Every marketing leader in similar circumstances asks themself these two questions:
- What do I need to accomplish in year 1?
- How do I get there?
There are four fundamental steps to developing and executing your Year 1 marketing strategy:
- Develop a Lead Generation Strategy
- Implement Demand Generation
- Design Process & Manage People
- Build Lead Gen Infrastructure
DEVELOP A LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY
Account Segmentation: Start building your strategy by defining your ideal customer profile. What are the firmographic properties of the top 20%? Using this customer data, identify ‘propensity to buy” factors. What is it about your top customers that make them spend with you? Apply these factors to the broader market to establish your TAM (Total Available Market).
Marketing Strategy: Having segmented your customer universe, you are now ready to for your marketing strategy. What is my plan to reach my target audience? What does my budget allocation look like? What pilots will I run to test my strategy?
Campaign Management: The next major step is planning and sequencing your campaigns. There should be both demand generation and nurture campaigns. The demand generation campaigns stimulate interest, while the nurture campaigns cultivate leads that are sales ready.
IMPLEMENT DEMAND GENERATION
Buyer Knowledge: Stimulating interest for your products or services begins with buyer knowledge. In this step you identify your buyer personas and map their buying behavior. Understanding how and why your customers buy is critical.
Content Creation: From your buyer research you are equipped to create relevant content. The key to successful demand generation is the ability to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time. Create persona-specific content for each phase of their buyer’s journey.
Execute Demand Generation: Equipped with buyer knowledge and relevant content, launch your demand gen campaigns. Make sure you measure and optimize all channels used to stimulate inquiries. Every channel must produce an ROI. If not, fix it or drop it.
DESIGN PROCESS & MANAGE PEOPLE
Lead Management: Most leads are not ready to buy. They need to be scored, nurtured and qualified before being handed off to sales. Create a custom lead management process mapped to the buyer’s journey. If you don’t, sales will keep ignoring your leads because of their poor quality.
Staffing: Within the marketing organization, there must be a resource dedicated to nurturing leads. This resource’s job is to increase the quantity and quality of leads provided to sales.
BUILD LEAD GENERATION INFRASTRUCTURE
Marketing Automation: World class Lead Gen has four essential components: people, process, content & technology. Marketing Automation is the technology piece. Marketing Automation Software (MAS) automates lead management and campaign management. MAS also facilitates a Marketing Reporting Framework to measure campaign ROI.
CALL TO ACTION:
The Year 1 charter is simple – create a steady flow of sales-ready leads. Use the Year 1 Roadmap to structure your thinking as you develop your marketing strategy. Don’t skip a step. If you don’t have the bandwidth or expertise, send me an email for some help.
