Marcu Taylor's Blog, page 5

Marketing Budgets: How to Set, Allocate & Optimise Them

Marketing budgets are a tricky topic for every business and there’s no single formula that calculates the perfect budget for any given strategy. The ideal figure depends on the nature of your business, how it’s structured, what your objectives are, how your sales funnel is constructed and a whole bunch of other factors.

Set your budget too low and you’re never going to get the results you need from your marketing strategies, meaning your entire investment is compromised. Spend too much or allocate your budget in the wrong places and you risk running out of funds before making a return on your investment.

Setting the right budget and using it effectively is the biggest challenge marketers face. So how do you pinpoint the ideal figure, allocate it for maximum impact and optimise your spending to squeeze out every last drop of ROI?

The marketing budget conundrum

The marketing budget is a complex being and it often leaves marketing teams at odds with executives. Like all things in business, you have to spend money to make money but marketing can be expensive and it’s not always obvious where marketing actions justify the spend.

As we’ve discussed before, it can be difficult to prove the ROI of individual email campaigns or ad clicks, especially when they don’t lead directly to sales. Unless you can prove the value of these marketing actions, your marketing spend looks inefficient, even if you’re spending money wisely.

This is compounded by the fact that so much of modern marketing revolves around testing, experimentation and learning from both successes and failures. It’s easy to bask in the glory when things go right but it’s equally difficult to show that failures are also part of the journey towards success.

To ensure that you get the budget you need for all those blog posts, email campaigns, experiments and software tools that capture leads and turn them into paying customers, it’s crucial that you have the right analytics and attribution system in place to prove their worth.

Only by showing investors and executives the financial benefits of every marketing action can you guarantee you’re going to keep getting the funds to make things happen.

Perhaps, more importantly, this data will help you allocate your marketing budget to the most effective channels and campaigns. You’ll waste less budget on ineffective marketing actions, redistribute spend to where it has the strongest positive impact and identify opportunities for improvement – all of which leads to a greater return on your investment.

How to set a marketing budget

Marcus recently published his ultimate marketing plan on the Venture Harbour blog, where he runs through each stage of the creative planning process. On the subject of marketing budgets, he explains that there are generally two ways businesses determine how much to spend:

Benchmark budgets: Where businesses set aside a fixed percentage of revenue (eg: 7-15%) as their marketing budget.Goal-based budgets: Where your marketing goals, devise a workable strategy for achieving them and assign the necessary budget to make it happen.

As Marcus explains in his guide, the second of these approaches is by far the most effective method of setting budgets and getting the best results. To illustrate why this is the case, let’s take a closer look at these two approaches to setting budgets.

Method #1: Using benchmarks to set your marketing budget

Read any generic advice on setting budgets and you’ll often hear arbitrary figures for how much you should dedicate to marketing activities. Generally, these figures will be anywhere between 12-20% of total revenue for newer companies that want to grow and somewhere in the 5-15% for more established organisations looking to maintain growth.

According to The CMO Survey: Fall 2018 report, the average marketing spend is 7.3% of company revenue, which gives us a rough idea of pre-Covid budgets.

However, the previous year’s report showed how much this average figure varies across different industries, even when the average across all industries was a similar 7.5%.

All you have to do is look at industry variance to see how arbitrary averages can lead you astray.

Going back to Marcus’ ultimate marketing plan, he explains that while this benchmarked approach is simple and easy to control, it can leave you in a vulnerable position.

“The problem is that it’s not based on achieving an objective. Spending 12% of revenue on marketing every month may seem reasonable, but it may only be enough to keep up with your competitors if they’re also doing the same. It may even lead to losing market share, especially if your competitors are using the following approach.”

Marcus Taylor, Venture Harbour CEO

While it’s important that you don’t spend beyond your means, it’s equally as important that you don’t underspend on marketing and miss out on opportunities to drive growth that could secure your position in the industry for years to come.

Also, if you’re not budgeting based on marketing objectives to begin with, it’s unlikely that you’ll be assigning funds to channels, campaigns and actions based on objectives either, meaning you’ll never get the most out of your marketing spend.

You’re simply putting in average investments and getting average results in return.

Method #2: Setting budgets based on your marketing goals

Instead of setting arbitrary marketing budgets and simply keeping your business alive, it makes more sense to define specific growth targets and set your budgets based on achieving them.

Here’s the example Marcus provides in his marketing plan guide:

Let’s say the business wants to grow by $500,000 revenue in 12 months.

If each customer brings in $2,000, then you need 250 new customers. This means, your breakeven marketing budget would be $500k (acquire 250 customers @ $2k each). 

If you aim for a gross profit target of 50%, then your marketing budget is $250k and you have a target acquisition cost of $1,000. From here you can work out how many leads, demos, or clicks you’ll need to acquire one customer giving you a target cost per lead, cost per click etc.

With a budget of $250k and a target acquisition cost of $1,000, you can start putting strategies together that will achieve your growth target within those means. Your next step is to calculate the expenses of each marketing action within your strategies – every blog post, ad campaign, follow-up email, etc. – to make sure that your goals are achievable within the set budget.

To calculate the acquisition cost (CPA) of marketing actions, you can use this simple formula:

CPA = Total cost of action / total conversions

Let’s say you want to calculate the CPA of leads from a paid advertising campaign to make sure the numbers add up. You have to make sure you consider all of the costs that go into running that campaign to get an accurate picture of the true expense – for example:

$100 per month on a Google Ads campaign$100 per month of a Facebook Advertising campaign6 hours of writing ad copy at $80 per hour6 hours designing a landing page at $60 per hour2 hours designing ad visuals at $30 per hour1 hour promoting content on social at $30 per hour1 hour creating an automated email campaign to follow up leads at $30 per hour

Of course, these are all for the sake of example but the point is that you have to get an accurate figure of your marketing expenses to set and allocate your budget effectively.

In our example, the cost of this campaign for the first month is $1,013, including the monthly ad spend and the one-off expenses for creating the campaign. So even capturing just one lead in the first month would put us in line with our target $1,000 CPA before our monthly spend drops to $200, at which point we need to start factoring for optimisation expenses.

We can then use CPAs and total as KPIs for this campaign to ensure that performance is on track. If we’re capturing leads for less than our target CPA, we can increase bids to capitalise on the success of this campaign. If we’re overspending, we pause our spend and use it for marketing actions that are achieving better results.

How to allocate a marketing budget

With your marketing budget set, you now have to allocate it across each channel with the aim of maximising the performance of your overall marketing strategy.

This is where you decide how much to invest in organic search, email marketing, conversion optimisation, etc.

Once again, the best way to approach this is to start from your marketing objectives and work backwards. In the previous section, we looked at how you can set a budget for specific marketing goals, define a maximum target CPA and work out the cost of marketing operations to ensure you hit your targets.

You’ll need to do this for every channel, every strategy and every campaign to allocate your budget with accuracy and avoid overspending.

Know your expenses – all of them

The biggest danger with overspending is that you won’t consider all of the costs that go into creating and managing each strategy/campaign. HubSpot has published a guide to managing marketing budgets that includes a number of free templates, which may help you think of some expenses you wouldn’t normally consider.

In the same article, HubSpot lists the following common costs involved with any strategy:

Software: When it comes to digital and even print media, you may need software to create your marketing campaigns, or handle your daily processes.Freelancers: If you have a temporary campaign or want to test out a new marketing strategy, you might want to hire a short term freelancer before bringing on a full-timer.New personnel: When you do hire full-time employees, you’ll want to budget costs including their computer, technology, benefits, and onboarding-related needs.Advertising: Budget how much money you’ll spend on paid opportunities such as physical ads, native ads, sponsored content, search engine ads, and social media promotions.Content creation: When you create content such as videos, photos, or even blog posts, you’ll need to put paid time into it. Budget how much money will go into creating this content so you can adjust accordingly based on its return on investment.

You’ll need to allocate sufficient budget to each of these resources for every campaign you run. It’s important that you have funds available for these campaign essentials, otherwise you’ll ultimately run out of content to promote or have to pause ad campaigns that are generating perfectly good leads.

Another really important point covered in the same HubSpot article is hidden costs. In the words of HubSpot’s VP of Marketing Meghan Keaney Anderson:

“When people allocate budget for product marketing, they tend to think in terms of product launches and promotional activities. That’s certainly an important part of it, but another area of focus to remember is setting aside resources to conduct research and message testing long before the product ever goes to market.”

Message testing is something a lot of marketers forget to budget for or simply underestimate how much budget may be required. You’re unlikely to find the most effective message first try and campaigns that don’t initially work can still generate a worthy ROI with some testing and experimentation.

If you’ve piled resources into designing a landing page that’s not converting in the way you’d hoped, those resources are wasted forever unless you optimise the page and find a formula that works – something we’ll talk about more in the next section of this article.

Another expense marketers often forget to consider is updating old content. The shelf life of content is getting shorter all the time and the number of leads you generate gradually decreases, even for your best pieces of content. To maintain performance and maximise the ROI from your content, you have to keep it updated.

While this is a relatively low-cost strategy, it’s an essential one that you don’t want to stall due to a sudden lack of budget.

Prioritise your channels

Earlier, we looked at setting budgets based on marketing goals, using the following criteria:

You want to grow your business by $500,000 revenue in 12 monthsEach customer brings in an average $2,000 revenueYou need 250 new customers to hit your target

So, now, you’re going to work back from this target to figure out how many leads you need to generate in order to hit your 250 new customer goal. Look at your conversion rates from organic traffic, paid advertising, social media and your other inbound strategies to figure out how many leads you need to generate.

All you need is this simple formula:

Leads required = Target customers / conversion rate

Let’s say you turn 3% of paid traffic into paying customers and you want to know how many leads you would need to generate to hit your target of 250 new customers.

This would give you:

250 / 0.03 = 8,333 additional leads

So, with your existing paid advertising strategy, you could hit your new customer target by generating 8,333 additional clicks throughout the year. Now, you can compare this with your current ad spend and CPAs to see how much it’s going to cost you to achieve this.

This tells you how much to allocate to paid advertising for this marketing objective over the next year.

Run this calculation for all of your channels and compare the numbers to see which of them are most effective, considering time and cost.

This approach to allocating budget ensures that you have enough leads to work with in order to hit your targets. Let’s face it, you can’t convert leads you don’t have and increasing conversion rates doesn’t happen by magic.

However, you can increase conversion rates by allocating budget for tests and experimentation, which allows you to become more ambitious with your marketing objectives and budget allocation.

How to optimise a marketing budget

Optimising your marketing budget is essentially a process of reallocating your budget to ensure it’s being spent to the best effect. Once your campaigns have had time to gather pace, you’re going to find that some of them perform better than expected while others fall short of your calculations.

Likewise, external factors that are out of your control will affect campaign performance, to different extents, as time goes by – for example, new consumer trends, industry changes and economic fluctuations.

As the performance of channels, strategies and individual campaigns changes over time, you want to ensure that your budget is still allocated to achieve maximum impact.

So, broadly speaking, optimising your marketing budget involves two key objectives:

Optimise channels, strategies & campaigns to maximise performanceAllocate and reallocate budget to where it makes the most impact

Throughout this article, we’ve looked at how you can set and allocate marketing spend by calculating every expense and ROI. This approach has given you all of the targets and KPIs you need to measure performance and adjust your budget accordingly.

Maximise performance across every channel

To get the best from your marketing spend, you have to optimise campaign performance across every channel. By maximising ROI, you know that your budget is being used to the best effect and you can reallocate spend to increase investment into your most effective campaigns/channels.

Optimising cross-channel performance starts with understanding the customer journey and how it aligns with your sales funnel.

We’ve covered this before in our Marketing Funnel Strategies: 5 Steps to Increasing Sales article where we run through the five key stages of the modern buying process:

Awareness: The moment a user first discovers your brand, product, offer, etc.Consideration: They’re interested but not ready to buy now – perhaps comparing you against the competition or waiting for a special offer.Conversion: When a user finally makes the choice to buy (hopefully with you).Loyalty: Users who regularly buy from you and find it difficult to go elsewhere.Advocacy: Users who actively recommend you to potential buyers.

By attributing channels and campaigns to specific user actions, you can optimise them to the KPIs that truly matter. Here’s an example of a marketing funnel you might have for a mobile application:

Source:  Apptentive

To maximise performance, optimise campaigns based on your target KPIs and run conversion optimisation tests to improve results. Take a look at our 100+ Conversion Rate Optimisation Tips To Boost Your Sales article if you’re in need of some CRO tips.

You’ll also find additional help in these articles:

The Beginner’s Guide to Conversion Rate Optimisation5 Top Conversion Rate Optimisation Strategies17 Must-Have Conversion Rate Optimisation Software Tools7 CRO ‘Best Practices’ That Can Kill Your Conversion Rate

Once you’ve got a solid optimisation strategy in place, you’ll also want to take a look at your entire sales funnel to address leaks. These are areas where your leads are dropping out of the buying process, which is bad news for your marketing budget.

