in additional product launches, or service launches, branding initiatives within the business, or different leadership topics that you want to become thought-leaders in the industry about. These are all great topic categories to write content from.

You also want to take into consideration your customer personas and who you want to sell to. You might be writing different content for different personas; you might find different topics will resonate with each one of your personas in different ways. You also want to take into consideration industry trends which are a great place to start generating some curated content that could get your audience interested.

Try to make sure that you’re on the cutting edge of what’s going on in your industry. Many other businesses also want to be on the forefront, and you want to be able to write thought leadership about what’s going on with your peers or vertically related business sectors.

Search engine optimization priorities are also an important thing to keep in mind many, as companies will want to make sure that their content is SEO (Search Engine Optimized content) meaning their content will show up in search results and you might have specific keywords that our company prioritizes.

For example, if your company sells mobile applications “mobile app development” might be one of your keyword phrases, and you want to make sure that you write plenty of content around mobile apps as a whole category.

Competitor content is also an important thing to keep in mind, take stock on what exactly your competitors are writing about. You can find this out through following them on social media, using a competitor content tracking platform, or just keeping up-to-date.

Practice researching by doing some of your own digging within your organization to determine what other teams want you to write about. Ask your sales and customer service teams what type of content would help them not only sell more, but also keep customers happy for longer.

Listen on social media to determine what your market audience is talking about. You also want to ask your audience on social media what they might want to hear. You can send out a tweet or put a Facebook post out there and simply ask your followers what type of content they like to see from you.

Once you have a solid brainstorm, a topic that you want to write about, then you can create your content and its creatives.

Your sales funnel typically starts at a very wide and broad top end where most of those people are looking to make sure the product and their budget are a good fit, and it the ‘thing’ will solve their problem or give them what they want.

New buyers close to becoming leads are a little narrower in the middle of your funnel where you’re actually starting to nurture those people, they have taken something of value from you and you know they are interested, you know who they are.

The bottom of your sales funnel are leads that are very close to becoming customers.

How long the sales funnel is based on your business but it’s important to understand your funnel and to start to match your content to these different stages in that buying cycle so that you can meet them there at all stages.

FAQ ABOUT CONTENT CREATION & CONTENT MARKETING

What is content marketing?

a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.
How to do content marketing?
Content marketing includes things like educational articles, e-books, videos, entertainment, and webinars that answer specific questions people have and provide them with something they can’t get elsewhere. It’s the best way to turn your product, no matter how common, into something that is not like everyone else’s
What are examples of content marketing?
The article you are reading right now is an example of content marketing.
What is content strategy?
Content strategy focuses on the planning, creation, delivery, and governance of content. Content not only includes the words on the page but also the images and multimedia that are used.
Why do you need content marketing?
Content marketing is a low budget, high ROI method of meeting your potential customers where they are in the sales cycle.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS FOR CONTENT MARKETING

Agile
Analytics
A/B testing
Blogging
Buyer Persona
Content Strategy
Call to Action
Clickthrough Rates
Conversion rates
Crowd sourced content
Content curation
Content Syndication
Data content
Dynamic content
Editorial calendar
Evergreen content
Engagement
Formatting content
KPI – Key Performance Indicators
Lifecycle stages
Promotion
PPC
Paid Promotion
Quality content
Informative content
How-To content
Social content
Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Optimization
Sponsored content
User generated content

WHAT OTHERS SAY ABOUT CONTENT MARKETING

Forbes:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshsteimle/2014/09/19/what-is-content-marketing/

What’s Your Marketing Strategy?

Developing a Marketing Strategy & Plan

Perhaps the most vital aspect of any business is the marketing function. A marketing strategy provides a roadmap for running and coordinating marketing programs (aka campaigns) that help define the tactics, branding, people, entities, and assets involved in commercializing your products and services. A written marketing plan is the only way to document the planning process.

Serving many purposes, a marketing plan doesn’t have to be a long and formal document, even a simple one that answers these three questions will help you get started.

where are we now?
where are we going?
how do we get there?

A marketing plan helps you develop a marketing strategy that captures all the things you and your team has learned about the market, the competition, and your customers. This information is critical because it becomes the supporting evidence for the marketing strategies that you and your team decide to pursue.

