“If you build it, they will come” may be a great movie line, but it doesn’t apply to finding customers for a new business. You need to create demand for your product or service. I will outline the building blocks of a successful marketing and sales program, from social media to net promoter scores. Techniques for identifying the right acquisition programs for your target market and metrics for measuring the effectiveness of initiatives are highlighted throughout. 

Guidelines for aligning marketing and sales activities with product, positioning, and brand strategy are included, as are methods for calculating cost per acquisition and other key financial planning data. 

The first steps to create your strategic marketing plan:

1. Analyze what your competition is doing
2. Choose your marketing mix
3. Evaluate your marketing mix
4. Create your marketing plan 

Analyze Your Competition: The first step is to analyze what your competition is doing. What type of marketing program is your competition using and what are they spending most and least on? I like to create a competition spreadsheet that holds all information on the competition activities in their marketing programs. This spreadsheet gives me an overall look my competition’s marketing mix. To get started creating this spreadsheet, first list out each competitor you would like to assess (I typically select 10-15 for my clients, my advice is no less than 5). For each competitor list out each marketing program that they are using (SEM, SEO, Affiliate etc.). Keep in mind that they may have unique programs that are not on our list, be sure to make note of those programs. Next I like to rate the importance of each program (I used an A, B, C scale with A being the most important). Here are some additional ways I find competitive information:

1. Subscribe to mailing lists
2. Follow social media
3. Go to trade shows 
4. Read industry publications
5. Analyze their website
6. Gather though leadership materials
7. Set up Google alerts
8. Subscribe and ready their blog

Key insights that you should be collecting from the above information is:

1. Content for what’s out there
2. Ideas to borrow
3. Sense of quality of content
4. Seeing how customers respond
5. Measure the savvy of competitors
6. Insight into their marketing strategy

From this information you can create profiles of your competitors and their overall marketing strategies.

Choose Your Marketing Mix: The next step is to choose your marketing mix based on the insights you have collected from the above profiles of your competition, what you know about your business and what you know your customer is going to respond best to. Select the programs that you believe are going to be most effective to market your product or service to create demand. Remember what we are doing, creating demand! We want to bring customers to us; we want to be known out there! They can’t buy from us if they don’t know us. Be sure to review your marketing objectives first and unsure that your marketing activities align. It is also important to decide how important your program is to your overall marketing strategy. Identify if it is a must do or just a nice to have. I like to separate them into 3 buckets: Must Do, Important, Nice to Have. This will help you begin to estimate the percentage spend on each program. It is important to know your customers, ask yourself questions like:

1. Where are my customers located?
2. Where do they go for services?
3. Whose options do they trust the most?
4. What do they respond to (e.g. coupons/discounts, VIP access etc)?
5. Where do they expect to see you?
6. How modern are they?

Evaluate Your Marketing Mix

Our next step is evaluating our marketing mix. And what we want to do here is prioritize our programs by the level of importance to the business overall. This is going to guide us when we actually start to allocate budget. Marketing budget, which is very important. We want to rank and prioritize them. We want to rate them, so that we can figure out how they should be fitting overall within our marketing mix itself. 

First thing I recommend you to do is rate each program with a score of A, B, or C. Real simple. It’s either I must do it, I need to do it, or it’s a nice to have; I don’t have to do it, right? That’s my rating. Next we want to figure out the level of effort for each program. Is there a lot of effort that needs to be put in? Especially when you’re a small start-up business, putting a lot of effort into a program may not make it as attractive. You want to understand, am I going to have to put a lot of effort, a little bit of effort, or maybe a medium amount of effort? 

Next, we want to estimate what percentage of our overall marketing budget we want to spend on the program. Especially in the first year of your business, you don’t have to go out for three years because it’s going to change. Your marketing mix, by the way, can change by month-to-month, or by year-to-year. 

Let’s take a look at that chart below. You can see how I put this together. We’re going to look at the program, the importance score, the level of effort and then finally, my marketing budget.

