$$$ and People

A lot of things boil down to money and people, don’t they?  Marketing efforts are no exception.

The final components of your marketing strategy should cover these two topics:

• Financials – forecast & budgets
• Controls – implementation and organization

When we talk about Financials for your company’s strategic marketing plan, we are specifically talking about your sales forecast and your marketing budget to support that forecast.  Every organization should understand their sales track record and should use this to support the development of their 12-month sales forecast.  You need to:

• Review your sales from the most recent 12-month history. 
• Consider how many sales associates it took to get you to where you are today.  Do you have the right people in place to get you to where you need to be over the next 12 months?  Do you plan on adding to your sales team?  How long will it take for them to begin producing for you?
• Review the products/services you sold.  Do you see a trend?  Can you predict if that same trend will hold true over the next 12 months?  Do you have new products/services to sell?  If so, how many can you expect to sell with your current staff and at what price point?
• Consider other growth opportunities you have over the next 12 months.

Once you have spent time in analysis and consideration, formulate a realistic sales forecast for the upcoming 12 months.  Now, the next step!  You’ve already brainstormed and come up with what you believe is a good tactical list of programs for your organization and you have validated them against your research.  Now we have to put numbers to these programs and see if the marketing spend is realistic based on the sales forecast we just created.

We typically recommend our clients having a marketing budget that is no more than 15% of their sales forecast.  This allows for a good marketing mix of programs that can support the anticipated company growth.

Now that we’ve got a budget, the final step is defining the marketing organization and how the plan will implemented.  By defining the marketing organization, I mean really putting together a chart of personnel or outsourced organizations and what role each of them will play.  Your implementation plan should include major projects, milestones, and timelines so that those driving the bus can determine if they are on the right road!

Whew!  All done!  That is the final component to developing your organization’s marketing strategy!

Getting Down to the Tactics

So we are almost through all the components of a solid marketing strategy!  We are to the part of the plan where you actually need to take all the research you have compiled and make good decisions on the tactics to support the marketing strategies that you defined in the previous section.

As you think about the possible programs you should actually implement, keep in mind the audience you are addressing and what the end result of the programs should be.  Be sure that you focus on programs that are going to drive the core of your business.  It doesn’t make sense to spend your effort and $$$ in areas of your business that are only going to account for a small percentage of your revenue.  Put your time and $$$ where it counts!

Consider various types of activities both traditional and online:

- brand definition/messaging
- brochures/product sheets
- website development/redesign
- email campaigns
- webinars
- interactive multimedia
- presentation development
- networking
- speaking opportunities
- and the list goes on.

Have fun and think out of the box, but be practical and make sure that your programs stay within a reasonable budget based on your sales forecast!

Defining Your Strategy

So the next section of your formal marketing plan should be defining your Marketing Strategy.  What does that include?  There are several things:

1.  Define the overall mission.  This should be 1-3 sentences that summarize the overall goals for your marketing efforts.  A good example might be, “Our 2009 mission, is to develop programs that support generate a 30% increase in our sales pipeline activity.  We will focus on online programs as we have seen a substantially higher conversion to sales from these programs in 2008.”

2.  Define your marketing objectives.  You should clearly lay out the objectives for the marketing programs you will be executing in the tactical plan (which is the focus of my next entry!).

3.  Define your financial objectives.  You need to clearly define your financial goals for the time period in which your strategy is being developed.

4.  Define your target markets.  Clearly define the markets that you are targeting your marketing programs to in this plan. 

5.  Define a your positioning.  Basically, how will you position your products and services within your target market to achieve the marketing and financial goals you have defined.

This section is critical to your marketing strategy so be sure and spend an appropriate amount of time as you define this portion of the plan.