The marketing plan serves as a tool to help you align the organization. Marketing involves many people, so you’ll need to get everyone on board and going in the same direction. The written plan becomes a source document to create presentations, to conduct training, and to give directions to external partners.

Believe me, you’ll use it a lot.

Most importantly, the written marketing plan outlines a coherent and coordinated set of marketing programs with schedules and budgets so you can run a smooth operation.

Don’t wait until the very end of the planning process to write it all down. We like to start writing it from the very beginning.

Here’s a tip that makes it easy:

Create a blank Power-Point presentation with just the headings of each high-level concept each on a separate page and keep it with you during team meetings. You could also create a notebook with dividers as the main sections you have come up with, such as:

Our mission & vision
Our competitive advantages
Online marketing channels
Offline marketing channels
Our customer profiles

As you collect information or make key decisions write or type it into the appropriate slide, page or section. That helps you keep the document up-to-date as you move to the process when you have enough written material to go ahead and create a first draft; But be sure to date the draft as you’ll be making regular updates and revisions.

A written marketing plan is a dynamic document and you should expect to make changes to it as conditions in the market change. If you create a great plan and update it regularly it will help you stay ahead of the competition.

HOW TO WRITE A MARKETING PLAN

There are 3 steps to writing a marketing plan:

1 – Step one is to analyze the market.

This is where you explore important issues about market conditions, your potential customers, and the competition. This part of your plan is called the situation analysis.

Once you’ve analyzed the market you need to describe your strategy for achieving success where you lay out the approach to segmenting a market targeting specific customers and how you will position your products and services in that marketplace.

2 – Next is the tactical section, which includes your product or service programs, your pricing approach, your promotion, and marketing communications programs, and your channel design.

These are often called the 4 P’s of your marketing plan.

Pricing
Product
Promotion
Place

A good marketing plan explains how you will implement the various tactics described in the last step, it’s here where you describe what steps you need to take, when those steps will happen, and who’s responsible for getting them done.

3 – Finally, the financial section of your plan needs to describe a budget that outlines the financial and other resources needed to implement your marketing plan. Here you also lay out your forecast of what you expect in terms of future revenues or other business goals.

This section of the plan may also describe how you will measure success. You can start the marketing planning process anytime but an important consideration is how and when your company does its annual business planning. That’s where the company develops financial forecasts, Investments, budgets, and so on, generally speaking, there are two ways to connect the marketing plan with business planning.

Some companies start the marketing planning process first, right around the beginning of the fiscal year. Each marketing team develops their own sales revenue forecast for their assigned products, and they also develop a budget to spend on marketing programs that they think are needed to achieve those revenue forecasts.

Those forecasts and budgets are combined into a company level revenue forecast and that’s fed directly into the annual business planning process, but some companies do just the opposite.

Other companies may start with the business planning process where they develop an overall revenue goal and spending target, and those are divided and given to the individual marketing teams. Those teams now have to take those targets and develop the best marketing plan they can to achieve those goals.

Another good idea is to create a calendar of each section of the plan. A good marketer is disciplined and doesn’t cut corners, and writing a marketing plan takes time and lots of work but in the end is worth the effort.

FORMING A MARKETING TEAM

Good marketers know the value of a diverse and talented team of colleagues to help write their marketing plan. You’ll need to draw on their expertise, their marketing knowledge, and possibly their resources and / or their network.

Your team will include colleagues inside the company as well as external partners like advertising, graphic design, web design, digital marketing specialists and promotional firms.

Let’s review the various roles of a cross-functional team providing input and feedback to the marketing plan.

Marketing research is a key role you’ll need on your team.

Your company might have a separate marketing research department, or it may outsource it; but either way you’ll need their help understanding customer needs, testing new product concepts, or perhaps testing a new advertising message.

Your marketing plan needs to explain what you know about the market, so make sure you involve your colleagues in marketing research.

Next is your technical team.

These are the people who develop your products and services they might be engineers, or scientists in an R&D department, or perhaps software developers; it depends on the nature of your business. You’ll need their input to your marketing plan so you can explain what new products might be coming down the pipeline.

Most companies have a sales function and you should enlist their help in developing a marketing plan, after all they’re on the front-line in direct connection with customers day to day and they have a lot of insights about your customers and your competition.

Your sales team may also have ideas about the selling tools they need to succeed. Be sure to get their input, depending on your business you may also want to involve colleagues from manufacturing or operations these are the people who make the products or deliver a service. A good customer support team, for example, might have great insights about customer complaints or service issues.