For example, my website gets a score of ‘A’ because it’s very important. I have to do it. I don’t have a choice. My content marketing, I believe, in this particular business, I also have to do at trade shows, speaking – for my B2B software business, again, being very important. SEM, kind of important. I want to make sure that I test it out. Email marketing. Also, very important to my business. PR and analyst, my marketing partner program that I have to build. My industry specific advertising and my influencer program. Those are actually a little bit less important for my business, so I’ve ranked those A, B, and C. Then I took a look at my level of effort. On my website, you know, it’s not a big level of effort to actually build a website. At least a basic website. My percentage of my marketing budget, about 5%’s going to go to that. Where then I scan down my list a little bit further and I see my trade shows. There’s actually quite a bit of energy and effort that I have to do for trade shows because I have to be there. It’s going to take up a lot of my marketing budget, but the effectiveness overall is very high. And then I go down my list a little bit further and I look at my PR programs, and I say, it’s a medium level of effort. I’ve got to put some energy into that. It’s about 10% of my budget, it’s pretty effective in terms of how I’m going to use it. 

You’re probably asking, but what this is going to do, is this is going to really help me understand how I need to put together my entire marketing program? All right, we’re on our last step, which is creating our marketing plan, and this is really important because your marketing plan becomes your guidebook of how you’re going to execute your entire marketing strategy. It’s like an action plan, but it’s a little bit higher level. It’s going to inform one very important thing, which is your financial plan. In fact, a lot of the reason why we do this is so that we can feed this into our financial plan to get revenue projections and cost-estimates. Very important. 

The first thing we have to understand is does this directly, or indirectly affect our monthly revenue? How does our marketing plan affect our monthly revenue, or our yearly revenue for that matter? Then we have to calculate the cost of marketing because we have to understand the complete plan and forecast our expenses appropriately. We also have to understand the performance of our financial assumptions. Each marketing program, typically has assumptions associated with it. How much am I going to get for SEM? How much is it going to cost me per word? What’s the conversion rate? All of these things start to feed in. If I do PR, how many customers going to get from the PR activities that I do? These are all what we call assumptions and they all have to be fed into the plan. When we get to our financial planning section, of this post, you’ll start to understand how this all connects together. But right now I just want you to be mindful that this exists out there. All these details need to be figured out so we can feed them in-to-the-financial plan. Now, I do want to make sure that you understand that not every detail in the marketing programs need to be outlined in your business – actual business plan. We are going beyond just the business plan here and we’re talking about how to really build an overall marketing plan. So you have to decide the level of detail. What I recommend at a minimum is at least summarizing all your marketing programs, so the investor and stakeholders understand what you are going to do to drive demand. If you just do it at a summary level, that’s great. If you want to provide more detail, you can always put detail in ancillary slides or in the appendix, in the back, of either the slide deck or the actual business plan – written business plan as well. That’s something that you can choose. You do not have to have every level of detail. But do you need to do this to run your business? Absolutely!

Objectives tactics and assumptions about your marketing program: Next, what I like to do is, as I’m creating my plan, I like to look at three things, which I call: objectives, tactics, and assumptions. If I break down each marketing program into objectives, tactics, and assumptions, then I can actually start building out more of the plan. The first thing I like to do is understand what I am trying to get out of this. If I can build this detail out for each one of my plans, then I’m going to be much better off. It is very important to build a marketing calendar. A marketing calendar will actually take each one of these marketing programs, the objectives, the tactics, and the assumptions that you’re doing for each one and plot it out in a timeline. I love marketing calendars because they tell you how to execute the business. 

All right, so for each one of the programs, let’s talk a little bit more about objectives, tactics, and assumptions. What are you trying to achieve? What is your objective? Those are the questions you want to ask and make sure you also have a specific measurement for success. What results are you trying to drive? It is so important that we state the objective for each marketing program. Otherwise, you might be wasting money if you don’t really understand this, and I don’t want you to waste money. That’s bad, right? 

Now, the tactics is the second section, which is really outlining each tactic: how we’re going to execute the program, what tactics are we going to use, or are we going to need to use, in order to build this program out? You don’t need to list out every action, but it’s important to get an idea of the tactics that you’re going to use. It doesn’t necessarily need to be an action plan that says I’m going to do this, this, and this, but the tactics that you’re going to use in order to execute that program. 

