Friday, October 25, 2013

Don't Talk About Marketing

Marketing Strategy and Planning

Many marketing plans look somewhat alike: executive summary, situation analysis, SWOT, objectives, marketing strategy, action plan and financials, with assorted appendices.

And most are equally ineffective.

The biggest deficiency is the lack of a business case: what business results will occur, and for what cost. This is not easy (see the post Meaningful Metrics), often because of the difficulty of proving, for example, the impact an awareness-building initiative had on sales. But building the business case is an absolute must.

It starts with the company objectives. Are you pursuing organic growth? If so, how? By expanding the customer base for current products, increasing sales to existing customers, or entering new markets? Then (yes, this is simplistic, my apologies), how will each marketing initiative support the objective?

Take increasing sales to existing customers. One organization, with two distinct offerings, wanted to increase cross-sales into accounts where one offering dominated. The challenge was that not only did the account executives not know enough about the other offering to create selling opportunities, they didn't know who in the organization to talk to. Marketing got sufficient funding by working with sales to agree on account penetration objectives and identify what programs and investments were needed to "open new doors" (offerings education, easy-to-use collateral and reference-selling coaching).

In another case, the "objective" was to increase sales, based on the assumption that was the only way to increase profits. The research marketing then unearthed a critical insight: consumers saw multiple benefits to the product that were not being communicated. This led to a new communications strategy that both increased unit profits as well as unit sales.

These plans succeeded - that is marketing got the budget it needed - because they focused on business results. The material that makes up many typical marketing plans was available during the strategy discussions, but not "presented" - when the rest of the business leadership team asked specific questions, the marketing team knew the answers.

As Andy Berndt, Head of Google's Creative Lab says, “my advice to marketers is don’t talk about marketing. Bring the CEO ideas that can make the business better or solve a problem.”*

*"What Do You Want From Me: How High-Performing CMOs Exceed Expectations," Spencer Stuart, November 2010



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