You spent good money on capturing those leads and, for each one that doesn’t complete the buying process, you’re out of pocket. So, to maximise return on investment, you have to put fixes in place to minimise the number of leads who drop out of your funnel before completing the purchase.

We’ve also covered this before in our Funnel Optimisation 101: 5 Steps to Fixing a Leaky Marketing Funnel article where we guide you through the following steps:

How to pinpoint leaks in your sales funnelDetermine where you’re losing leadsPlugging conversion killersRefining your lead nurturing strategyTurning customers into repeat buyers

By optimising your sales funnel across these five key areas, you’ll prevent leads slipping away and entice new customers to keep buying from you.

With this approach, you’ll be optimising every part of your budget on two fronts. First, you’ll be fine-tuning performance across every channel and (SEO, social media, email, etc.) and testing new ideas to boost results even further. Secondly., you’ll be optimising the journey prospects take after the initial conversion and maximising ROI from the leads you pay for.

Reallocate your budget for maximum impact

With your channels, campaigns and funnel all working at full capacity, you know that your marketing budget is being put to its best use. All that’s left to do now is reallocate your marketing spend, based on results, to ensure that your budget is always invested where it has the maximum impact.

As Jonathan Gordon writes for McKinsey, “with budgets under increasing pressure, marketers must allocate every dollar with precision and purpose.”

“What companies need is an analytical, forward-looking approach that allocates marketing dollars to customer segments as well as products or geographies that have the highest growth potential rather than to those that have traditionally performed well.”

Your marketing budget isn’t a set it and forget it entity, as long as you have the data required to measure performance, model future trends and adapt your spend accordingly.

This is no different from optimising your paid advertising budget on a platform like Google Ads. If a campaign is performing particularly well, the most obvious step is to increase your budget for the highest performing keywords.

Going a little more granular, you might optimise your bids to reflect how keywords perform on different days of the week, weeks of the month or months of the year. As long as you have the historical data to prove that, for example, conversions are 30% higher on weekend mornings, you can model this outcome and increase your bids for these times of the week.

The same principle applies to your entire marketing budget and the opposite is true for campaigns that aren’t getting the results you need.

By reducing spend on these campaigns, you can free up budget to reallocate elsewhere. In the meantime, you can start investigating underperforming strategies to find out why things aren’t working and test variations to improve performance.

This ongoing process of optimisation and reallocation helps you maintain top performance across your entire marketing spend and ensure your money is always being pumped into the most effective channels.

Reduce CPAs and other expenses

Another tactic for optimising your marketing budget is to reduce your cost-per-acquisition and other expenses, such as CPCs. Generally speaking, it’s good practice to keep a constant eye on your data and look for areas where you might be overspending unnecessarily but be careful about over-optimising CPAs.

While it’s great to reduce expenses, you don’t want to limit performance or growth by curtailing your marketing spend.

Let’s think of it this way: any good marketing strategy generates positive ROI, contributing to increased revenue and growth. So, in theory, the more you spend, you get back in return and this should be the mindset you have.

Of course, there’s always a limit to how much budget is available and there comes a point where optimising CPAs is a valid tactic – particularly, if you’re overspending anywhere. Just make sure you don’t fall into the trap of limiting results by over-optimising your spend.

Keep your mindset focused on ROI and what you get back from campaigns, not simply what you’re spending. And, if you need help with calculating the ROI of your marketing campaigns, you can use our free marketing ROI calculator.

Over to you

In this article, we’ve looked at how you can set budgets, based on your marketing goals and calculating expenses vs returns. This granular approach allows you to forecast the value of channels and strategies before you start spending and prioritise allocation, based on your goals.

We’ve also looked at how you can optimise your marketing spend on a channel and campaign basis. By maximising performance across every marketing action, first, you give your budget the best chance to realise its full potential. From there, you can reallocate your budget to invest more where performance is highest and optimise underperforming campaigns to bring them back up to pace.

The post Marketing Budgets: How to Set, Allocate & Optimise Them appeared first on Venture Harbour.

How to Implement Agile Marketing

Adapt or die.

The pace of change in today’s business landscape is dizzying, and there’s not many industries that move as rapidly as marketing.

Today, 63% of CMOs and marketing managers think traditional methods of brand advertising and positioning are either losing their effectiveness or broken.

This forces marketing teams to compensate by experimenting with new channels and ideas on-the-fly, using tools like TrueNorth to identify and prioritise their highest-performing campaigns.

Without the luxury of time, many marketing teams are adopting Agile Marketing methodologies to become more flexible in our ever-changing business landscape.

What’s in This Guide?

If your company is exploring Agile Marketing, you’re in the right place. This guide has everything you need to begin implementing Agile today:

What Is Agile Marketing?“Agile” vs “agile”5 Reasons to Implement Agile MarketingThe Traditional Waterfall MethodologyAgile Marketing Frameworks & TerminologyAgile Methodology vs Waterfall MethodologyScrumbum TerminologyHow to Implement Agile MarketingIs Agile Marketing Right for Your Team?

Stay loose as we explore what Agile can do for you.

What Is Agile Marketing?

Agile Marketing is a work management methodology that emphasises visibility, collaboration, adaptability, and continuous improvement. Agile teams value flexibility and responsiveness above all else and have passions for collaboration and experimentation.

Agile as a management framework didn’t originate with marketing. It began with software developers in the 1980s who were searching for a more agile project management methodology due to constantly changing requirements from their customers.

But as the business world has sped up, it’s become increasingly important for marketing teams to adopt similar Agile principles to shorten their project lifecycles and become more responsive and adaptive to the feedback they receive on campaigns.

Instead of spending three months planning a robust ad campaign for a new product launch, Agile teams spend three weeks creating a minimum viable product they can push live to gather immediate feedback on performance before executing an iterative cycle of improvement.

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“Agile” vs “agile”

Agile marketing teams require agile marketers.

The first “Agile” is a proper noun that describes the entire Agile framework, which is a structured methodology with a set of principles and practices to help marketing teams achieve better results.

The second “agile” is an adjective that describes the individual members of the team, who are fluid and quick to respond to dynamic work environments.

Ideally, Agile teams are made of agile team members.

5 Reasons to Implement Agile Marketing

When compared to traditional project management frameworks, Agile Marketing is the easy winner. A survey conducted by CMG Partners asked CMOs about the results of adopting Agile:

93% said Agile has helped them improve their speed to market93% said Agile helped them switch gears more quickly and effectively87% said Agile has made their teams more productive80% said Agile has led to an enhanced prioritisation of the things that matter80% said Agile helped them deliver a better, more relevant end-product



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The Traditional Waterfall Methodology

The most common traditional marketing methodology is known as Waterfall. It’s characterised by breaking work into several sequential segments, which follow each other chronologically and rarely have much overlap. If you’ve ever planned a marketing campaign using a Gantt Chart, you’re familiar with the Waterfall methodology.

Waterfall has its place in many industries that value sequential, stepwise planning and execution. Construction is a fantastic example, as there’s a linear process of planning, permitting and execution to follow in a structured order.

However, marketing doesn’t flow as linearly as construction. Like software development, there’s an iterative feedback requirement that the Waterfall methodology struggles to satisfy.

Agile Marketing Frameworks & Terminology

There are three primary Agile frameworks:

Scrum: The original Agile methodology developed by 1980s software teamsKanban: A 1950s resource management framework developed by Toyota production teamsScrumban or Modified Scrum: A hybrid Scrum-Kanban framework that’s better suited to the needs of today’s marketing teams

To best discuss their differences, it’ll first help to clarify a few Agile terms:

Backlog: The ever-growing list of work items to be completedSprint: Derived from Scrum, a short period of intense workStory: A single work itemStory Points: Estimates of the resources required to complete a story, generally measured in hoursStoryboard: Derived from Kanban, a visual representation of all stories to be completedSwimlanes: Derived from Kanban, columns on the storyboard representing different phases of work (e.g., requested, in progress and completed)

Now back to those three Agile frameworks.

Scrum

Scrum is based on the idea that teams work best with short sprints of concentrated, prioritised work. These sprints last just 1-3 weeks, and all work is executed by a small team of just 3-7 team members led by a Scrum Master.

Scrum’s goal is to identify all stories (requested work items), prioritise each story, and choose which stories the team has the resources to complete with the goal of producing a minimum viable product by the end of the sprint. After the sprint, the team reviews actual versus expected results and reviews the sprint process to continuously improve their workflow for better productivity.

Kanban

Whereas Scrum uses an iterative cycle of short sprints to prioritise and complete stories, Kanban is continuously in execution. Kanban involves creating a central storyboard with swimlanes for stories in different stages; typically, requested, in progress and completed. New stories are added to the storyboard continuously, and the entire storyboard is in a constant state of review.

Scrumban or Modified Scrum

Scrumban, also known as Modified Scrum, is a hybrid of both Scrum and Kanban that borrows elements of each to suit the needs of today’s marketing teams.

It heavily leverages the Scrum framework with short sprints of focused work but also includes Kanban’s visual storyboard and status swimlanes while still respecting Waterfall’s sequential structure.

Ultimately, there’s no single “best” Agile Marketing Framework. It depends on several factors:

Your company’s industry and the type of products or services you provideYour organisational culture and willingness to integrate Agile principlesYour specific team members’ personalities, strengths and weaknesses

However, most marketing teams find Scrumban to be the best Agile Marketing framework for their teams.

Agile Methodology vs Waterfall Methodology

Waterfall methodology usually doesn’t work too well for marketing teams for two reasons:

Ever-changing requirementsLengthy timelines



1. Ever-changing requirements

Software developers developed Scrum in the 1980s because they kept bringing versions of the completed project to clients only for clients to change what they wanted. Ever hear the phrase, “You don’t know what you don’t know”? That was a common problem, as clients didn’t realise all of the possible features until they started to see it come together.

The same happens with marketing campaigns. As work progresses from marketing plan development to execution to delivery, requirements frequently change. Waterfall isn’t well-suited to adjust with each change requiring you to go back to previously completed phases. This bogs down the process and makes teams feel like they’re spinning their wheels.

Agile Marketing frameworks like Scrumban are well-equipped to deal with changing requirements because sprints only last a few weeks at most. After each sprint, the Agile team reviews newly-requested stories, reprioritises the backlog and gets to work on the next 1-3 week sprint.

2. Lengthy timelines

Most marketing campaigns take 6-12 months (or longer) to roll out. That’s a considerable amount of time, which means the initial planning phase and the final delivery phase are separated by a large gap where your marketing team might as well be working in an underground bunker utterly unaware of the changing market conditions around them. By the time the final product is rolled out, one of two things is usually true:

It’s no longer the best campaign given the new environment.It changed so much due to the aforementioned ever-changing requirements that it’s disconnected from the initial planning phase.

Because of those very obvious downsides, it’s no wonder CMOs love what Agile has done for their marketing teams.  

Scrumban Terminology

Because Scrumban is the most common Agile Marketing methodology used, let’s define a few more terms used by Scrumban teams.

Key Scrum Roles

Scrumban leverages a small Agile team of 3-7 people, plus a couple of external stakeholders that connect the Agile team to the rest of the organisation.

The Scrum Master is the person who leads the Scrum. They’re responsible for cataloguing and filtering all requests that come to the Agile team, and they facilitate all Scrum meetings. The Scrum Master doesn’t have to be a boss, executive or anyone in a leadership role. Anyone on the Agile team can be the Scrum Master, and many high-performing Agile teams rotate Scrum Masters after each sprint to allow everyone to develop the skills required to succeed in the role. After all, Agile is all about flexibility.

Team Members are the remaining people who make up the Agile team. Including the Scrum Master, the Agile team should have between 3-7 people. If you have more, consider breaking up into two or more complementary Agile teams.

The Project Owner is the person who oversees the deliverables or outcome of the sprint. Usually, it’s an organisation leader who people on the Agile team already report to, but that isn’t always the case. In fact, sometimes there isn’t even a Project Owner.

The Requestor is anyone who requests work from an Agile team. They’re a stakeholder in the process and will be included in the Sprint Retrospective meeting.

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The 4 Types of Scrum Meetings

Speaking of meetings, there are four types of Scrum meetings common in Agile Marketing cycles.

The Sprint Planning Meeting is the major kickoff meeting that happens a few days before the scheduled sprint. This meeting is the longest of the entire process, often taking several hours, and is where all of the planning work is done for the full 1-3 week sprint.

Identify all requests to form the backlog.Score and prioritise all stories in the backlog.Determine which stories the sprint will include.Distribute stories to Agile team members.

The Daily Scrum or Daily Standup occurs at the beginning of each day during the sprint and lasts just 10 minutes or less. During these meetings, each Agile team member quickly recaps what they accomplished yesterday, what they’ll accomplish today and any roadblocks they’re facing.