External partners might include your advertising agency, your branding company, a public relations firm, and perhaps a marketing consultant. They’re there to help you succeed, so make them a part of the team from the very start.

Once you’ve identified the key players on your team make sure they’re aware of the marketing schedule or business planning cycle you’ve created. If the team members know their role and understand your expectations and timelines you can count on them to help you write a great marketing plan before you venture out into the marketplace prematurely with your products and services.

MARKETING ANALYSIS, KNOWING WHERE YOU ARE NOW

You’ve got to have a realistic understanding of where you are today, after all, you don’t want to pick a fight with your competition until you know what they have & you’ve got to fight with.

This part of the plan is called the situation analysis, or marketing audit.

Analyzing a market means estimating how many potential customers you might be able to sell your products and services to. When analyzing any market, you want to group customers into three types:

First are the customers that already buy from you today.
Second are customers that buy the same products and services you offer but from someone else.
Third are potential customers that might be interested in your type of products and services but not buying from anybody.

Now, estimate the potential number of customers that you might be able to capture. For each of the three groups you do this, so you can decide where you want to concentrate your marketing strategy. It’s the old adage, fish where the fish are.

Next, you want to analyze how your company compares to your competition. A good tool for this is called the competitive matrix. To create a competitive marketing matrix, list your company and your competitors across the top. Then down the side, list the things that you want to compare.

Things like company size, market share, selling strengths, product & service weaknesses, and especially the key strategy elements like the value propositions and branding. You are looking for what companies have in terms of key resources and how do they use those resources to acquire and retain customers.

Customers buy things for a variety of reasons but some are more important than others. If you know what’s most important to them you can appeal to that need or desire when trying to get them to buy. You can try to raise the sense of importance they place on another factor.

You also need to measure how they rate your product versus others and how it delivers each benefit. They may have misconceptions that you need to change.
You may have key feature of your product that is better than your competition, this analysis will be critical later when you complete the situation analysis.
You need to test the features of your product and services compared to the same features on your competitors.
You need to determine which features perform better than the competition, which perform the same, and which perform not as well.
When you complete the analysis, take a close look; are there features that need to be improved?
Are there certain competitor or possibly go after based on product performance?

Keep in mind that the data and information you put into the situation analysis doesn’t have to be perfectly accurate, it just needs to be realistic. That allows you to step back and see what customers to go after, what to emphasize, when marketing to them, and what competitors to go after.

The marketing situation analysis is an important step so you want to take your time. Here a good technique is to leverage the team you created to write the plan:

I suggest you break the situation analysis into the various sections and assign the writing of each section to the team member most qualified to do it. Having a good understanding of your situation can go a long way to setting you up for success.

As you write your marketing plan the heart of any marketing plan is your strategy, this is where you describe how you plan to win in the marketplace. The strategy section has three parts vs.

Segmentation, where you break your customers into homogeneous groups this helps you be efficient with your marketing Resources by focusing only on the most relevant customers. There are four ways to segment customers:

Demographic is where you group customers buy their characteristics such as income level age gender or their height and weight. It’s useful for certain products or services that deliver a benefit specifically tied to that characteristic. If you’re marketing a shampoo for redheads for example, then you’d want a group customer hair-color.

Geographic segmentation groups customers by where they are physically. Knowing where your customers are helps you know where to place doors and where to communicate or sell to them.

Behavioral segmentation is grouping customers by the things they do. It can be things such as they purchased from. how frequently they purchase, or their price sensitivity.

Finally, is psycho-graphic segmentation, which is how customers think. Their attitudes about the benefits they seek in a product. An example of psycho-graphic benefit would be the need for Prestige or need for convenience.

Segmenting this way tends to be very powerful in targeting. You make decisions based on which specific segments to go after. It’s a process of narrowing down your audience to a selected group.

Let’s go back to the shampoo example. Using all four types of segmentation you might have a target audience like these women, over 40, with red hair, who live in certain metropolitan areas who buy shampoo once a month, and whom seek the benefit of natural looking hair color.

Now, you have a specific identifiable group of customers for the next step, called positioning. Positioning is determining by how you want your customers to think about your products versus the competition so they’re more likely to buy yours.

