Mini Lesson: How To Build a B2B Marketing Plan

every marketing manager needs to know how to build a marketing strategy they can actually use cause what usually happens is they build an overly complex one that they show to leaders and leaders are really impressed and then there's tons of ideas in it there's loads of unrealistic ambitious things that can't be achieved with the budget they have currently and the team they have currently so naturally leadership are like this is awesome oh my gosh you're amazing and then reality hits after that meeting they look at their task list all the things that they've got to do the requests and activities keep flooding in so they kind of know deep down that they are never getting to that strategy and then the other camp is and I was chatting to someone earlier about how people are viewing tactics as strategies so for example I'll ask do you have a marketing strategy and they'll say yeah we have a LinkedIn one and that's tactics and so that kind of completely overlooks the whole point of a marketing strategy which in a second I'm gonna break down like what you need in yours and then the third one is where it kind of is a marketing strategy like it's halfway there but what they've done is they've sort of like filled it out tick box exercise template and this is what I used to do all the time so you know you need objectives you know you need a review you know you need strategies tactics measurement but you kind of rush past the ones that are hard so like when you get to target audience you like I can't do this so in target audience you just put like demographs and just like just check them down and you just feel like you don't feel a deep sense of confidence in what you're doing so those are the three different things that I after coaching hundreds of marketers inside B2B Breakthrough Academy my online course which you can check out through the link and that is what I have seen with the hundreds of marketers I've coached going from overwhelmed stressed out to strategic leaders like truly confident in their ability so I'm gonna share the process with you of exactly what they go through the first step is that marketing review but it has to be done in like a down to earth way we have to look at real numbers we have to look at like what is the marketing currently doing now where is it failing we need to make sure that we're clear about what the challenges are with maybe the brand the website everything that's going on in the marketing what's working what isn't and being super honest about where your marketing really is cause what tends to happen in the marketing review is that we're scared to look bad in front of our bosses and so we make the marketing review sound really good so that when we present them all the amazing things I've been doing like you know I'm doing a good job when in actual fact what we need to say to them is like this is not been going well and here's why and I wanna change things but I can't do that without your support so that's the real work in the marketing review a lot of it is actually mindset work and to understand that you are enough you do enough you know enough we just need to hone it down and simplify and strip out all the noise that's keeping you stuck and then part 2 call it module to inside my program part 2 is um working on the marketing objectives and obviously there's tons in step one the marketing view but that's top level in this section we have to move away from um like okay my objective is I wanna get leads okay generate 50 leads within a quarter that is not an objective that's a measurable result it's an outcome of an objective so the way that I teach objectives and it obviously I can't cover that right now but you could take my free crash course that's in my link if you want to a school card where you benchmark where you're at and it'll give you a percentage score in different sections and then you go on to take my crash course which will teach you the basics can't cover all of it and but basically we're looking at we're not going for 50 leads we're going for why is the business not currently getting the number of leads it needs to be at the growth it needs so for example is it that customers are leaving us for cheaper competitors why is our conversion rate low is our positioning off you know we need to find out what is the barrier to actually achieving the growth maybe we have a bad reputation online maybe um our service is not up to scratch we need to find out like what is holding us back in our achieving these outcomes that we want so once we've got our objectives we then move into strategies and tactics and strategies are the big folks areas so LinkedIn is not a strategy LinkedIn is a tactic and a strategy is like what's the big thing that we need to focus around to achieve the objective and that's a big area for training is like we need two to three strategies max like with if you're in an sme small medium organisation you have very limited marketing resource you cannot be doing more than two to three strategies and this is the biggest downfall for marketers so then we move into okay what are the tactics what are we actually gonna do who's gonna do it the activity plan then we move into reporting and in reporting I actually have a guest teacher within my course because it's not my strongest area but what's really great is I keep it down to earth cause he's one of the most intelligent data scientists in the world and I'm like yeah but we don't understand any of that so like chill so it's a really nice vibe because we're kind of balancing each other out so we help build the report and then the next step this is where people don't prep is getting your strategy ready to pitch to leaders like with a presentation template with showing them only what they need to see not like blowing them away with too much and really if you follow those steps properly it's not just about filling out a template like it's changing yourself throughout like if you can do that you will truly be respected by leaders like the the students I work with is unbelievable even in module 1 a lot of the time because they're asking questions of their leaders around like you know what's our conversion rates and what is currently holding the business back just simple important questions they're like oh wow like you're talking the right language I've not seen the side of you before and also by overcoming some of the kind of mindset blocks around imposter syndrome and being quite confident say look if we do that we'll have to drop this you know we could do all of those things however resources will be spread too thin I don't see it likely that will get results learning to have that type of assertiveness is huge as well so first thing to do is head to my profile take the mini crash course obviously I'd love to see you inside B2B Breakthrough Academy 2 the doors are not open yet they will be soon and let me know in comments have you been skipping any of these important steps