The third area is what we call assumptions, and assumptions are really about what assumptions are you making in terms of the effectiveness of your marketing program. What is your response rate? What is your conversion rate? What are your assumptions around the number of downloads or number of leads generated by whatever marketing program you’re doing? Again, this is wildly important because what we’re trying to yield is what we call a cost per acquisition or cost per lead (CAC). This is going to be a question that every investor is going to ask you, and in order to build up to that, we need to know what programs we’re using, how those programs generate into, or translate, into the actual cost and the assumptions that we’re using to generate those cost assumptions are all right here. This is all going to feed, also, into your financial plan as well. 

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples to see how it actually works. We’re just going to take two examples of some marketing programs. The first one is called SEM, or we call it paid search program. This is basically how are we going to execute that program. How are we going to execute our paid search program? Well, the first thing we want to look at is what is our objective. Our objective is obviously to increase traffic. We also want to create lead generation or email signups, because that’s also very important. What we do in the program to actually, what words we select and other tactics that we use, will actually inform how we achieve that goal of lead generation as well. We want to increase brand awareness as well, and overall sales. We want to use traffic metrics and conversion to measure how effective we are. That starts to tell you your objective overall of why you’re doing SEM. I want to understand why you’re doing the SEM program. And that, I gave you a bunch of objectives in there, not just one, so you can kind of think about those as you’re executing your own SEM program as well. 

Next thing I want you to do is understand some of the tactics. What actually am I going to do? And the tactics would be around how am I going to buy the words, how I’m going to bid on the words, maybe what range of costs that I’m going to go. I’m going to go after multi words, not single words. I might go after anywhere between $1 to $2 a word, I’m going to use an agency to actually buy those terms, and I’m going to track my customer behavior to see what’s working, what’s not working. I’m also going to look at my Google Analytics to see where I’m getting the conversion, my cost of leave, or my cost of conversion as well. Those are the tactics that I’m going to use in order to execute my SEM program, as an example. 

Now assumptions. What assumptions am I going to use in terms of how it works? The first assumption that I want to have is how much is it going to cost me for these words? What range am I going to be in? I have to make an assumption that it’s going to be $2 a word, $3 a word, $1 a word. And then I also have to understand, if I’m actually trying to convert that customer to sale, what’s my conversion rate? And in fact, I usually used about a 2% conversion rate on average, and that’s a general conversion rate for most product conversions. Again, it may not be the case in your industry. We have to understand what your conversion rate is for your industry. Those are just some of the assumptions that I’m going to use that actually go into my financial plan as well. The other assumption is how much I’m going to spend on Google Ads as well. 

Our next marketing program is content marketing, and in content marketing, what we’re trying to do is identify and map out how are we going to market all this though thought leadership material that we have. Let’s take a look at some of the objectives. First thing is to build trust and rapport with our audience. We want to make sure we increase our incoming traffic. That’s very important for new prospects, and maybe even our existing customers as well. They’re going to see us out there. We want to test new business ideas. We want to get brand awareness is another objective that we might have with our content marketing. Content marketing is kind of big, so it has lots of objectives. I’m just giving you some examples of some objectives here. Boost search engine SEO, that’s a huge one, right? In fact, one of the big benefits that you get from content marketing is actually boosting your SEO traffic. That’s wildly important. 

Now let’s take a look at some of the tactics. How are we actually going to execute this strategy around content marketing? Well, first thing is, we’re going to post videos, interviews, trend forecasting, and other thought leadership pieces to YouTube, we’re going to post articles to our website and to social media, we’re going to engage the customer with a Q&A, which is a great tactic, we’re going to post case studies, before and afters illustrating benefits of our product or service. That’s a little salesy, but that’s still okay as long as the customer’s being educated along the way. We’re actually going to generate an e-book once every quarter, and we’re going to make it available for download on our website.  

Let’s take a look at our assumptions. Our assumptions around content marketing is our search engine rankings. One of the most important things that I want to track is how much SEO traffic am I actually getting from all this activity that I’m doing? I also want to track my conversion rates. If someone sees a thought leadership piece on YouTube, are they actually going to come over and are they going to buy? That’s very important, so I want to track my conversion rate, I want to track how much traffic I’m getting from SEO, and from all these different sources. Wherever I publish this content, I want to know exactly what traffic I get and what conversion I’m getting, or a lead that I’m getting that will ultimately lead to a sale. Those are the important things. Those are the assumptions that I’m tracking and then I can put conversion rate data associated to it, and even traffic data associated to it so I can tie it back to the justified cost of the budget that I’m spending to do this. That’s the key. If I can take what I’ve done and actually tie it back to how much I’m spending, then I can get what we call a cost of acquisition, which is EXTREMELY important in this overall process. 

