The Virtual CMO

15 Steps to Build an Effective Strategic Marketing Process

February 15, 2021 Eric Dickmann Season 4 Episode 1
The Virtual CMO
15 Steps to Build an Effective Strategic Marketing Process
Show Notes Transcript

In part 1 of our Masterclass Series on Building a Strategic Marketing Plan for Your Business, host Eric Dickmann discusses the process of creating a plan and the 15 steps required to maximise your campaign effectiveness while reducing spend on activites that don't produce the desired results.

Eric Dickmann is the Founder and CMO at The Five Echelon Group, a strategic marketing consulting service that specializes in fractional executive, or Virtual CMO consulting services, for small and midsize companies. In addition to this podcast, he's also the host of the YouTube series Work-Life.

Additional information and FREE resources on our Masterclass Series are available at https://fiveechelon.com/masterclass

For more information about Eric Dickmann and The Five Echelon Group, visit https://fiveechelon.com

To subscribe to the podcast, visit https://fiveechelon.com/podcast for more details on subscribing using your podcast player of choice.

For more information on the Work-Life series, visit https://ericdickmann.com/work-life

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The Virtual CMO podcast is sponsored by the strategic marketing consulting services of The Five Echelon Group. If you’d like to work directly with The Five Echelon Group and receive personal coaching and support to optimize your business, enhance your marketing effectiveness and grow your revenue, visit Five Echelon.com to learn more and schedule a free consultation.

Eric Dickmann:

Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann. In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business. We are very excited about season four, because what we've done is we've mixed things up a little bit. As opposed to having guests on every week on random topics, applicable to marketing professionals. What we've done instead is created a masterclass series. And this series is all around building out a strategic marketing plan for your business. And we want to delve into this topic and really help you understand why it's so critical to have a strategic marketing plan. What are the steps involved to create a strategic marketing plan? Why is it so important that you do that in order to be successful? So in this very first episode, I just want to take a few minutes. And talk about what a strategic marketing plan is and why it's so critical for your business. So when we look at a strategic marketing plan, I want to focus on the basics, the who, what, when, why and how so to start things off. Who are your marketing efforts targeted towards this may sound fairly simple. I think we know we have a product, we have a service, we have something that we're offering to the marketplace, but have you really taken the time to identify that buyer persona, to really understand who your target market is and what that ideal customer profile looks like? And the reason this is so critical is because all of your marketing really revolves around this idea that you are trying to reach that ideal customer. You are trying to penetrate that target market. And until you get very specific about knowing what that niche is, knowing specifically who that buyer is, it is very hard to craft a marketing program. To reach them. And it's also very easy to overspend because you're casting too wide, a net you're trying to reach to broaden audience, which from a marketing perspective can be very costly. So the first area is who are you really trying to reach with your marketing efforts? The second area is, what is that marketing message you're trying to communicate. Marketing is complicated in the fact that we are trying to cut through the noise and there is so much noise out there. Whether you look at social media platforms, what you see on the news, what people are talking about at the office, there's a lot of noise out there. And what you're trying to do with your marketing messages is cut through that noise in such a way that they resonate. With your ideal buyer, that target market that you're trying to reach. And so we really want to focus in on those marketing messages to make sure they're effective and clearly communicate the value proposition of your product or services. The next is when. When is your strategic marketing plan going to run? When do you expect to see results and how then in between when your plan is going to start running and when you expect to achieve results, are the various elements of your plan. Going to be ready. So for example, if you need to create contact our content, you may be need to write a white paper. You need to create a video. You need to make some graphics, whatever the assets may be when along that continuum, do you need to create those so that they have time then to work and be effective as part of your marketing plan? To draw in those potential buyers to your marketing programs. So it's very important to understand these timelines. Where are you going to implement these target, uh, or these marketing tactics to reach your target market? There are so many different channels that you can use. Is it going to be online through social media? Is it going to be through paid ads? Is it going to be on your website? Is it going to be through email communications, whether they're direct or newsletters? If so, how are you going to build that list of people to ultimately send that marketing communication to it's very important that you understand all of these things because that's how you need to then craft your marketing plan to be able to support that. So what channels are going to be part of this mix. And do you have the content that is necessary to make those channels most effective for your marketing plan? And then why would a customer respond to your marketing message? What is it that you're doing? What is it that you're communicating that will resonate with them? So are you solving a specific pain? Are you adding specific value to their lives? Are you making their job easier to do? What is it that is going to resonate with this ideal customer? A customer you need to understand. The why, uh, why is this solving a customer's problem? Why is it a value to them and all of this needs to be part of your overall plan. And then finally it's how, how are you going to implement this plan? How are you going to fund it? How are you going to create the assets that are needed to be able to support the various initiatives within your plan? So this is when you start to get very tactical. This is when you start to build out the timelines, you start to allocate the budget. You start to really get into the nitty-gritty of what it's going to take for your marketing plan to be successful. One of the things that I really want to talk about too, as we lay the foundation for this strategic marketing plan is why a strategic parking plan is different than a budget. You know, as I've engaged with many clients as part of my practice at the five echelon group, one of the things that I see over and over again is that many clients have a marketing budget. Maybe this is a template that they use every year. They adjust the numbers up or down, but by and large, this marketing budget forms the foundation of their plan. And I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't work with what are fairly well known budget constraints. We all know about how much money any given company is willing to allocate towards marketing activities. But if you start with the number and then work backwards, What happens is that oftentimes you end up doing the things that you have done in the past. You rinse and repeat you recycle marketing activities from one year to the next one, quarter to the next. And. This misses huge opportunities for you to try new things. After all marketing is about experimentation. Marketing is about trying to see where you can be most effective. And sometimes you need to mix it up a little bit. And often when you're working backwards from a marketing dollar, this prevents you from really adding that experimentation to your budgeting plan. The other thing is, is that. You can really limit yourself because what you're focused too much is on the specific tactics, rather than focusing on the areas where you're going to be most effective and to be most effective, you need to have an objective going in and then be able to measure the results as you're going through your program. And so you really need to start with that. You need to start from your objective. You need to start from, what are you trying to achieve? How are you going to measure if you've actually achieved it? And then what are the tactics that are going to help you achieve it most successfully? And then you start to put together how much is it going to cost to do that? And that's a much better way to go about putting together a plan rather than