The Sprint Review is a short meeting, less than an hour, which takes place shortly after the completion of the sprint. This meeting includes the Agile team, the Project Owner and the Requestor to hand over deliverables and discuss progress achieved. The Sprint Review is outcome-oriented, and there are no PowerPoint presentations allowed!

The Sprint Retrospective is a longer meeting, generally 1-2 hours, and usually takes place after the Sprint Retrospective. Unlike the Sprint Review, the Sprint Retrospective includes only the 3-7 Agile team members and is process-oriented. The goal of the Sprint Retrospective is to compare the results of the sprint versus what was expected and discuss improvements that can be made to the process to achieve better results with future sprints.

How to Implement Agile Marketing

If you’re thinking about implementing an Agile Marketing framework for your company, there are a few things you’ll need to do before you hold your first Sprint Planning Meeting.

1. Get organisational buy-in

For most organisations using the traditional Waterfall methodology, Agile principles are a huge shock to the system and making the transition requires a lot of organisational change management. You must get buy-in at every level, including executives, potential Agile team members and future requestors.

If you’re a startup using Agile from the get-go, the buy-in process may be easier as you have a clean, blank slate to design your startup marketing strategy.

2. Form teams and map out your workflow

Once you have organisational buy-in, it’s time to put your Agile team together and map out your process, including a standardised request process. While most Agile Marketing workflows most closely resemble Scrumban, you can modify the process to suit both your organisation’s needs and the strengths of your personnel.

As you execute your first few sprints and review the process during your Sprint Retrospectives, you can continuously modify the workflow for better efficiency.

3. Plan your first sprint

Now it’s time for your first Sprint Planning Meeting. Typically, this is the longest meeting of the entire lifecycle, but it’ll probably be extra long for the first few times through the process. Don’t worry if it’s disjointed or inefficient. It’s a learning experience for everyone, so make it fun by ordering food or making a party out of it (if that’s part of your organisational culture).

One of the hardest parts of your first Spring Planning Meeting is understanding how to prioritise and select stories to be included in the sprint. Let’s look a little closer at each.

Prioritising stories

The first step in prioritising stories is identifying them all, so begin by having every team member write down their open work items on Post-It notes, including any work from external requestors. Aggregate your backlog of Post-It notes on your storyboard and remove any redundant items. Now go through all of the Post-Its and organise them with the most pressing items on top and the least pressing on the bottom.

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Estimating capacity and adding stories to the sprint

Once you have your backlog prioritised, it’s time to figure out where to draw the line. Any items above the line are included in the sprint. Any items below the line aren’t.

The first step at this stage is determining how much capacity your team has. Generally, this is measured in hours where each member of your team takes their standard work week and subtracts time they’re allocated to other tasks, such as meetings or answering emails.

Let’s say one of your team members, Peter, works a 40-hour week. He has a one-hour meeting every day during the week and answers emails for one hour at the end of each day. Peter’s capacity looks like this:

Total Work Time: 40 hoursMeetings: 1 hour per day x 5 days = 5 hoursAnswering Emails: 1 hour per day x 5 days = 5 hoursSprint Capacity: 40 hours – 5 hours (meetings) – 5 hours (answering emails) = 30 hours

If your sprint is three weeks long, Peter has 90 hours of capacity during the sprint (30 hours per week x 3 weeks).

Repeat this process for every team member until you know how much total sprint capacity your team has.

Next, you need to identify how many hours each story will take to complete. In the definitions section above, we called these story points. As a rule of thumb, most stories should take less than a single day to complete, so if you have any stories that’ll take more than a day, consider breaking them into multiple smaller stories.

With all of your stories assigned story points, work from the top of your prioritised backlog to the bottom until your team runs out of capacity to complete any remaining work. That’s where you draw the line for the sprint.

4. Execute the sprint

With your first Sprint Planning Meeting complete, all that’s left is to execute the sprint! Use the 10-minute Daily Scrum to divide up the open stories with team members voluntarily choosing which stories they’ll own and physically moving the story to the appropriate swimlane on your storyboard. Repeat this process every day.

5. Review the sprint

Once your first sprint is over, it’s time to review the results with your pair of post-sprint meetings: the results-oriented Sprint Review meeting with stakeholders and the process-oriented Sprint Retrospective with your Agile team.

What did you learn about your workflow? How well did your team do prioritising stories and assigning story points? Were you Daily Scrums efficient?

Make workflow changes as needed and incorporate those changes into your next cycle.

Is Agile Marketing Right for Your Team?

Agile Marketing is a powerful framework embraced by CMOs and other organisational leaders around the world, but that doesn’t mean it’s right for every team. In fact, implementing Agile Marketing can be disastrous for industries, organisations, or individuals who aren’t a good fit.

While Agile Marketing is the right choice more often than not, here are two instances where Agile may not work.

1. You work in a strictly-regulated field like healthcare or finance

Though Agile can work for healthcare and finance organisations, these industries are also heavily-regulated and have defined requirements for many of their outputs.

2. Your team doesn’t see the value of Agile

Buy-in is required for Agile to work. If your executives don’t see its benefit, your efforts may be doomed from the start. Similarly, Agile requires a significant culture change among team members, requestors and other stakeholders. If you don’t have organisational buy-in, it may be worth hiring an Agile consultant or coach, who can help show the benefits of Agile to increase buy-in among key stakeholders.

Conclusion

More than ever, it’s crucial for marketing teams to remain agile and flexible in their constant search for value in a dynamic, rapidly-changing business landscape.

Increasingly, Agile Marketing is the answer. It’s a game-changing framework with the potential to maximise your team’s output and productivity, making you more responsive to industry trends while providing better results to your clients and internal stakeholders.

But to truly make the most of your newfound productivity, you need tools that are capable of keeping up with your new Agile processes.

We’re currently in the process of building TrueNorth, a marketing management system that helps marketing teams create adaptable plans, prioritise campaigns, and rally their teams around the marketing plan.

If you’re interested in joining our beta, you can join here. As a Venture Harbour reader, you’ll be jumped to the front of the beta queue.

The post How to Implement Agile Marketing appeared first on Venture Harbour.

Marketing Budget: The Complete Guide

You know you need to get your brand’s message out there.

You even have some ideas for how to do it.

But how do you know which ideas are the best ideas?

And how much should you even spend?

It sounds like you need a marketing budget.

What’s in This Guide?

This guide covers everything you need to put together an effective marketing budget to ensure your company’s sustained growth:

Why is it important to spend on marketing?What is a marketing budget?Why is a marketing budget important?Aligning your marketing budget with your business goalsBrand vs product-specific marketing costsHow to calculate your marketing budgetHow to create your marketing budgetFinal considerations for your marketing budget

Let’s dive in.

Why is it Important to Spend on Marketing?

Marketing is essential to build brand awareness and increase company revenue. Without investing in marketing, you’re relying on grassroots word of mouth to grow your brand, which, while possible, can take a very long time.

Plus, chances are your competitors are investing in their marketing efforts. If you aren’t at least keeping up with them, you’re losing both market share and time, as it’ll be harder to reclaim that market share later on.

What is a Marketing Budget?

A marketing budget is the total money allocated to growth and promotion-related efforts over a defined period, such as one month, one quarter, or one year. These efforts can include the following:

Website design and developmentPPC ad campaignsSocial media campaignsEmail marketing campaignsContent creation for content marketing campaignsBacklink buildingPrint, TV, radio, direct mail and other traditional campaign channelsEmployees and contractors working on marketing-related effortsTools and software used for marketing-related efforts

The size and complexity of your marketing budget will vary by the size and complexity of your business.

Small businesses may have simpler marketing budgets with just a handful of employees or contractors creating a few blog posts for a content marketing campaign and promoting those posts with basic PPC and social media ads.

Large businesses may have much more complex marketing budgets spanning multiple departments or divisions, each with different department-specific business goals that tie back to your broader business’ growth targets.

Why is a Marketing Budget Important?

Having a marketing budget is hugely important for several reasons.

1. You know exactly how much you can spend

If you don’t have a budget, how do you or your employees know how much to spend?

Let’s say you sell a subscription-based product where the average lifetime value of one customer is $2,000. You tell your marketing team to generate more customers, but you don’t tell them how much to spend. Come month-end, your team tells you they signed up 100 new customers worth $200,000 to your business, and it only cost $100,000.

That’s awesome, except each customer only generates $500 in revenue in their first month, so you just spent $100,000 to generate $50,000 in Month 1 revenue, and now you can’t make payroll next week.

2. You can properly size your marketing spend

As a corollary to the above, having a marketing budget lets you properly size that budget to optimise for your business’ goals. That way, you can find the sweet spot where you’re growing at the right pace while remaining solvent.

If your budget is too small, you may fall short of growth targets and/or lose market share to competitors.

If your budget is too big, you may have to cut back elsewhere to avoid going under.

3. You’re forced to prioritise your marketing efforts

Between PPC ad campaigns, social media ads, paid sponsorships and promotions, traditional print ads and other strategies, there are a lot of different ways you can spend to grow your brand.

But if you know you only have $5,000 per month to invest in a single channel, you’re forced to prioritise one channel above all others. A tool like TrueNorth can help you make that decision.

Aligning your Marketing Budget with your Business Goals

Your marketing team is hard at work spending their budgeted allocation to build your company’s brand and generate new customers.

But what if that isn’t what they’re doing?

Or, more specifically, what if that isn’t what they’re doing directly?

Think about your company’s sales funnel for a second. Yours probably looks something like this:

Now think about what your marketing team is doing and where in the funnel they’re operating.

They should be trying to generate as many customers as possible, but are they instead thinking in terms of qualified leads, traffic, or impressions?

Let’s look at two basic scenarios to illustrate this point. In both scenarios, your company is promoting your awesome email marketing course, which you sell for $1,200.

Scenario A

In Scenario A, your marketing team is running a PPC ad campaign to maximise traffic by targeting keywords like “why use email marketing” at $10 cost per click. They have $15,000 to spend and generate 1,500 visits to their target page, which leads to 15 new customers (1% conversion rate) with $1,200 revenue per customer.

In total, they spent $15,000 and generated $18,000 in revenue for a 20% ROI.

Scenario B

In Scenario B, your marketing team is running a PPC ad campaign to maximise customer conversions by targeting buyer-focused keywords like “best email marketing course” at $20 cost per click. They have $15,000 to spend and generate just 750 visits to their target page, but those 750 visits turn into 25 new customers (3.3% conversion rate) with the same $1,200 revenue per customer.

In total, they spent $15,000 and generated $30,000 in revenue for a 100% ROI.

The marketing team in Scenario A was able to generate twice as much traffic, but the marketing team in Scenario B was able to generate much more revenue for the same ad spend because they were targeting customers further down in their sales funnel.

This doesn’t mean you should always target customers already in the buying phase of their journey. Maybe targeting customers at the top-level awareness stage of the sales funnel gives you the best ROI because they’re less expensive to acquire and your email marketing efforts are convincing.

To make the most of your marketing budget and generate the highest possible ROI, your marketing team must think in terms of your business’ goals.

Brand vs Product-Specific Marketing Costs

At any given time, your company is marketing itself at two different levels:

General brand awareness and visibilityProduct-specific promotion and lead generation

These two types of marketing are complementary, and an effective marketing budget considers both.

1. General brand awareness and visibility

Spend some of your marketing efforts on general brand awareness. If your company sells B2B training courses, like the email marketing course example above, you want to spend money promoting your brand’s overall expertise and authority. There are a ton of different forms this level of marketing can take:

SponsorshipsGuest blogging or podcast appearancesTraditional TV and print adsDisplay ads and native advertisingBranded social media hashtag campaigns

These marketing efforts prop up your entire company, which has indirect benefits on revenue generated by your specific products.

Though not universally the case, frequently, these types of brand awareness marketing activities have fixed monthly budgets because they’re ongoing with more indirect efforts.

But just because these campaigns are more indirect and don’t directly promote specific products doesn’t mean you can’t (or shouldn’t) try to track their ROI, though it can be more difficult. Monitor referral traffic, on-site engagement and email sign-ups to measure the value of your brand awareness efforts.

2. Product-specific promotion and lead generation

One level deeper than general brand awareness is product-specific promotion. If your company sells B2B training courses, this is the money you spend promoting a specific course to generate more customers and revenue directly.

While product-specific promotional efforts can have global effects propping up your whole brand, those benefits are secondary to the primary goal of generating more customers and revenue through increased sales of the specific product being promoted.

Product-specific marketing campaigns have a different feel than general brand awareness campaigns:

PPC ad campaigns for specific product-related keywordsPaid influencer promotions featuring your productGiveaways of free product for trusted brands in your industry to reviewContent marketing campaigns with solution-focused blog posts and tutorials

These types of marketing efforts have one goal: Generate more sales of your specific product.

