Spoiler: if you want your marketing to be effective and make an impact on the big picture of the company, you can’t operate in silos.
The fact of the matter is, your marketing plan should never stand alone. It should work with your business’s strategic plan like a well-oiled, revenue-building machine. And for that to happen, marketing strategies must align with your sales plan and overall business goals. Otherwise, growth is just a dream you’ll keep chasing.
Wake up and smell the ROI!
Follow these tips to set yourself up for success:
1. Consider marketing in the business planning process from the get-go
Define your business goals and build your sales and strategic plans to reach them, then use this as a foundation upon which to build your marketing plan. When you know where you are going, it’s easier to determine how you’re going to get there via your marketing efforts.
2. Tie it all together
Make certain every aspect of your marketing ties into and supports at least one business objective in the overall strategy of the company. This will ensure you’re spending time and money in the right places.
3. Work backward to move forward.
Yes, you read that right. In order to set marketing goals you need to take a step back and think from the bottom up:
- Identify how much revenue your marketing needs to bring in to be in sync with a business goal
- Determine how many sales you need to hit the revenue you want
- Calculate your closing rate (divide sales by leads and multiply by 100) to figure out how many opportunities you’ll need to make the necessary number of sales
Now you know the number of opportunities your marketing needs to create in order to generate the sales necessary to get the revenue required to support the goal (deep breath). Okay, now you can move along.
4. Make sure to set meaningful marketing metrics
Say that 5 times fast! To clarify, you not only need to decide on goals that generate a certain number of opportunities, but they should also be measurable and provide quantifiable results relevant to your business objectives.
P.S. It’s a good idea to set quarterly benchmarks as well, so you can analyze and make adjustments to your plan if necessary to keep alignment on track.
5. Determine your capabilities
Remember that well-oiled machine we talked about earlier? If you don’t have the capabilities to get things aligned, it’s like throwing dozens of wrenches into the machine! And that means bye-bye ROI. Aligning your marketing to your company goals is vital to growing your business. If you don’t think you have the ability to make it happen, our final tip is to find someone who can.
By the way, our phone is 231.727.9778