just. Focusing on a number, focusing on a spreadsheet, full of buckets, where you're going to spend your money. when you're focused too heavily on a marketing budget cost becomes the overriding consideration. How much money do I have? And what can I do with those specific dollars? And I think you really want to shed that way of thinking you want to focus much more on what you're trying to achieve and how you can achieve it. As you'll see, as we go through this program, there are many things that you can do within marketing that really don't cost anything that have a very positive ROI, even if you're not spending a lot of money. And so it's not always dollars. That should be your focus of attention. It's really what you're trying to achieve. And so what I really wanted to do in episode one here is frame out why a strategic marketing plan is so important to your business and why it's much more than a marketing budget. And so as we look forward, we're really going to start to drill into the aspects of a strategic marketing plan and what each area really takes to be successful. And one of the things that I'm so excited about with this masterclass series is I've gone out and found some really great thought leaders in the space to help us through each one of these areas. And I think you're going to find real value in the content that they deliver, because they are truly experts in each one of these areas. And one of the other things that we're doing, that's very exciting. That's a little bit different than we've done in past seasons is with each episode on the website. We are going to not only have the show notes and a video replay of our conversations with our featured speakers, but we are going to have extra content and resources that really expand upon the things that were talked about in each episode. And we're going to continue to build on this as we have subsequent guests that add new and additional insights into what each one of these topic areas. So I wanted to go through and just give you a little bit of a preview of the kinds of things that we're going to be talking about on this show. As we explode out the idea of building a strategic marketing plan for your business. So in the next episode, we're going to be talking about identifying your target market and your ideal customer profile. As we let off this show, you know, we talked about how important it is for you to really understand your target market and to be able to be very specific about who you're focusing your marketing activities to reach. And then who is that ideal customer profile? What is their buyer persona? What do they look like? What are the kinds of things that really move this person to action? It's so important that you have a clear understanding of that. Before you go in and start to build out your marketing plan. So from there, we then go into the importance of product market fit and competitive differentiation. So product market fit is really where is that opening in the marketplace? For your specific product, what is truly a differentiator between what product what's your product or service offers and what competitors out in the marketplace are offering today too often, we're too close to our products. We think that there is something truly unique that they offer when in fact those unique, those differentiators are really not that understandable. To your ultimate buyer. And so we're going to explore that a little bit more, how to really make sure that you understand your product market fit and how you can then use that to create real competitive differentiators that matter to your target audience. Following that we're going to be talking about building out a brand story, something that really resonates with your ideal customer. Building a brand story is much more than just what does your product do? What does your service offer? It really talks about the value that your company provides in delivering this product or service it starting to build that trust it, starting to build that excitement that your customer can have. About you as a company and then about the products and services that you offer. So this is a really important thing to get, right. And it affects. All of your market messaging, uh, that follows. So as we build out that brand story, then what we want to do is we want to explode that and build out some really competitive messaging that focuses on three to five words that is going to be compelling to your audience because. You have to stand out quickly. You have to cut through the noise. Your messaging needs to cut right to the chase of what is going to solve a particular pain. What is going to add value to that customer? So we want to create some messaging that are built off that brand story that are going to resonate ultimately with your ideal customer. From there. We talk about, expanding your team with digital freelancers and content creators. Look, we would all love to have bigger staffs. We would love to have more people to be able to support our marketing activities, but that's not always possible. So one of the great things is today we live in a world. Where there are so many places where you can get excellent freelance talent to be able to help you build out the content that you need to support your marketing activities. So we're going to go into some detail about that, how you can augment what you have in house with these digital freelancers and content creators to really create some stunning and compelling content for your marketing organization. And then we want to talk about marketing automation to increase your campaign effectiveness. And the reason that marketing automation is so important is you don't want to be tied to every interaction that you're having. You don't want to manually have to process sending out emails and furthering that interaction with those perspective buyers, you want to have something that's grinding away in the background that when somebody expresses interest in a product or service, it's going to follow up with that potential customer with additional content that they may find a value that moves them throughout the buyer's journey. That as specific trigger points happen in that journey, we can follow up with that customer. We can guide them on a path. That's going to answer their questions. That's going to build trust. That's going to add value and marketing automation is so important in making sure that is simple and easy to do. We're then going to talk about customer relationship management and analytics. So really having a centralized hub for all of your customer data, understanding customer interactions, what are they doing with your organization? How are you interacting with them? How are you communicating to them? When marketing is working on getting this potential customer to be interested in a product or service, and then they send it over to sales. Does sales really know what kinds of offers the customer responded to? Do they really know what communications have been sent? What a follow-up collateral may have been sent out to that prospect. as part of the marketing engagement, it's really keeping marketing sales and service all working together on the same page so that you have that 360 degree view of customer interactions. And then you have the analytics. On top of