These types of product-specific marketing activities usually have variable budgets. That doesn’t mean you spend different amounts every month, but rather that your company’s product offerings are more dynamic than your brand itself. If your company is releasing a new or updated product, you may want to increase marketing spend for that product to generate buzz and momentum at launch. Over the following weeks or months, maybe your company has another product to promote or is releasing an update of an existing product, and you want to focus marketing spend there instead.

How to Calculate your Marketing Budget

Broadly speaking, there are two common ways to set marketing budgets:

Benchmark budgetsZero-based budgets

One is significantly better than the other.

1. Benchmark budgets

Benchmark budgets are bottom-up budgets, meaning they assign spend based on a bottom-line number. Examples of benchmark budgets are the following:

12% of revenue12% of revenue after expenses (“Profit-First” budgeting)Fixed budget every month, quarter, etc.

Benchmark budgets are common because they’re safe and easy, but they give little consideration to your business’ goals or growth targets.

It’s like training for a marathon by running 15 miles each week. It’s certainly better than running five miles each week, but is it enough training to finish in under four hours? I guess you’ll find out come race day.

2. Zero-based budgets

Zero-based budgets are top-down budgets, meaning they work backwards from your business goal to determine how much you need to spend.

For our marathon trainer, that means working backwards from your target finishing time to determine your average pace and the number of miles you need to run each week to improve to that pace.

This approach is more purposeful and gives you the best chance of hitting your goal.

A zero-based marketing budget begins with your True North metric; the one metric, that if increased, will achieve your business’ goal.

Source

Let’s revisit our email marketing course example above. Let’s say your goal is to generate $600,000 in revenue over the next 12 months. With zero-based budgeting, you work backwards from that goal:

Your goal is to grow revenue by $600,000 in 12 months.At $1,200 in revenue per customer, that’s 500 new customers.Assuming a 50% gross profit target, that’s a target acquisition cost of $600 per customer.

Depending on the specific marketing tactics you plan to use, there are a lot of different ways to reach that $600 per customer target. Let’s go back to Scenarios A and B above.

For the marketing team in Scenario A trying to generate new customers with a PPC ad campaign targeting keywords like “why use email marketing,” they know their campaign converts leads into customers 1% of the time. If they want to hit their $600 target customer acquisition cost with a 1% conversion rate, they can’t spend more than $6 per click.

For the marketing team in Scenario B trying to generate new customers with a PPC ad campaign targeting keywords like “best email marketing course,” they know their campaign converts leads into customers 3.3% of the time. If they want to hit their $600 target customer acquisition cost with a 1% conversion rate, they can’t spend more than $20 per click.

If you don’t know which campaign ideas have the best ROI yet, I recommend using a tool like TrueNorth to track all of your campaign ideas and record their results in a centralised place so you can hone in on your best campaigns and grow your business faster.

How to Create your Marketing Budget

Creating your marketing budget is a little more involved than just earmarking dollars for different costs or campaigns. You’ll want to focus on these five steps:

Determine your business’ objective and its True North metricUnderstand your sales funnelQuantify your operational costsFactor in all product-related promotional costsMeasure and track ROI

Let’s take a more in-depth look at each.

1. Determine your business’ objective and its True North metric

Every solid marketing budget starts with the top-line business goal. What is success to your business?

Once you know what success means for your business, you can determine your True North metric; the one metric that, if increased, will achieve that goal.

This initial step is crucial because everything after it should always tie back to that objective. If your marketing plan and budgeted expenses don’t move the needle for your True North metric, should you be doing them?

2. Understand your sales funnel

Your sales funnel describes how you move visitors through the various stages of the buying process to become revenue-generating customers.

It should cost less money to generate general prospects or site visitors who are at the top of the funnel — further away from making a purchase — and haven’t become qualified leads yet.

Conversely, it should cost more to generate highly-qualified leads who are lower in the sales funnel and ready to buy.

Your goal should always be to optimise your sales funnel by putting the right campaigns, marketing materials, content, and sales pitches in front of the right visitors or leads depending upon where they are in the buying journey.

If you do this successfully, you can know two crucial pieces of information about your sales funnel:

The cost to acquire a prospect, visitor or lead at each stage.The conversion rate of each stage into revenue-generating customers.

Now you can maximise your marketing budget’s performance by creating campaigns that target potential customers at the stage of the funnel with the highest ROI.

3. Quantify your operational costs

The amount you pay for each click in a CPC ad campaign is just one marketing-related cost. You may also have operational costs that are more fixed in nature that your company needs to budget for regardless of the size of your brand or product-specific campaigns:

Employee/contractor salaries and related expenses Email marketing tools  and CRM softwareWebsite domain registration and hostingSEO-related tools and expenses

Whether you spend $20,000 or $200,000 on an ad campaign, you’ll have to account for these mostly-fixed expenses just to keep your marketing teams’ lights on.

4. Factor in all product-related promotional costs

When gearing up for a new product’s promotional launch, it’s easy to forget any expenses you incurred in the prior months preparing for launch.

Market researchFocus groups to generate customer feedbackTesting to develop the perfect campaign messaging

All of these expenses factor into your total marketing cost even though they may not directly show up on your active campaign’s budget.

5. Measure and track ROI

Your business should always be looking to improve your marketing ROI to get a better bang for your buck. A key part of that is frequent measuring and tracking of campaign performance.

Six Sigma is a set of techniques that focus on process improvement, and an integral part of Six Sigma methodology is this process of continuous refinement and quality improvement known as the DMAIC Process:

Define the True North metric and KPI that tie your marketing team’s efforts to your business’ goals.Measure the defined metrics while your campaign is running.Analyse the data generated from the measurement process.Improve your campaigns by tweaking the performance of underperforming campaigns, landing pages or email copy, or look to cut underperforming campaigns altogether to focus on high-ROI activities.Control this iterative improvement by documenting the process and making it part of your marketing team’s day-to-day workflow.







Final Considerations when Creating your Marketing Budget

Before you rush off to create your company’s marketing budget, there are a couple of final considerations to make:

Your company’s marketing maturity and your True North channelThe role of remarketing



1. Your company’s marketing maturity and your True North channel

Your marketing budget should be agile and responsive, so it can react to what is (and isn’t) working. Overall, the idea is to do more of what generates the best results and less of what doesn’t.

A key part of finding what works is identifying your True North channel; the channel that generates the best results.

There are three phases of marketing maturity that your marketing team can use to figure out how to allocate marketing spend across various channels:

Phase 1: You’re looking for your core channel, which requires investing a small amount of your budget in a wide variety of channels to see what works.Phase 2: You’ve found your True North channel, which means you can focus intensely on maximising your returns until they begin to diminish.Phase 3: You’ve saturated your True North channel, which means you should slowly experiment with one or two other channels to diversify your efforts.

This is all a part of DMAIC continuous improvement process and is integral to your marketing team’s sustained success in an increasingly competitive landscape.

2. The role of remarketing

Remarketing lets you customise your message to speak directly to visitors who have seen your site before. Considering 97% of people will visit your site without making a purchase, remarketing is an important and cost-efficient way of continuing the conversation with people who are familiar with your brand or product but haven’t pulled the trigger on a purchase yet.

Earlier we talked about how important it is to put the right campaigns, marketing materials, content, and sales pitches in front of the right visitors or leads depending upon where they are in the buying journey. Remarketing is an extension of that by putting personalised, targeted content in front of specific people. Plus, CPC rates for remarketing ads cost half as much, as regular ads, and can convert over 50% better.

Conclusion

Your marketing budget includes everything your company needs to spend on promotion-related activities and should always align with your business’ goals. If your top-line goal is to increase revenue, then your marketing budget should be created from the top-down to include the resources required to hit your revenue targets.

It’s also important to focus those resources on promotional activities and marketing channels that generate the highest ROI. If you don’t know what those activities and channels are, begin by experimenting with small marketing spend across a variety of channels to identify the big winners. If you do know what those activities and channels are, focus your efforts on maximising your returns until your results begin to diminish.

Above all else, remember that your company’s marketing efforts should be agile and responsive as you react to changes in performance in constant pursuit of the highest possible ROI.

We’re currently in the process of building TrueNorth, a marketing management system that helps marketing teams create adaptable plans, prioritise campaigns, and rally their teams around the marketing plan.

If you’re interested in joining our beta, you can join here. As a Venture Harbour reader, you’ll be jumped to the front of the beta queue.

The post Marketing Budget: The Complete Guide appeared first on Venture Harbour.

The Ultimate Guide to Building a Go-To-Market Strategy

It’s a common theme among startups.

Develop an idea. Build a product. Drum up excitement. Then, figure out the marketing as you go.

Yet, according to CB Insights, the number one reason why startups fail (42%) over burnout and even running out of cash, is because they tackle problems that may be interesting instead of those that serve a market need.

New product excitement can cause founders to overlook the critical elements that ensure a product’s success in its market—an intimate knowledge of your potential customers and the market in which you are launching. Even the most innovative and excellently crafted products may not survive without a clear roadmap to what success looks like and how to achieve it.

Don’t develop your products and marketing in isolation from the key elements that are integral to success. Craft a go-to-market strategy and tip the scales in your favour.

What is a Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy?

A go-to-market strategy is different from your typical marketing strategy. A marketing strategy outlines tactics that satisfy the demand for a product you already introduced to your market. It also morphs over time to adapt to your business.

In contrast, a go-to-market strategy is short-term and involves research, planning, and strategy for a product or service you have not yet launched. It provides a clear roadmap for how to introduce a new product to your ideal customers.

Go-to-market strategies are not just for new product launches, however. They can also help you launch your product into a new market segment, re-launch your brand, or improve existing product sales.

A GTM strategy is beneficial because it can reduce your time to market and also ensure a successful product launch and a clear path for growth. You will also prevent money loss by only executing tactics aligned with your research and targets.

What is a go-to-market strategy? A GTM strategy answers the Who, What, and How:

WHO are you marketing to?WHAT marketing strategies will help you reach this target market?WHAT are their goals?WHAT are their problems?HOW does your product solve these problems?HOW does your competition solve these problems?HOW can you strategically price and position your product for the best results?

Essentially, your go-to-market strategy will outline how you get your product in front of the people who will be willing to buy it.

How do you create a GTM strategy?

This guide will discuss how to formulate a go-to-market strategy. Throughout, we may use the term “product” for brevity, but you can use this interchangeably if you sell services.

7 Steps to Building a Winning Go-to-Market Strategy







Formulating a GTM strategy will require comprehension of several components:



Your ideal customerYour market, positioning and the demand for your productYour competitionYour product and its offerings; pricing strategyChannels to distribute your product and reach your customers

We will walk through each of these below and discuss how to execute each step.

1. Assess Your Market and Product Demand

Do people want and need your product? Is there enough demand for what you are selling?

When you thoroughly research product demand, you can tell if your product will be a hit (or a failure) long before you even launch it.

That’s why assessing product demand is such an integral part of your go-to-market strategy. Suppose while you go through this process, you uncover (hesitatingly) that a large market does not exist (which means there will likely not be enough demand to create a viable business). In that case, you can adjust your product and/or marketing to satisfy your market. Hence, it’s also a way to validate your product.

Note that if you already have a finished product ready to sell, we hope you have already validated your idea by doing this type of research. If not, it’s vital to do this research now before wasting a lot of money on marketing. If you find a product-market mismatch, you can tweak your product to fit your market or vice-versa.

To assess market demand, answer the following questions:

What problems does my product solve?What proof do I have that my product solves these problems?

If you are unsure if your product will have enough demand to sell, perform some initial research before going ahead with your go-to-market strategy. Talk to potential customers one-on-one and gauge their reaction to your product. Ask them specific questions. Also, run a survey to a segment of your target market.

2. Identify your Ideal Customer and Create Buyer Personas

It might be hard to believe, but not everyone loves chocolate and puppies.

Some people are allergic to puppies. Others are die-hard cat fans. And some don’t even care about pets at all (I know, the horror). The point is, we are all different.

Similarly, some people will adore your product, and others won’t care about it or consider it valuable. This may sting a little, but not everyone will love your “puppy.”

This is OK. In fact, it’s good.

The reality is that you can’t market to everyone because everyone isn’t a target market. If you target people who are not interested in what you are selling, you lose the ability to market to the people who are really interested in what you are selling. In the end, you will end up selling to no one.

Identifying your ideal customer helps you get laser-focused on the customers who fit your product. According to Copyblogger founder Brian Clark, “You don’t just accept who you find—you choose who you attract.”

Who are your ideal customers? Let’s go through the process.

Start the research process by answering some questions about your current customers:

What problems do you solve for them?Why do they make decisions in favour of your product or service?How does your product meet your customers’ goals?How is your product different from your competitors?

