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Strategic Marketing Planning Advice from Top Marketers
What makes a marketing plan ‘actionable’ and ‘strategic’? How do you know if your plan will be actionable and deliver results? Some may say that defining goals is most important, while others focus on customer needs. We at The Mezzanine Group were curious how leading marketers would answer these questions so we started a discussion in the CMO Network group on LinkedIn. We asked them-
"I'm looking for your top tips to help B2B companies develop a clear and actionable strategic marketing roadmap for 2016. What have you learned in the last year (or over your career) that you think is essential to the development of an effective marketing plan? Specific or general tips welcome. Thanks for sharing your expertise.”
We compiled this advice in our latest whitepaper, “Strategic Marketing Planning for B2B Companies- Lessons from 65 CMOs” where we grouped learnings into ten lessons.
The second most important piece of advice (learn about the first in our introductory post) is to get buy-in from key stakeholders. A marketing plan can have all necessary components to be effective but if resources aren’t allocated to execute on the plan, it will simply remain a great marketing plan instead of being a great marketing plan that produced solid and measurable results. Not only does key stakeholder involvement secure resource allocation, it ensures that goals and objectives are aligned across the business, making marketing efforts more effective.
Meeting with key stakeholders as you build the plan is a practical way to get everyone on board while also ensuring goals and objectives are aligned. During the client marketing planning phase at Mezzanine we host workshops with key stakeholders to quickly facilitate information sharing. Consider this type of workshop facilitated at your organization. Regardless of what strategy works best, be sure to get everyone on board so that your marketing efforts don’t just look good on paper, but that they add value to the overall business and help achieve revenue goals.