1. Foundational Marketing: Building Your Marketing Plan

2. Build your marketing plan
Tying it all together for action

3. You need a marketing plan
Marketing plans support your business plan
Marketing plans guide you to success
Describes strategies and tactics for the next year
They provide guidance to accomplish sales and overall business goals
They should generate high quality leads
Partners with plans are more successful

4. Pre-planning Understand your target market
See modules: Buyer Personas and Best Clients, The Buyer’s Journey
Define your unique selling propositions
See modules: Competitive Differentiators, Value Propositions and Elevator Pitches
Think about what you want to communicate
See modules: How to Tell Your Story, Content Marketing, Advocacy

5. Components of the plan Goals Sales forecast Budget Marketing tactics
Editorial calendar
Executive summary

6. Goals and objectives Focus on the desired results
Be clear, specific, and measurable
Examples of strong goals
By the end of the year marketing programs will increase sales by 25%
By mid-year we will have revamped all of our marketing materials so they have a consistent look
By the end of the year, Cloud based solutions and services will represent 30% of our revenue mix

7. Sales forecast Consult with the Sales Team Reality Check
Don’t set it and forget it, do periodic status checks
Reality Check
Have someone validate
Does it make sense?
Begin with previous forecasts
Learn from actual results vs. plan

8. Set a marketing budget If you know the marketing tactics you will use
Associate costs for each tactic
If you don’t yet know which tactics
Use a percentage of revenue If you don’t know which tactics you will use
How much should you spend?
5% of revenues to maintain current state
10% of revenues to grow and gain market share

9. Inbound marketing tactics
Used to attract prospects and clients
Blogs
Social media
Podcasts
Banner ads
Digital case studies
Infographics and videos
Content syndication
Search engine optimization
And any other methods used to attract prospects and clients to you

10. Outbound marketing tactics
Used to push out to prospects and clients
Direct mail
Telemarketing
Cold-calling
Print ads
Radio and TV advertising
Tradeshows and Events
Newsletters
And other methods of pushing messages and content out to prospects or clients

11. Create an editorial calendar
Detailed schedule of marketing activities
When to develop, build, write, and execute
Keeps everyone on the same page

12. Executive summary The first part of the written plan is written last
Describes the key elements of the plan at a high level

13. Review Now that you’ve learned marketing, you need a plan
What are your goals?
What is your sales revenue plan?
Set a marketing budget to accomplish sales plan
Determine marketing tactics
Create an editorial calendar
Write an executive summary