Leverage your current data to answer these questions. Consult your Google Analytics and gather customer information from their conversations with customer service, marketing and sales teams. Get data on issues, questions, and feedback gleaned from customer conversations. Also, research your customers’ interests on social media and notice what profiles they follow and what’s important in their interaction with others.

The next step is to determine the physical demographics and psychographics (habits, interests, values) of your ideal customer.

We won’t go into much detail on physical demographics as they’re straightforward and typically include characteristics such as age, location, gender, and other lifestyle factors.

For psychographic data, answer the following questions about your ideal customer:

Where do they hang out online?What type of media do they consume?What type of communication do they prefer?What are their deepest concerns?What are their biggest stressors?What are their pain points, problems and challenges?What are their motivations?What are their product preferences?What relieves their stress?What triggers them to look for a solution to their problem?What are their objections to purchasing?

If you don’t yet have customers or you want to dig deeper into uncovering customer behaviour and interests, send a survey to target customers and offer an incentive for participation. If you do not have customers, add a popup or message on your website, and send a link to the survey via your social media profiles.

Are you launching a new product?

If you already have some customers, you may naturally gravitate toward attracting more of the same people with your new product offering. But, what if your current customers are not the ideal customer for your new venture? New products warrant new research. Start from scratch with a new customer profile and go through the steps as if this was your first product.

What are your goals?

Your ideal customer should also be someone who helps you tap into new markets and expand your business.

For example, let’s say your software solution targets startups, but recent improvements allowed you to expand your market to medium-sized businesses. Build a go-to-market strategy to target this new segment so you can scale your business. Just be careful not to tip the scales to favour your business goals more than what the customer segment wants and needs. Balance is key.

Build Customer Personas

Customer personas organise your ideal customer data into customer profiles (personas). Customer personas are critical as they will play a role in every marketing strategy.

Customer personas are realistic representations of your target market. Either based on real customers or fictional, they should embody the traits, characteristics, and behaviours you uncovered from your ideal customer research.

Here is a sample customer persona.

Source

ScriptDoll also has a handy Ideal Customer Worksheet and Profile to help you build a persona.

Tailor Your Messaging

Defining your ideal customer allows you to tailor your messaging to your targets to increase conversions. For example, let’s say you sell a software solution that automates marketing.  Here is how your persona data connects to your messaging.

3. Create Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)

How do you differentiate yourself from the competition? Why should your customer buy from you instead of your competitor?

You likely have multiple answers to those questions. But, a unique value proposition isn’t just a list of your product’s features and benefits. It’s a comprehensive, all-encompassing statement that briefly describes the real value your product offers, and why it’s better than your competition.

Essentially, your UVP should strike a chord with your audience, and at a glance, answer the question on every customer’s mind, “Why should I choose you over your competitors?”

Here is a formula for Unique Value Proposition:

That’s a lot to fit into one concise statement, which is why so many marketers have a hard time developing their UVP.

To make the process easier, focus on your top product benefit (the deep benefit) instead of individual features, and use that for inspiration.

For example, a selling feature of a lightweight vacuum may be that it helps consumers deep clean their rugs with its powerful motor. But if we dig deeper into the benefit, we would also discover that because the product is lightweight, it makes cleaning much easier and less of a chore. This deep benefit bypasses the brain (cleans the rug well) and hits the heart, empathising with the customer (less stress while cleaning = happier customer). You are not selling a vacuum; you are selling happiness.

The founder of Revlon Charles Revson acknowledged this when he famously said, “In the factory we make cosmetics. In the store we sell hope.”

Need inspiration? Here are some popular UVP examples:

Digit  – Save money, without thinking about it.
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Instead of listing a cool product feature, Digit appeals to a deep benefit or pain point of its audience—it’s too difficult to save money. Digit removes the complexity from saving money so consumers can achieve their money goals, well, without even thinking about it.

Intuit  – Powering prosperity

Two simple words are all it takes. Intuit helps individuals and businesses organise and budget their finances with ease, which results in the deep benefit of empowering people to become prosperous.

Squarespace  – Helping creative ideas succeed

Website builder Squarespace focuses on the emotional needs of its targets: creatives who may not be tech-savvy but want to get their creation out into the world with a professional website.

4. Define Your Brand Positioning and Messaging

How do you want your customers to perceive you? What do you want them to think when they come across your brand?

Once you define your targets and solidify your unique selling points, determine how you want your market to perceive you. In other words, define your brand positioning.

According to The Branding Journal, positioning is, “the act of designing the company’s offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of the target market”.

To successfully position yourself in your market, first, figure out what your customers want (your ideal customer). Next, list the brand’s attributes that differentiate you from your competition (what you want to be known for, your UVP), and then research your competition to figure out how your brand fits in your market. The last step is to come up with a brand positioning statement that ties it all together.

Competitive Analysis

We already discussed identifying your ideal target customer and also defining your UVP so you can identify your differentiators. To fully position yourself, you also need to identify and understand your competitors so you can figure out how you fit in your industry.

The goal of a competitive analysis is first to identify your competitors and compare and contrast their marketing with yours to discover better ways to attract your customers. Don’t copy their tactics, but uncover their strategy strengths and weaknesses to inform your go-to-market strategy better and position yourself for success.  

You can also poll your customers to ask them who they think your competitor is as it may be a company you were unaware of. Get feedback directly from your customers to ensure you are competing against the right companies, and not wasting your time elsewhere. This knowledge can strengthen your marketing and help you outperform.

One last thing to note here is that your competition may change once you target a new segment. The people in each segment will espouse distinct goals and values—that is if you segmented correctly.

Note that competitive analysis is important, but it’s not the biggest priority of this process. Businesses set themselves up for failure when they solely rely on competitive data to inform new product ideas. Instead, focus more on customer feedback and insights from your internal team; prioritise this information instead. Leverage competitive analysis to discover how you fit into your current market environment and to find the best ways to reach your ideal customer.

Positioning map

Taking competitors, your customer attributes and product benefits into consideration, create a positioning map for each product differentiator.

Let’s say you run a pet grooming service, and two of your key selling attributes are accessibility and quick delivery.

The positioning map will help you see where you fit in the market relative to your competitors.

Once you solidify your positioning, create your positioning statement, “High-quality pet grooming services, delivered to your door, in minutes.”

So what you are essentially doing is creating messaging that positions your brand a certain way in your customers’ minds, exactly how you want it to be perceived.

A simple way to create your positioning statement is to focus on three words or traits that define your product and brand. For example, in the above statement, we mentioned that the pet grooming service was safe, easy to access (delivered to your door), and delivered quickly (in minutes).

Use your positioning statement to define your messaging and tailor your communication to your targets.

5. Create Your Marketing Strategy

How will you ultimately use this information to reach your customers? This is what your marketing strategy will define.

Everything we have done up until this point feeds into the development of your marketing strategy. While this topic is quite extensive, we will briefly cover the essential elements and how to tie it all together.

The way you target your customer will depend on which stage of the buyer’s journey they are in. The buyer’s journey outlines the steps your customer takes from discovering your product all the way to purchase. Below are the three primary stages of the buyer’s journey and the type of content your prospect may interact with at each stage.

1st stage – Awareness – The consumer or prospect becomes aware of your brand. Awareness can occur via educational content such as blog posts, videos, infographics, or exposure to your social channels. At this stage, the prospect may also opt-in to receive a lead offer and become a subscriber.

2nd stage – Consideration – The prospect evaluates solutions and compares them with each other. At this stage, content and messaging may include case studies, reviews, webinars, or product demos.

3rd stage – Decision – The prospect is ready to make a decision. They may interact with content such as case studies, reviews, proposals, product videos, and tutorials.

The goal here is to identify what the prospect’s goals are as they move through the funnel so you can send the right content and messaging to push them further down the funnel.

Marketing Channels

Where will you deliver your messages and interact with your audience? What type of media will your audience consume?

Consumers devour media at a rapid rate. On average, global consumers interact with media over 7.5 hours a day, likely shifting back and forth from online ads and videos to product reviews and social sites, and even offline media such as newspapers and magazines.

Therefore, to successfully reach consumers, brands need to be present on multiple channels. How do you choose the appropriate channels for your brand?

First, assess which channels your targets use the most. Review your competition as well and identify which channels they are using to inform your strategy. Next, match your chosen channels to your customer’s journey, and provide a seamless, consistent experience for consumers who access them.

For example, a consumer may find out about your product on LinkedIn, then move to your website to learn more. Finally, they may visit your product tutorial on YouTube and watch your customer reviews on your website. If this were your sales funnel, your channel strategy might include:

[Awareness] Strengthening your product pages and messaging on LinkedIn. Would videos convert better? How can you engage more on LinkedIn to bring more brand awareness?[Consideration] Optimizing your landing pages. When consumers leave LinkedIn to view your website, how well do your landing pages convert?  Do you have a landing page set up or do you lead people directly to your website? Are you logically continuing the conversation from your LinkedIn to the pages on your website?[Decision] Optimising your YouTube videos. Are your YouTube videos optimised for consumers who are ready to make a decision?

As you enter channels, monitor which ones perform the best, and pump more marketing dollars into the high-performers. Note that even though a product performed well on one channel, doesn’t mean a second product will follow suit. Whenever you launch a new product or expand into a new target segment, reassess your strategy and perform more testing.

6. Define Your Pricing Strategy

Pricing is not just a financial decision; it affects many aspects of your business and communicates different messages to your prospects. For one, it can indicate to the customer your product’s value. A customer may perceive a lower-priced product as inferior or vice versa. But, the price at which this occurs will be different for each target segment.

Pricing will also influence your sales and marketing. For example, a higher-end, higher-priced product may require a longer sales funnel and more coercing to convince people to invest.  

Your brand and product attributes will also affect your pricing strategy. For example, if the price is one of your main selling points, you may want to undercut the competition. If you are focusing on quality more than price, you may want to price your product higher than the competition. You can consult your positioning maps for this step as well.

Consult this in-depth guide for more information on pricing strategies.

7. Additional Considerations (Budget, Metrics, and Resources)

You are almost ready for launch. But, a go-to-market strategy wouldn’t be complete without the following:

Budgeting 

Prepare a budget and consider all items, including product development (if applicable), personnel, R&D, warehousing, and marketing. Also, account for future cash flow and set aside an additional five to ten per cent for contingencies.

Metrics and KPIs 

Your strategy is not complete without metrics that define your launch’s success. The metrics should be attainable and quantifiable (“1,000 sales in 60 days” instead of  “a lot of sales in the coming months”)

Marketing Made Easy: Resources and Support

The right tools can help you automate your tasks and forecast your growth before you even launch.

We are currently developing a new marketing collaboration platform TrueNorth to help marketers plan, test, and gain confidence in their campaigns by simulating them before launch. Save money and time discovering which campaigns will work before you spend your money. If you want to beta test TrueNorth, go here to request early access.

Your Go-to-Market Strategy: Summary of the Steps

We discussed a 7-step process for developing your go-to-market strategy:

Assess your market and product demandIdentify your ideal customer and create buyer personasCreate your unique value propositionDefine your brand positioning and messagingCreate your marketing strategyDefine your pricing strategyAdditional Considerations (budget, metrics, and resources)

Launching a new product or entering a new market is often more chaotic than a step-by-step process would suggest. You can complete these steps out of order or at the same time. Regardless, always focus on your customer and don’t shortcut any part of the process. A go-to-market strategy will ensure you have control over your product and its marketing as you go from idea to launch.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Building a Go-To-Market Strategy appeared first on Venture Harbour.

ROI Calculator: How to Calculate Your Marketing ROI

Proving the value of marketing campaigns can be difficult, especially at the earlier stages of the marketing funnel where conversions and KPIs aren’t directly linked to sales or revenue.

This makes it difficult to put a monetary value on strategies like content marketing or individual ad campaigns that might be essential for generating leads but don’t close the deal themselves.

Fewer than 50% of marketers are confident about proving the success of their marketing activities – Skyword’s 2020 Content Marketing Trends Report.

Accurately calculating the return on investment (ROI) of every marketing action is crucial for proving that they contribute to generating revenue – whether it’s directly or further down the consumer journey. Not only do business executives expect you to show the value of your marketing efforts in plain numbers, you also need to know yourself which strategies are profitable.

In this article, we explain how you can calculate marketing ROI more effectively, why it’s so important to do so and some of the difficulties/limitations you might experience along the way.

What are we looking at in this article?

Our priority with this article is to help you accurately calculate the ROI of your marketing campaigns. Aside from proving the value of successful marketing actions, this will also enable you to identify areas for improvement and optimise your campaigns to improve performance.

That being said, it’s important to understand that ROI isn’t the perfect KPI – a trap many marketers and business owners fall into. In marketing, there is no one metric to rule them all and ROI should be used alongside other performance indicators to build a complete picture of campaign performance – something we’ll explain in more detail throughout this article.

