7 Tips for Strategic B2B Marketing Planning. Every marketer needs to align their marketing plans to the strategic goals of their business – it’s a critical component of Marketing Performance Management. In fact, our research at Allocadia found that companies with strong growth are 2X more likely to align marketing KPIs directly to their contribution to the business, underscoring the need for all marketing teams to operate in lock-step with company objectives. Ann Handley “Think about how your content story aligns with your strategic plans, and how this can set you apart; don’t create me-too content. The most successful Marketing teams develop and deploy plans that are customer-centric, outcome-based, data-informed, and consist of impact-to-value™ metrics chains, at the business level. This requires the development of organizational objectives, not just campaign goals, against which each action can be measured. Too often CMO’s don’t create the right organizational structure needed to operationalize a new strategy. Today’s CMO is looking at significant changes in strategy as they are now responsible for revenue growth and for customer engagement. Either one of these two strategies would require a review of the current organizational structure to see if it would support the strategy. Strategic marketing planning tools can help marketing teams define objectives from the top down, communicate and track them across the entire organization.
Every marketer needs to align their marketing plans to the strategic goals of their business – it’s a critical component of Marketing Performance Management.
In fact, our research at Allocadia found that companies with strong growth are 2X more likely to align marketing KPIs directly to their contribution to the business, underscoring the need for all marketing teams to operate in lock-step with company objectives.
To help demystify this mission for marketers, my team collected the advice of seven B2B marketing industry experts related to strategic planning.
Here’s what we heard:
1. Matt Heinz
“Focus on metrics you can buy a beer with. Align directly with the goals of the sales organization. Prioritize objectives that your CFO already cares about.”
2. Justin Gray
“My advice to any marketer leading up to a strategic planning process is to establish benchmarks, honest and predictable benchmarks. Marketing suffers big time from shiny object syndrome, the newest, hippest technology or trend gets all of the attention. But as we are all ping ponging from one new idea to the next we never bring with us a baseline to measure these buzz-worthy new toys against.
Simply put, you MUST have marketing’s contribution to pipeline and revenue measurable and transparent. Sounds like a no-brainer but when you look at our most recent benchmarking study measuring these critical KPI’s is a huge struggle for today’s marketers. Only when you can demonstrate your starting point will you be able to show value in a new investment.”
3. Ann Handley
“Think about how your content story aligns with your strategic plans, and how this can set you apart; don’t create me-too content. See how I tucked “strategic” in that last sentence? That’s because you need to avoid the dreaded RAOCs (Random Acts of Content). They live in…
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