JUMPSTART STEP 7: STRATEGIC B2B MARKETING PLAN

How to Bring It All Together In A Realistic 12-Month Strategic B2B Marketing Plan

If you’ve been following our JumpStart plan from the beginning, you now have a ton of valuable information at your fingertips. (Just joining us? Read through our first six blogs to learn what you need to do to get your building blocks in place!) But what do you do with all of this information? Put it into an actionable, functional plan. By developing a 12-month strategic B2B marketing plan, you will have a clear path forward for the year, making your marketing much more effective and purposeful.

It can seem daunting to get started, but lucky for you, you’ve already gathered most of the information you need to build a strong marketing plan. Now you just need to write it down and translate it into actual strategy and tasks.

Personally, the Pom team likes to build marketing plans in PowerPoint rather than a dense all-text document. Breaking your plan up into slides makes it easier to see the big picture while still being able to drill down into the details – it helps you simplify and focus your plan. Here’s an outline we use to build such a document:

Goals
Target Audiences
Current Efforts
Competition
Sales Team Insights
Value Proposition
Marketing Engine
Plan for Each Piece of the Marketing Engine
Measurement Methods
Budget

As you can see, the first 6 sections are basically already done! You don’t want to repeat everything you’ve learned from your research into these areas – you just need to pull out the highlights and key takeaways. Try to keep it at one slide per item. The idea is to have all the work you’ve done easily accessible and readable to share with others in your company and for you and your marketing team to reference throughout the year.

The marketing engine is where you really start to get strategic. Break up your marketing efforts into pieces like:

Website
Content Marketing
Social Media
Email Marketing
Events
Marketing Tools (presentations, brochures, etc.)

What marketing areas have you worked on in the past, and are there any new ones to add?

Next, create a slide for each section of the marketing engine – here, you may want more than one for each area. This is the meat of your marketing plan. Write down specifics for each one. Think about what the research from the first six parts have told you. Is it time for a website overhaul? Do you need to focus on SEO? Do you want to send more email to your target audiences to better communicate your value proposition? This part will take a good amount of time and brainstorming, but remember, you have the building blocks in place.

We like to develop a simple visual that captures the marketing machine to make sure we (or our clients) stick to our marketing plan. This is really helpful to refer back to throughout the year while following your plan. Print it out and put it up front and center in your office. You’ll be able to see at a glance if you’re staying on top of all parts of your mix and maintain focus.

The last two steps are how you’ll stay on track and prove the value of your marketing plan. You want to be sure you have measurement tools set up to capture your ROI for all of these efforts. Continuous tracking, measuring and reporting should be a key part of your plan.

Finally, set your budget. Maybe you know your budget and need to fit the puzzle pieces into it, or maybe you need to present and get a budget approved based on what you’ve outlined in your plan. Either way, it’s good to have it as part of this ultimate marketing plan document.

Whew, you’ve made it! After following all of the JumpStart steps, you’ll have a really solid grasp on your marketing for the year. With the research and discovery to back up your plans, plus the tools in place to keep you on track, your 2018 marketing should be your best yet.

We know building a marketing plan from scratch may sound like a huge undertaking, but it’s totally doable.