Here’s a preview of what we’re looking at:

Marketing ROI definitionFree marketing ROI calculatorWhy is ROI so important?The pros and cons of ROIIs ROI overrated?Other important metrics and KPIs

Once we’re done, you should have everything you need to calculate the ROI of your marketing campaigns and a better understanding of how to use (and not use) return on investment as a marketing KPI.

Marketing ROI: The obligatory definition

In articles like this, it’s always best practice to start by defining the subject to make sure everyone’s on the same page. So what exactly is marketing ROI? Well, return on investment (ROI) aims to tell you how much revenue you’re getting in exchange for your total marketing spend.

In other words, ROI measures the difference between how much you spend on marketing activities and how much money they generate.

ROI is measured as a percentage and there are numerous ways to calculate it – several of which we’ll be looking at in this article. The most basic method of calculating ROI is to subtract your marketing spend from the revenue generated, divide this figure by your marketing spend and then times the resulting figure by 100.

So your basic ROI calculation formula would look something like this:

ROI = Marketing revenue – marketing spend / marketing spend x 100

Let’s say one of your marketing campaigns has generated $100,000 revenue over the past financial year and the total marketing spend on that campaign comes to $38,000.

Your marketing ROI calculation would be as follows:

100,000 – 38,000 = 62,000

62,000 / 38,000 = 1.63*

1.63* x 100 = 163%

* Figures rounded to the nearest hundredth decimal

So that’s the basic formula of calculating return on investment but, in reality, accurately calculating marketing ROI is a little more complex than that – something we’ll explain in more detail throughout the remainder of this article.

First, though, let’s take a look at our ROI calculator.

Marketing ROI calculator

To help you calculate the marketing ROI of different strategies, we’ve built an ROI calculator, powered by TrueNorth.io and built using Leadformly. You can even embed this form on your own website by filling it out and clicking on the embed link on the final results page.

To calculate your marketing ROI, simply follow the steps on the form above, starting with how much you have spent on any given campaign or strategy – eg: $10,000.

Click on the continue button and the next step will ask you to provide the following three details:

Conversions: How many conversions you generated from your investment.Conversion goal: Which type of conversion goal you’re measuring (sales, signups, leads or visits).Return: The total revenue you generated from these conversions.

This stage is important because it forces you to attribute revenue to your conversions goals. For example, if you’re calculating the ROI of a lead generation strategy, you need to understand the average value of every single lead – not only the ones that lead to purchases.

Let’s say you spend $10,000 on a campaign that generates 3,000 leads – fairly realistic numbers, albeit conveniently round. You can already take from this that you’re spending an average of $3.33 on every lead from this campaign, which is a crucial metric for understanding the value of marketing strategies before the sale.

Now, all you need to do is attribute the total revenue generated by this campaign. Let’s go with a modest 1% success rate of turning leads into customers and say you get an average of $3,000 from each customer. This gives you a total return of $90,000 for this campaign and you’re ready to calculate your marketing ROI.

Complete the form and your results reveal a campaign ROI of 800% and a return of $30 for every lead (vs $3.33 spent).

By calculating ROI in this manner you can also identify room for improvement. Of course, you could increase investment and expect to generate even more revenue from such a profitable campaign.

Alternatively, you could look at that 1% conversion rate of leads into customers and decide there’s room for improvement here. By optimising your lead nurturing strategies and turning more of them into paying customers, you can increase revenue without increasing your investment.

Another angle to take could be increasing the lifetime value of each customer. So, instead of generating an average of $3,000 per customer, you could incorporate cross-selling and upselling campaigns with the aim of increasing this to an average of $4,000, which would get you up to $120,000 revenue from $90,000.

The point is: the more detailed your ROI calculation is, the more accurate it becomes and the greater insights you have for improving performance across your campaigns at every stage of the customer journey.

Why is ROI so important?

Needless to say, ROI is one of the most important KPIs for marketers and businesses. There’s no such thing as a free marketing strategy and, above all, you need to know that you’re generating enough revenue to justify the expense across your marketing activities.

More specifically, there are several reasons why ROI is so important to marketers, specifically.

Prove your marketing strategy is profitable (or not)

Return on investment is by no means the only measure of marketing success and not a perfect KPI, either. We’ll look at the pros and cons of ROI as a metric later but, for now, let’s give it the credit it deserves as one of the most important and useful measures of marketing success.

The first reason ROI is such an important metric is that it helps establish that marketing campaigns are profitable. If you’re investing $38,000 per year in marketing and generating $100,000, then you’ve got yourself a profitable marketing strategy.

Calculate growth potential

The second reason ROI is so important is that it also helps you calculate growth potential. If your marketing strategies achieve an ROI of 163% and generate $100,000 revenue from $38,000 investment, then, in theory, you should be able to double your revenue and profit by doubling the investment.

Of course, things aren’t always as simple as this but ROI gives you a strong indication of growth potential and allows you to pinpoint specific marketing strategies that are worth increasing your investment.

Let’s say your SEO strategy currently has an ROI of 123% while your paid advertising strategy has a more profitable ROI of 238%. This gives you a strong indication that increasing your PPC budget is the most profitable step to take with next year’s marketing spend.

Protect your marketing budget

Return on investment is also a valuable measure of failure and accurately pinpointing marketing strategies with underperforming or negative ROIs can save your marketing budget – or even your entire business.

A poor ROI doesn’t necessarily mean you need to pause your strategy or abandon it altogether, though. Once you pinpoint underperforming strategies or campaigns, you can optimise them to improve performance and increase the overall ROI of your collective marketing strategies.

It works both ways, too. You can learn lessons from your high-performing strategies/campaigns and apply these to improve the results of less successful ones.

Attribute failure & success

Above all, ROI allows you to prove where the success and failures are in your marketing efforts. Whether you need to prove results to directors, identify successful strategies or optimise individual campaigns, ROI provides a simple, accountable measure of success.

You can use this to test new strategies, demonstrate your successes, identify failures and learn crucial lessons along the way.

This doesn’t mean ROI is the perfect measure of success or the only one you need. As with all marketing metrics, there are pros and cons to using ROI as your primary KPI and it’s important to understand these.

The pros and cons of ROI

As a ratio of revenue vs spend, return on investment is a great way to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. However, a lot of marketers fall into the trap of prioritising ROI when there are plenty of other important metrics that should be considered alongside it.

All KPIs have their limitations and weaknesses, which is fine – as long as you know what they are. Return on investment is no different and understanding the pros and cons of ROI will help you use it effectively.

The pros of ROI



ROI is easy to understand

One of the biggest strengths ROI has as a KPI is that it’s easy to understand from a reporting perspective. If your campaign has an ROI of 163%, then you know it’s generating profit and adding value to your business.

Likewise, any campaigns with an ROI lower than, say, 50% are hurting your marketing budget. From this single metric, you can see which campaigns are working for you and which ones need optimising to improve performance – or dropping altogether.

The easy-to-understand aspect of ROI is valuable for demonstrating the effectiveness of campaigns to non-marketers, too. If you’re sending reports to executives who want to know your marketing efforts are paying, ROI is going to be one of the first KPIs they look out for.

Talking to non-marketers about impression shares, customer lifetime value and retention rates doesn’t always communicate the value of strategies in a way they’re interested in. Return on investment is a fast, no-nonsense measurement to demonstrate all of the good things you’re doing.

Fast & easy comparisons

ROI’s no-nonsense nature is great for marketers, too – especially when you need a fast and easy way to compare the effectiveness of different strategies or campaigns.

If your aim is to increase revenue for the next year, you can use ROI to see which strategies will achieve the highest income through increasing investment.

On the other hand, if your aim is to increase revenue without investing anymore, then you can optimise the strategies with the lowest ROIs to improve performance, increase ROI and generate more revenue from the same marketing spend.

Achieving either of these goals is easier said than done, of course, but ROI makes it easy to compare performance through a single metric and help you prioritise where your marketing efforts (and budget) are best spent.

Universal and divisible



An old example of campaign reports from HubSpot and Salesforce data, making ROI comparison easy [source].

Another big strength of return on investment as a measure of performance is that you can apply it to any marketing strategy and calculate it for every campaign. You can use ROI to measure the performance of all your marketing efforts, each individual strategy, every platform being used and specific campaigns.

While some metrics and KPIs are only useful for certain campaign types, ROI is universal and divisible across every level of your marketing activity.

The cons of ROI



ROI is difficult to calculate

The biggest problem with marketing ROI is that it’s difficult to calculate accurately. As mentioned earlier, there are so many variables involved in marketing that ROI can be an elusive metric.

The biggest challenge of measuring marketing ROI is attribution.

How do you prove the value of every individual blog post, ad view, email campaign and lead generation strategy? If you can attribute all of these touchpoints to the sales they lead to, then you can calculate ROI with some sort of accuracy.

Unfortunately, this is impossible to do with 100% accuracy. Tracking codes aren’t infallible and there are certain interactions hold value but you simply can’t measure – for example, ad impressions that build brand awareness but don’t convince users to click the first time they see them.

It’s an unreliable prediction model

Another problem with return on investment as a marketing metric is that it’s unreliable as a prediction model. The point is, ROI was never designed to be used for prediction models and it’s not suitable for this purpose.

A lot of marketers make the mistake of calculating ROI and thinking they’ll get linear results by simply increasing spend.

ROI is a measurement of return vs spend at the time of calculation, not a prediction. So doubling your investment doesn’t necessarily double your return. In fact, ROI is rarely linear and one reason for this is the law of diminishing returns, which describes a point where increasing investment results in a disproportionate increase in revenue.

Another reason is that there are so many variables that can skew the reliability of ROI as a single metric – the weather, time of day, current political events, economic stability, the weekend’s sporting results and an infinite number of factors that have nothing to do with marketing.

You can partially overcome this problem by tracking ROI over time and then use this data to forecast future returns. This makes ROI a significantly more reliable measurement of performance but it’s important to understand that this isn’t what ROI is designed for.

ROI can catch you out

The simplicity of ROI as a performance metric catches a lot of marketers and business owners out. If you don’t know how to use it properly – or rely on it too heavily – ROI as a marketing KPI can lead you astray and encourage you to make some poor decisions.

Earlier, we talked about the law of diminishing returns and failing to understand this principle can be costly – especially if you hike up your spend on a campaign only to see unimpressive results.

Another common problem with misusing ROI is that marketers might pause campaigns that aren’t generating revenue, even though they’re adding crucial value. For example, you might pause a social media campaign that isn’t generating sales without realising those ads are building brand awareness and increasing the number of people who search for your business on Google or pick up the phone and call you directly.

Once you cut off this supply of leads, you start selling less through the other campaigns it supports.

This is why attribution is so important in calculating the true ROI of campaigns.

Is ROI overrated?

Return on investment isn’t overrated but it is often misunderstood and misused by marketers. ROI was never designed for the complex world of digital marketing and it’s unrealistic to expect any single metric to accurately measure the performance of your campaigns.

ROI is useful for gauging the efficiency of your marketing efforts but you have to understand its limitations. Another problem you’ll experience is not having the necessary tools to calculate ROI with 100% accuracy, especially for campaigns that don’t directly generate revenue.

No matter how good your data processes are, you’re not going to attribute every click to the final purchase.

So ROI isn’t an absolute figure for profitability or efficiency of your marketing actions, it’s more of a rough guide. That being said, you can increase the accuracy and usefulness of ROI as a metric by calculating it in greater detail and attributing every datapoint possible.

This is why our ROI calculator asks you how many conversions your campaign generates and which type of conversion you’re measuring the value of.

Other metrics & KPIs to measure

One of the biggest mistakes marketers make with using ROI as a KPI is they put it to the top of their priority list and develop tunnel vision. Optimising for maximum ROI isn’t a viable marketing objective and it takes your attention away from what really matters most: profit.

Return on investment can help you estimate the profitability of your marketing campaigns but it’s not the end goal. Instead, ROI should be used along other crucial performance indicators to build a rounded picture of your marketing profitability.

These include:

Profit: Generally there are three levels of calculating profit: gross profit, operating profit and net profit – each with different uses.Profit margin: Each level of profit calculation has a subsequent profit margin calculation – gross profit margin, operating profit margin and net profit margin.Operating expenses: How much it costs to run your marketing strategies. Market share: Your revenue as a percentage of the total revenue generated within your niche.Growth rate: A timeline of revenue over monthly, quarterly and annual periods.Cost per acquisition: The average amount you spend to convert each customer.Customer lifetime value: The ongoing value of each customer to your business.Customer retention: The percentage of customers who continue to buy from you.Churn rate: The percentage of customers that stop buying from you over a defined period.

The list goes on but the key point is that ROI alone can’t give you a reliable calculation of marketing or business performance. For example, it doesn’t matter how great the calculated ROI of a campaign is if you don’t have the available budget required to achieve your target return.