It may seem a little abstract, but positioning happens up in the mind of the consumer and in that space, they form beliefs about products and services in a particular category. You can change those beliefs so they have a favorable opinion of your product.

You do that by making a claim and by supporting that with credible reasons to believe or the four P’s as we call them. That claim becomes your positioning statement. What you’ll say to customers when you communicate to them about buying your product.

Let’s use our shampoo example. A positioning statement might look like this for women over 40 with red hair that want to look their best.

Our shampoo gives you a more natural looking color to your hair than our competitors shampoo.

Now, to support this position and claim, you might include photographs of customers who have used the product and perhaps some testimonials of how much they liked it. Notice how I included my target audience and the positioning statement as well as the primary benefit that they want and that our shampoo can the deliver so.

What benefits should you emphasize?

Go back to your situation analysis, this is where you compare your product to the competition to find out what benefit you deliver better than they do. When you position your offering around strengths, you’ll get an important edge of the competition and that’s what great marketing is all about.

A great marketing strategy only comes to life when you take action.

Now, it’s time to dive in and write the tactical section of your marketing plan. This is where you describe in detail your product or service programs, your pricing approach, your promotion, and marketing Communications programs and your channel design and marketing we call these the 4 P’s.

Product and service programs refer to all of the aspects of how products and services perform their job. Delivering benefits includes things like the design of the product, how it feels to use it, the packaging of the product, and the people and processes involved in dealing with customers. Be sure to describe the entire customer buying experience which typically includes the following steps:

The need recognition phase this is where customers realize they want something.

The next step is information search, where they gather information from a wide variety of sources. This is a critical step because this is when a customer is most receptive to your message.

Once a customer gathers information they evaluate the Alternatives based on what features are most important and which product does the best job in delivering those features.

Eventually they go to the purchase phase where they actually buy the product.

Now you might think that the buying process ends here, with the final purchase, but there’s one last step called the post-purchase behavior.

Your written plan should list the prices you intend to charge and why they’re set at that level. Describe where and when prices will be communicated to the customer. This might be a simple price sticker on your packaging or you might have prices on your website.

Promotion includes all the things you say outside of the company to the market. This is where you broadcast the value proposition and other information about the product. It includes advertising in-store promotions email campaigns or have social media and sales promotion.

Your marketing plan should outline the specific programs in terms of where and when you’ll promote your products and finally distribution. These are the programs that create an effective Pathway to get the product from the factory into the customer’s hands.

Somebody has to take the product, ship it, store it, place it on the shelves, and possibly service it. Once the sale is made, including your written plan, the specific details of where customers can buy your products which might include store locations, online Distributors, and so on.

To have an effective marketing plan all four P’s have to work together to convey the value proposition. No one of the four P’s, by itself, can carry the load a good marketer. Use all the Tactical tools available to make the biggest impact possible.

Once you’re confident you have a thorough comprehensive marketing plan for your business you need to take steps to implement the actions outlined in the plan. Here are the specific factors you should address vs. how and when you’ll communicate details about the plan.

List of specific audiences or individuals that need to hear about it. Then write in the schedule with exact dates and locations for these presentations. Next are the marketing programs that you created in your Tactical section.

For each program, I like to use a simple framework that describes who, what, when, where, and how. The section should describe who is responsible for the program. It should show the timeline they have to complete the program, including when implementation starts and when it finishes.

You should also explain where the implementation actions occur, and maybe some details on how your team will Implement that program.

Finally, you want to set up key performance indicators, or KPI for short. Key performance indicators help you keep track of your overall strategy and your individual marketing programs. They alert you when it’s time to intervene and take action to get things back on track. Without KPIs you are flying blind and your run the risk of falling short of your overall goal.

To be effective, each KPI should be quantifiable and measurable. You can have as many as you want but don’t measure a KPI just because you have the data. If you’re not going to use it don’t bother, it’s a waste of time.

Measure something only if you plan to take action from it. That’s why I like to set thresholds; I should have a target of what you expect to happen plus a high and low number around that Target

For those thresholds you and your planning team should agree in advance what action you’ll take if those thresholds are exceeded. Here’s an example, assume you create a KPI about the number of new customers acquired each month; you set your target at 500 and you also specify a high and low 605 respectively. If your actual customers per month is more than 600 you might consider taking an action, such as reducing advertising spending or in the low in if you were below 400 you could consider increasing sales incentives

Good marketers not only reach their marketing goals but they also know whether those goals were achieved the way they expected them to be. They also take a meted action when they detect something is going in the wrong direction. A well-written marketing plan will help your team do just that. Marketing takes time and money so it’s important that you develop a budget and a forecast of what you expect in terms of business results.