I want to give you one more, I said I was only going to give you two, but I’m going to give you three here, one more example of a marketing program and how it can work, and this is our PR program. So, let’s take a look at our objective. What is our objective in PR? Well, first of all, it’s to promote goodwill and to spread our brand throughout the industry. That’s very important to create brand loyalty, to get those influencers in the industry starting to talk about us, which is wildly important. So, all of these things, and also, really establishing ourselves as thought leaders in the industry is very important. What are some tactics that I’m going to use to actually generate all this PR? Well, number one, it might actually be hiring a PR agency, and I have to set a budget for that PR agency. I might say $2500, I might say $5000, it might actually be you’re going to really spend a lot of money on PR, 10, 15, or $20000. By the way, that’s what some of the bigger PR agencies actually cost, so hold on tight. But you can do PR on your own as well. You might say, you know what, the first year of my business, I’m going to do the following things: I’m going to get three article placements, or I’m going to get some article placements in some leading industry publications, I’m going to get at least three speaking gigs that I’m going to go ahead and promote myself.  I’m going to also do a press release a month that I’m going to release on my website, and every other month I’m actually going to release out there to the press. Those are called web releases. They’re also a really good tactic as well. 

Consider, what are some of our assumptions? Well, our assumptions are, again, conversion rates. How many people am I getting that actually read these articles and convert over? I can track that in my analytics, which is great. Did they convert from reading the article? And my speaking gig. When I actually did my speaking gig, how many people actually attended my session, and how many email addresses did I get once I actually gave the speech?  Now, what assumptions do I want to make? What my conversion rate are, how much traffic am I getting, how many leads am I getting, how many email addresses am I getting.

Common Mistakes

Let’s wrap up now with some common mistakes. I want to make sure you avoid these because I’ve seen them over and over again made by entrepreneurs. First of all, overspending. I am a big believer not to overspend in anything in your business, but specifically in marketing programs – you can easily get carried away here. So, I always like to start slow. My recommendation as a tactic is start with the low or free cost things first, things that you can do that don’t cost any money. Maybe it takes some of your time, but that’s okay, it actually doesn’t take any money. So, for instance, things like SEO. SEO is a free way to get traffic. It’s not totally free because you do have to put some attention to it, you do have to get some thought leadership material out there, but that’s okay, you’re going to do that anyway. And then make sure that it’s all indexable on your site.

Affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is essentially getting other people to market for you online and then they’ll drive traffic back to you, but you only pay them when the customer actually pays you. Pretty good gig, or at least when they buy. 

And then content marketing. You can put out thought leadership materials. You can put out videos on YouTube or do a blog yourself at least to get the engine going. So don’t overspend. There’s a lot of things you can do that don’t cost a lot of money. So the next mistake I see entrepreneurs make all the time is they forget to go back to their marketing objectives. Their marketing objectives are not aligned with the marketing programs in their marketing mix, the ones that they’ve actually picked. So make sure that you understand that. Make sure those things are aligned. Also, I want to make sure that you establish yourself as a thought leader. This is so important. People forget this. Your expertise, your credibility, all of this is so important to the overall process. 

Another mistake I see entrepreneurs making is not understanding what their customers will respond to. You’ve got to really understand your customers and how they want to be communicated. They are not going to go seek you out. You’ve got to seek them out, very important. In addition, I’ve experienced leadership not taking into account the cost of acquisition or cost per lead into the programs. If you execute these marketing programs, but you have no idea how much they cost, you are unable to calculate your ROI. Are you getting a sale? Are you getting a lead? You’ve got to measure this! It’s very important. It’s the fastest way to go out of business and run out of money is if you don’t measure cost of acquisition and cost of lead. There’s so much to do in marketing and building marketing strategies. They’re continually evolving, so please be sure that you’re evaluating them on a regular basis and adjusting them accordingly. Marketing programs that you do today WILL NOT be the same marketing programs you do six months into your business or 12 months into your business. 

So…. Get Started, Test, Measure, and Adjust. That’s how AMAZING marketing programs are formed.