By surrounding ROI with other important KPIs, you can build a more accurate picture of marketing (and business) performance. This, in turn, leads to more accurate predictions and informed marketing decisions at every stage of the consumer journey.

Prove the value of your marketing campaigns

Return on investment is one of the most important KPIs for marketers, but also one of the most elusive. Accurately calculating marketing ROI can be tricky and knowing how to use it properly is more complex than it appears.

However, taking the time to build accurate calculations of ROI allows you to prove the value of marketing strategies at every level – from every blog post and ad impression to the “last touch” actions that clinch the sale.

And the more granular you get with your ROI calculations, the more opportunities you’ll discover for optimising to improve results while having the necessary insights to measure performance.

The post ROI Calculator: How to Calculate Your Marketing ROI appeared first on Venture Harbour.

Best Business Plan Software [10 Solutions Compared]

Starting a new business can feel exciting and hopeful, but this good feeling can quickly fade when you think about the tedious and time-consuming process of creating a business plan. It’s that necessary but oh-so-dreaded step that has business owners procrastinating and lamenting over how to make one professionally and correctly.

Thankfully, business plan software can remove the guesswork and make the process much easier. While it won’t create the plan for you (some come close!) it can be a time-saver and lead you in the right direction, which is crucial if you are submitting the plan to investors.

By the time you finish reading this business plan guide, you will:

Know which business plan software will fit your budgetKnow which business plan software will match your current needs, whether you are looking to get investors or simply better organise your company and plan future financialsBe able to shortlist some software tools to help you narrow down your choices

We also created a comparison chart that includes pricing and some top features so you can compare at a glance.

Let’s quickly discuss how business plan software can help you and why it may be the missing link to getting your business started correctly.

Why Business Plan Software?

A business’ lifecycle will require the creation of a business plan depending on the need. Below are three reasons why you may want to create a business plan.

Secure funding: Before they hand over money, investors will want to see a comprehensive business and financial plan that includes projections and a well-thought-out strategy and goals.You’re starting a business: A business plan can help you determine future profits (or lack thereof) and provide a roadmap for the future. Essentially, it can be your safety net and tell you whether or not your business idea has merit.Your startup is stagnant and/or needs strategic planning: A business plan can help you dig into data to organise your business into a plan that will make you more competitive and ready to scale.

The problem: Creating a business plan is a big job, and if you are new to business, you may not know what to include or how to craft it to ensure you are doing it correctly. It’s a tedious process with a lot of items to consider, many of them you may not even be aware of.

Business plan software can walk you through each section of the business plan and also provide professional templates and expert advice. With the right software, you will be able to create a professional business plan that reflects the current state of your company and projects its future growth and potential to all stakeholders, in the best way possible.

The 10 Best Business Plan Software Tools

Below are 10 of the best business plan software tools on the market. We hand-picked these tools because they satisfy most of the needs our community encounters when creating a business plan. Each offers unique features, and your choice will depend on your current needs.

LivePlan : Best intuitive and cost-effective business plan software Business Plan Pro : Best business plan software for small businesses (not cloud-based) Enloop : Best business plan software with a free version BizPlanBuilder : Best user-friendly, cost-effective option with financial forecasting and management Bizplan : Best for startups interested in raising capital GoSmallBiz : Best for small businesses and nonprofits looking for a comprehensive suite of business management tools at an affordable price PlanGuru : Best business plan software focused on financial planning and budgeting Business Sorter : Best for small businesses looking for a fast, simplified planning process without sophisticated financial forecasting MAUS MasterPlan Lean : Best for businesses looking for a fast, simplified planning process with financial forecasting iPlanner.NET : Best template-heavy business plan software for a low price

Below is a comparison chart to help you quickly assess the top features and pricing of the 10 best business plan software tools and match them to your needs.

Let’s go into more detail on each tool, its pricing and notable features.

#1 LivePlan

Best intuitive and cost-effective business plan software

LivePlan is an excellent solution for the beginning entrepreneur (or entrepreneur at any stage) who needs a step-by-step process to create a professional business plan. LivePlan also offers a comprehensive online learning centre that teaches you how to create and manage companies, make your investor pitch, write your business plan, and more.

We like LivePlan’s simple, intuitive interface and its one-page business plan that gets you thinking about answers to essential questions as it relates to your business strategy.

LivePlan’s one-page business plan

Once you complete your one-page business strategy plan, graduate to customise one of LivePlan’s 500+ SBA-approved business plan templates and create a custom plan, step-by-step.

Connect LivePlan to your financial software, and with the financial dashboard, track your budgets, revenue, expenses, and current and future sales as you progress toward achieving your goals.

Features:

One-page business plansDetailed business plans500 SBA-approved industry-specific templatesStep-by-step instructionsFinancial forecastingBuild financial reportsFinancial software integrationFinancial performance trackingMarket research tools

Pricing:

No free trial; 60-day money-back guarantee

LivePlan has a straightforward pricing plan that changes depending on how far ahead you want to pre-pay. If you pay annually, it breaks down to $15/month. If you pay every six months, the cost is $18/month. The pay-as-you-go plan is $20/month with the first month billed at $10.

LivePlan also offers a 60-day money-back guarantee.

#2 Business Plan Pro

Best business plan software for small businesses (not cloud-based)

Business Plan Pro was created by the same company that created LivePlan. It is an off-line version of LivePlan’s cloud-based solution, without the bells and whistles of cloud-based software.

Similar to LivePlan, Business Plan Pro includes more than 500 professional templates to customise for your business. It also offers Easy Plan Wizard, step-by-step guidance from business planning expert Tim Berry, founder of the software and the website Bplans.com.

With Business Plan Pro, you will get detailed step-by-step instructions with error checks to help you craft a foolproof plan. Also, access financial spreadsheets, 11,000+ industry profiles to compare and match your business plan to, a graphic forecaster, QuickBooks import, and settings for nonprofits.

Features:

Detailed business plansIndustry-specific templatesStep-by-step instructionsFinancial forecastingBuild financial reportsFinancial software integrationMarket research toolsNot cloud-based

Pricing:
60-day money-back guarantee

The Standard Edition costs a one-time fee of $99.95 and is robust enough to create a custom professional business plan. The Premier Edition costs a one-time fee of $159.95. It includes additional features such as plan templates, business valuation, Excel import function, 24-month extended financial data, visual cash planning, and advanced financial analyses.

#3 Enloop

Best business plan software with a free version

Enloop is a simple business plan solution perfect for the entrepreneur who wants to try before they buy. Enloop is one of the few tools that provide a free version.

One unique feature of Enloop is automated text writing (Autowrite) which auto-generates the business plan text from data you already inputted. Another unique standout feature is TextSync which automatically syncs your financial data into your text when you make changes to your numbers. No manual updating required.

The blue data bubbles below show the data-sync technology and act as editable fields that pull in the data from your financial forecasts.

We like Enloop’s forecasting comparisons that predict losses and analyse performance. Enloop helps you discover problems before they happen by comparing your financial ratios against industry averages.

Enloop also has a scoring feature that rates your business plan in real-time so you can adjust and watch your score improve over time.

One downside to Enloop is the lack of integration with financial software. You have to input your financial data manually. Enloop also only comes with a single business plan template.

Features:

Detailed business plansBusiness plan scoringFinancial forecastingMulti-user accessAutomated text writingData-synced text

Pricing:

7-day free trial offered

All of Enloop’s plans include every feature (automated text writing, data-synced text, real-time performance score, pass/fail reporting, text formatting, charts, and country currency formatting). Still, you will need to upgrade if you want additional users and financial ratios. The Free plan includes 16 financial ratios analysed and no additional users.

Premium plan pricing starts at $19.95/month, billed monthly for the Detailed plan, which includes three financial ratios and two shared users. The premium Performance plan costs $39.95/month billed monthly and adds on up to 16 financial ratios and five shared users.

All pricing plans include the creation of three business plans. Additional business plans are offered at $9.95 each per month.

#4 BizPlanBuilder

Best user-friendly, cost-effective option with financial forecasting and management

BizPlanBuilder is one of multiple products offered by the company Business Power Tools, a 30-year business veteran created to help entrepreneurs start, run, and grow businesses.

BizPlanBuilder is for the serious entrepreneur who wants a comprehensive solution for creating business projections for investors and/or a future roadmap for growth. Even though the tool is robust and future-thinking with many years of financial projections offered, it’s also known for its user-friendliness with built-in step-by-step instructions, comments, advice, and video tutorials.

Below is the easy-to-use dashboard with a document-builder wizard that offers template text to customise, and simple navigation between sections.

BizPlanBuilder shines with its full set of CPA-tested financial models, including “Assumptions” pages, perfect for helping the beginner with more complex financial topics. Tell your financial story with meaningful financial projections that will impress investors and help you forecast correctly.

Features:

Step-by-step instructionsIndustry-specific templatesDetailed business plansMulti-user accessFinancial forecastingBuild financial reportsFinancial performance trackingNot-for-profit proposals

Pricing:
No free trial; 60-day money-back guarantee

Pricing starts at a one-time fee of $97 for the Windows app and a one-year subscription to the online cloud-based BizPlanBuilder. Add team members for $10/year per user. The second plan is strictly cloud-based at $27/month and offers additional features such as incentive stock options templates, expanded dashboard, and LLC formation doc templates. Add new team members for $1/month per user.

#5 Bizplan

Best business plan software for startups interested in raising capital

Part of the Startup.com suite of business products, Bizplan is a comprehensive solution for entrepreneurs seeking to get investment for their business ideas. In addition to the business plan builder, you also get expert-taught masterclasses, access to 20,000 experts for individual counselling, plus a funding platform (Fundable) where you can pitch directly to investors. Signing up for Bizplan also grants you access to Startup.com’s other product, Launchrock.com to help you acquire customers.

Bizplan’s step-by-step builder walks you through each section, so you don’t get confused or miss essential elements. Its sleek, easy-to-use interface includes drag-and-drop templates and a progress tracker for monitoring.

Similar to other business plan software tools, Bizplan helps you forecast your financials, allowing you to set limits, project revenue, and access multiple financial worksheets and templates. Organise your financial activity into an easy-to-use dashboard Bizplan calls your Financial Command Center.

Features:

Step-by-step instructionsDetailed business plansMulti-user accessFinancial forecastingBuild financial reportsFinancial performance trackingFinancial software integrationAccess to Launchrock.comAccess to Fundable.comAccess to guides, mentors, and masterclasses

Pricing:

Bizplan offers two pricing choices, monthly or lifetime. Monthly pricing is $20.75/month billed annually, and $29/month billed monthly.

You can also purchase lifetime access to Bizplan and the full suite of offerings for a one-time fee of $349.

#6 GoSmallBiz

Best for small businesses and nonprofits looking for a comprehensive suite of business management tools at an affordable price

GoSmallBiz is a comprehensive suite of business tools created by NFL Hall of Famer and entrepreneur Fran Tarkenton in 1996. The product suite includes everything small businesses need to run and grow a business. Within that suite is the business plan builder.

Similar to other business plan builders, Gosmallbiz offers a step-by-step interface that allows you to go through each section smoothly. Also, the tool offers multiple financial report templates to help you track and manage finances.

Though GoSmallBiz’s business plan builder is somewhat limited compared to others on the market, its standout feature is its inclusion of additional business management tools and consulting:

Unlimited business consultationCustomer relationship managerDigital marketing dashboardWebsite builderWebsite analysisHR document builderCorporate minutes writerBusiness roadmapBusiness docs libraryBusiness courses

Features:

Step-by-step instructionsDetailed business plansIndustry-specific templatesFinancial forecastingBuild financial reportsFinancial performance trackingMulti-user accessBusiness management toolsAccess to expert training and adviceMobile application

Pricing:

No free trial; 30-day money-back guarantee

Pricing is fixed at $39/month for all features and offerings.

#7 PlanGuru

Best business plan software focused on financial planning and budgeting

PlanGuru is a financial business plan software solution for the small business that wants to budget, forecast and manage finances efficiently. PlanGuru is different from other business planning software tools in that it focuses solely on financial planning. So if you are in the market for a standard business plan builder, this may not be the software for you.

PlanGuru’s strength lies in its financial capabilities, as seen in the dashboard below. Below is a view of the income spreadsheet, one of multiple reports available with Planguru.

Users can budget and forecast up to 10 years into the future.

In addition to robust financial planning, budgeting, reporting and analysis, PlanGuru also offers analytics, which includes graphics, chart projections, and insights into financial performance.

PlanGuru also provides PlanGuru University (PGU) to teach businesses about budgeting, forecasting, and planning, and how to use the platform. The business planning tool also provides video tutorials for all of its features.