that data to really understand what's working, whether that's on the marketing side, whether that's on the sales side, whether that's on the service side, you've got a tremendous amount of data within your organization that you can use to improve your marketing, to improve your sales efforts and ultimately to improve your service and the feelings that your customers have about doing business with your organization. So from there we talk about social media. Social media is a great set of platforms that are out there for really amplifying your voice in the marketplace. But social media is a very crowded space with a lot of people vying for attention. So how can you most effectively use these social media channels to amplify your message, to amplify your reach and get your potential customers? Seeing those marketing messages that you want them to see. So we're going to spend a whole episode talking just about the social media. Then we're going to switch into more of advertising on content creation around SEO to really get your content found. So it's so important to be able to leverage things like advertising to very specifically target. Key demographics, key areas of interest to be able to put your message in front of those ideal customers, and then build on that with the right kind of content and making sure that from an SEO standpoint, you get that organic traffic coming to your website by customers who are potentially interested in the valuable content that you're creating. So this is a huge topic. We're going to be talking a lot about these individual elements in future episodes as well, but we've got an episode dedicated just to these topical areas. From there. We want to talk about leveraging free media earned media. So this is impactful PR and a communication strategy. Look at companies like Apple, when they release a new iPhone, look at how many media outlets. Cover that product launch. I don't expect that any of us are going to be Apple tomorrow, but there are ways to really use a PR strategy to get your message out to the marketplace in a way that can earn you some free media attention and drive traffic to your website. It's very important to have a PR and communication strategy as part of your overall strategic marketing plan. You know, email isn't dead. And we want to talk about this idea of building lists, getting names of people who were potentially interested in your products and services, and then sending them valuable information through email communications and newsletters. So this is so important. List building is so critical and it's the kind of thing that if you are doing your marketing right. You're collecting new names of potential buyers along the way. And then following up with those potential buyers with meaningful content that adds value and builds trust in your organization. And so we're going to get into the nitty-gritty of what it takes to build strong lists. And then what kind of things you can do in your email communications to really resonate with that target audience and get them to open those communications that you're sending. From there. We want to talk about how to maximize your marketing budget. Let's face it. Marketing is a cost center. We spend money, but not everything costs money. And what we want to do is help you maximize the effectiveness of your marketing outreach. So that you are being most efficient with those marketing dollars. Yes. There may be areas that we advocate you spend money in that you're not spending money in today, but there may also be areas where we say you should back away from some of the spend. And there are certainly things that you can do with almost no spend at all. So we're going to walk through how to build out a marketing budget and prioritize where your money should go. Then we're going to talk about using video to communicate your market messages. To your audience, video is so important and that's why I wanted to dedicate an entire episode to just discussing video community communication strategy. If you think about it, video plays an important role on your website. In communicating what your product or service does and how it solves specific pain points for your ultimate customer video plays a role online in your digital marketing strategy through social media, through posts that you put out there, it can play a role in your email strategy in terms of personalized communications, in terms of sending video to your email list. There are many ways that video needs to be incorporated in your overall marketing strategy. Just like we're doing here on this podcast, if you're watching us on YouTube. So we're going to dig into the importance of video marketing and what it really needs to be in order to be an effective part of your overall. Uh, strategic marketing plan. And then finally, we're going to talk about, uh, strategic marketing and the role of a virtual CMO or an outsourced CMO to help manage your business. And the reason that I bring this up is because many marketing teams do not have an executive presence to be able to support marketing activities within the leadership team. Oftentimes the marketing role. Is a complimentary role to what somebody else is doing. Maybe you have a VP of sales and marketing, or one of the other management team leaders has taken on marketing as part of their responsibility. Well, I want to talk about why it's important to have a seat at the table and why, if you don't want to bring on a full-time executive leader to run your marketing programs, why a virtual CMO, a COO for hire might be the kind of tool. That can really enhance the effectiveness of your marketing by giving it the attention that it deserves. So these are the things that we're going to talk about as part of this masterclass series. I think you're going to love the lineup of guests that we have. And I think you're going to love some of the additional content that we're putting on our website to be able to support this masterclass series. So if you want to learn more. If you go to the five echelon group and go five echelon got com slash masterclass, you will see all of the details about our masterclass series, and there'll be links on that page to drill into these free resources. To help you understand more about the topic area as we release one of these episodes each week. I also encourage you to subscribe to our podcast on whatever podcast player you listen to we're on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, GooglePpodcasts, as well as check out our YouTube channel, where each week we post the live streamed interviews that we have with each of our guests on there. So if you'd rather watch some of these interviews and see what we're talking about. All of the interviews will be posted on our YouTube channel. So I really appreciate your time and attention today. I hope you enjoy this master class series please subscribe to our channels where you can stay updated as we release new episodes. Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Virtual CMO podcast. For more episodes, go to fiveechelon.com/podcast to subscribe through your podcast player of choice. And if you'd like to develop consistent lead flow and a highly effective marketing strategy, visit fiveechelon.com to learn more about our Virtual CMO consulting services.