Let’s look at each of these. A good budget helps you allocate the right amount of resources to the right marketing programs. To make the most impact another two ways to develop a budget you can decide on how much you have to spend in total and then allocate it. Some companies do this by taking a percentage of sales revenue as the total budget for marketing. That amount then is assigned to different teams and programs, I called this the top down approach.

The other approach is from the bottom up a marketing team develops a budget to spend on marketing programs that they think are needed to achieve a revenue forecast and then those budgets are combined into a company level budget. If you recruited a finance member to your marketing planning team, they’ll be able to tell you what approach your company uses.

Whichever approach you take you’ll still need to decide where to spend the money and how much to spend. How much you spend depends on a number of factors; look at each of your Tactical programs, the 4 P’s product, price, promotion, and place.

Estimate the required spending in each one; for example, do you need to spend money to upgrade your product or its packaging?

How much do you need to spend on marketing Communications to reach a sufficient number of people and still achieve the communications objective?

What do sales people and Distributors need to do their jobs effectively?

Next is your sales or revenue forecast, what you expect to achieve as a result of implementing your marketing plan. Now you can set any type of goal whether it be a revenue forecast, perhaps units sold, or maybe new customers Acquired and so on.

For a marketing goal to be the most effective it should meet the following criteria

Simply saying that your goal is to increase market share wouldn’t be specific. Planning to increase market share from 15% to 17% is much better goal because it’s specific.

A marketing or sales goal should be measurable. setting a goal that can’t be measured will become frustrating for you and especially when you try to gauge your progress of reaching it.

The goal must be attainable. setting an unrealistically high won’t do you any good in fact, it could hurt your campaign by causing you to spend more marketing dollars than is warranted.

The goal should be time-bound, meaning that the goal will be achieved during a specific time of year or perhaps a quarter or even monthly. Once you’ve estimated what each Bergen will cost, you’ll probably need to make some tough choices and this is a great time to use the talents of your marketing team to let them help you decide.

In our experience a team’s decisions end up being better than any single individual decision. After all, you’re in this together so put them to work in helping you develop the most effective budget and forecast possible.

An effective marketing plan is one that lays out a coordinated set of strategies and tactics to win in the marketplace. At some point in the process you’ll need to gain support for that plan and perhaps the most important audience is your management they’re the ones who allocate financial resources to the various projects in your company.

Without their full support you may end up not getting what you need. Here are some tips on how to make a big impact with company leaders when presenting your marketing plan.

Try to lead with the story, perhaps focus on a customer who had a great result using the product. This is a really good way to remind people how your products bring value to customers.

Share what has changed in the marketplace, what new threats or new products or perhaps Trends are out there that are creating a challenge for you. We call this creating the burning platform. You want people to understand the difficult situation you’re up against then share the process you went through to create the marketing plan. Give credit to your team members it builds your credibility when you collaborated with a cross-functional team.

Be as brief as possible because you probably won’t have a lot of time. You should be prepared with different length presentations; for example, you should have a 10-minute version a 30-minute version and a 1-hour version. Really Savvy marketers also know how to present their strategy in 30 seconds or less, the so-called elevator speech.

It’s all about getting people on board with your marketing plans.

Now you don’t have to share every detail about your plan, just the highlights. present the market conditions the competitive situation and your strategy in terms of who you’re targeting and how your positioning approach will convert customers. be completely upfront about the weaknesses or risks with your plan because you gain trust when you’re upfront and honest about potential issues. then share your forecasted revenue and budget needs make sure they completely understand your assumptions.

Take your time here if you see that someone has a different view around the assumptions then clarify it on the spot. not aligning around the assumptions can create real problems for you later so remind them that funding your marketing plan is an investment not a cost.

Assure them that you’re committed to getting them a good ROI (return-on-investment) given their experience. be sure to ask them for feedback on ways to improve your plan. finish the presentation by asking them for their support, it’s the old sales adage always ask for the order.

Great marketers show passion and enthusiasm for the products and services they manage.

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