Features:

Detailed financial plansFinancial software integrationFinancial forecastingFinancial ratiosExport to PDF, Word, and ExcelAdvanced reporting Excel add-inAnalytics reportingMulti-user accessPlanGuru University

Pricing:
14-day free trial; 30-day money-back guarantee

The pricing for the cloud-based version is $99/month billed monthly or $899/year (single entity). PlanGuru also offers a Windows-based version for the same price if you need multi-department consolidations.  

#8 Business Sorter

Best for small businesses looking for a fast, simplified planning process without sophisticated financial forecasting

Business Sorter appeals to the on-the-go business owner who wants to speed up the time it takes to compile a professional business plan. The platform touts that you can create a full business plan in only one to two hours using its unique 273-card-sorting system.

Business Sorter has you choose one of its pre-made cards (or create your own) and sort your business objectives for six different areas: finance, sales, goods and services, people, operations, brand and marketing.

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Next, prioritise your objectives and sort through the steps to identify which ones will help you achieve your objectives. Once you prioritise your objectives and steps for each area, Business Sorter compiles them into a business plan foundation for you to polish and customise further, assigning tasks to others and adding budgets, notes, and more.

Business Sorter is not as feature-rich as some of the other tools in our list as it doesn’t have the same depth of financial integration and planning. But, it is a good option for users who want a simple, quick, and efficient way of creating a business plan.

Features:

Step-by-step instructions273-card-sorting systemDetailed business plansMulti-user access and assignments

Pricing:

14-day free trial offered

Pricing starts at $10/month billed monthly or $80/year billed annually for up to three users. Premium plans start at $30/month billed monthly or $240/year billed annually for up to 12 users. Every plan includes all features, but pricing increases with additional users.

#9 MAUS MasterPlan Lean

Best for businesses looking for a fast, simplified planning process with financial forecasting

MAUS Business Systems has been serving customers since 1990. Its tool suite helps Advisors and small to medium-sized businesses with business planning, financial planning, exit planning, quality assurance, human resources and more. MAUS’ business plan creation product is called MasterPlan Lean.

Similar to Business Sorter, MasterPlan Lean takes the headache out of the business plan creation process and enables users to create comprehensive business plans quickly. In contrast to Business Sorter, MasterPlan Lean includes financial forecasting and more sophisticated financial planning, but the software is more expensive as a result.

The software speeds up the business plan creation time by walking you through questions and answers and a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis that will become the basis for your finalised business plan.

One standout feature is the software’s task planner which enables you to assign tasks as action items and track their progress among your team to ensure they get completed. The software also sends regular reminders and emails to team members with the status of their deliverables.

Create forecasts and track your financial progress with cash flow, budgets, and five-year forecasts, and compile charts and reports to view and send to stakeholders.

Features:

Step-by-step instructionsFinancial forecastingMulti-user accessTask plannerBuild financial reportsFinancial performance tracking

Pricing:

7-day free trial; 30-day money-back guarantee

MAUS MasterPlanLean costs $299/year for up to three user licenses. The Business Planning Pack plan jumps up to $499/year with five user licenses and also includes the software KPI dashboard, Virtual CFO Pro, milestones and projects.

The monthly plan Business Planning & HR Pack priced at $97/month is available for businesses that want a more comprehensive software suite with HR functionality. This plan includes everything in the Business Planning Pack plus Performance Review, MAUS Job Descriptions, and MAUS HR & Operational Policies & Procedures.

#10 iPlan n er.NET

Best template-heavy business plan software for a low price

iPlanner.NET has been in business since 2002 providing online software and services to help entrepreneurs, investors and companies with business planning, modelling and financial forecasting.  

iPlanner.NET isn’t the slickest or nicest looking software, but it’s an inexpensive, hard-working option for those who don’t need the bells and whistles of other tools but want the basic framework to build a business plan from pre-made templates. With the help of team experts, iPlanner.NET allows you to create a business modelling framework and forecast your financials with automatic calculations and real-time assistance.

The dashboard walks you through each section and provides notes to help you customise the text for your business.

Input, track, and forecast your finances with sections for revenue, expenses, assets, funding, and projections.

Features:

Step-by-step instructionsDetailed business plansBuild financial reportsFinancial forecastingMulti-user accessAccess to experts

Pricing:

Pricing is based on the subscription duration and the number of projects. The Professional plan is for the entrepreneur or business owner who will be creating one business or financial plan. Pricing for the Professional plan depends on the subscription duration: $24 for three months; $39 for six months; $55 for 12 months.

The Corporate and Corporate Plus plans are for serial entrepreneurs, business coaches and mentors who need multiple projects. Pricing will vary depending on the subscription duration and the number of projects. As an example, a 12-month subscription with up to 25 projects costs $111.

The Best Business Plan Software: How to Narrow Down Your Selections

To start narrowing down your selections, first determine what your goal is for creating your business plan. What is the most important factor?

If your goal is to attract investors, take a look at LivePlan, BizPlanBuilder, and BizPlan first.

If you desire a comprehensive tool for your small business that includes more than just a business plan builder, look at BizPlan, GoSmallBiz, and MAUS MasterPlan Lean.

If you are looking for sophisticated financial forecasting and planning, BizPlanBuilder and PlanGuru are two options to try. The other tools have financial capabilities as well (except Business Sorter), so they may also be worth a look.

If you want an offline (not cloud-based) solution, try Business Plan Pro, BizPlanBuilder or PlanGuru. 

If the speed of creation is most important, try Business Sorter and MasterPlan Lean.

If your budget is a top concern, most of the tools we discussed are not that expensive. Some have money-back guarantees and free trials. Enloop is the only tool discussed with a Free plan, so this may be a good first option to try.

Next, look at the comparison chart again to focus your selections. Once you narrow down your choices, try a few, and If they don’t have a free trial or free plan, they may offer a money-back guarantee.

Here is a list of the tools again for quick access:

LivePlan Business Plan Pro Enloop BizPlanBuilder Bizplan GoSmallBiz PlanGuru Business Sorter MAUS MasterPlan Lean iPlanner.NET

Business plan software will remove the difficulty and slash the time it takes to create a comprehensive, investor-ready, business-improving plan. Regardless of the tool you use, expect a more seamless process and a professional plan to guide your business for the years to come. Happy planning!

The post Best Business Plan Software [10 Solutions Compared] appeared first on Venture Harbour.

30 Best Slack Apps, Integrations & Bots to Try

Slack is one of the most popular communication tools for businesses with over 12 million daily active users (DAU). The platform has become a staple tool for startups, remote teams and collaborative workforces that need an always-on channel for communication.

As Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield puts it, what matters more than DAU is that users truly love the app. And one of the most enjoyable features of Slack is the extensive collection of apps, integrations and bots that you can install to turn it into way more than a messaging app.

Want to add new tasks to your team’s project management app without leaving Slack? No problem, there’s probably an app for that – and thousands of other tasks that you can perform within Slack using basic commands, saving you from having a dozen or more apps open at any one time.

In this article, I’ve got 30 of the best apps, integrations and bots that will turn Slack into a true workstation for your entire team.

Which apps, integrations & bots are we looking at in this article?

You can find the full directory of Slack apps and integrations on this page of the official website. The library categories apps into different sections and you can also search for the apps and services you already use to see if there’s an integration available.

In this article, we’re focusing on the best Slack apps, integrations and bots for six essential tasks:

MarketingProductivityCollaborationCommunicationProject managementTeam management

So the article will be broken up into those six sections with a look at our pick of the apps, integrations and bots for each task. Here’s a quick preview of the apps we’ll be looking at in each section:

App
Category
Best for




SignOff
Marketing
Sign off marketing campaigns without delay


HubSpot
Marketing
Trigger HubSpot tasks & receive notifications within Slack


ActiveCampaign
Marketing
Automatically post Slack messages for key events in ActiveCampaign


Zapier
Productivity
Share Slack data with other apps to automate 1,000s of tasks


Automate.io
Productivity
A simpler, more affordable alternative to Zapier


Google Calendar
Productivity
Manage schedules, events and statuses from Google Calendar


Stripe
Productivity
Automatically post to Slack when updates occur on charges, subscriptions, transfers, and other Stripe payments


Google Drive
Collaboration
Collaborative file sharing and notifications in Slack


Marker
Collaboration
Take, annotate and send screenshots in Slack


Dead Simple Screen Sharing
Collaboration
Share screens & create audio conferences with a single command


SlackShare
Collaboration
Venture Harbour.

The Ultimate Marketing Plan

The traditional marketing plan is flawed.

While it does a good job detailing a company’s situation, SWOT, and KPIs, there’s one crucial thing it doesn’t do very well; Adapt. 

Your marketing plan should be a guide that aligns the marketing team and can be followed with confidence to achieve the business’ objectives. It should adapt and improve after every campaign or insight, yet most are updated once a quarter… at best. 

In this guide, I want to introduce you to the marketing plan system that we use at Venture Harbour (called S.T.A.R – more on that in a moment) to align our team and deliver better results from our marketing activity.

What’s in this guide?

The Internet’s full of half-baked marketing plan templates and articles. We’ve gone deep sharing everything; from our processes to insights & tools that’ll help you run your marketing far more smoothly.

Ready to dive in?

What would marketing plans look like if they were invented in 2020? 

Your marketing plan maps your trajectory from where you are today to where you want it to be as a business.

If that trajectory is just 1% off and goes uncorrected you’ll end up miles away from where you intended to be. Which is what happens time after time in every marketing department.

When marketers don’t calibrate their plan often they lose alignment. Marketing teams that aren’t aligned underperform, triggering a nasty cascade of familiar symptoms; Difficulty proving ROI, securing budget, earning confidence and getting buy-in from stakeholders. 

Which makes you wonder – surely there’s a better approach to the ‘quarterly marketing plan in a Google Doc’ that could keep marketing teams aligned and improving over time?

The S.T.A.R Marketing System

The S.T.A.R marketing system is a simple alternative to the quarterly/annual marketing plan that fits into your regular marketing meeting agenda. There are four parts to it:

Strategy calibrationTriage ideasAction campaignsReport back

The S.T.A.R marketing system has three main advantages over traditional marketing plans:

1) Consistency – Instead of campaigns being approved politically, with gut feel, or executed without the right level of input from the team, every campaign idea is agreed on merit. 

2) Centralisation – Most marketing teams manage their budgets & forecasts in spreadsheets, create briefs in documents, tasks in project management software and track results in data dashboards. This inevitably leads to a breakdown in communicating results back to business goals and teams becoming misaligned. S.T.A.R centralises each step of the process – from triaging ideas, to signing them off, and reporting back.

3) Continuous – Each campaign, whether successful or not, is a piece of the marketing puzzle helping you complete the full picture. Instead of losing these pieces, S.T.A.R helps you record every insight and continuously calibrate your marketing plan.

Before we dive into how each of the four steps work, we’ve created a free S.T.A.R Google Sheet template that you can access by completing this survey.

Strategy

The purpose of any marketing plan is to ensure that as a marketing team you spend your time and money on the things that will best achieve your organisation’s goals. 

Your marketing plan’s direction is set by your marketing strategy. 

This is the most important step to get right as it influences all downstream decisions and results. Your marketing strategy must start by answering four questions with absolute clarity:

Goal: What is the business trying to achieve?Budget: What time & money should be allocated to achieving this goal?Audience: Who are we trying to reach?Channels: What things should we spend the budget on to reach the audience to achieve the goal?

The answers to these questions are your true north; The plan that tells you precisely what to do to achieve the business goal. 

1. What’s My Goal?

If you’re not absolutely crystal clear on what your business goal is – stop. 

Brainstorming campaigns without a clear goal is like an athlete starting a race with no idea where the finish line is. 

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there” – Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland

Finding your true north metric

As a marketing team, you need to know the one metric, that if increased, will achieve the business’ goal. 

While you may have a hierarchy of KPIs, you should still identify the one metric at the top of that hierarchy that the business looks towards to unlock growth.

This starts by understanding where the business wants to go. The timeframe you use for this is up to you, but here’s some food for thought:

How much profit does the business want to be generating – by when?Therefore, how much revenue does the business need to generate? Therefore, how many customers are needed?Therefore, how many leads are needed?

The specific terminology may vary for your business, but ultimately we’re just trying to connect the big picture aspirations of the business with the one number that marketing can directly influence to create a positive cascading impact.

You should end up with a hierarchy of KPIs that highlights one clear metric at the top that, when improved, delivers exceptional results. 

2. What’s My Budget?

Once you know where the business wants to go and what metric you can influence to get there, you need to know what resources you have available. 

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to set marketing budgets, and one is significantly better than the other.

Option 1: Benchmark budgets

This comes in various flavours from arbitrary percentages (e.g. 7-15% of revenue) to the popular ‘Profit-First’ model of allocating a percentage of revenue that always leaves a profit margin, to a simple fixed monthly amount. 

The benefit for this approach is its simplicity and safety. It’s hard for a company to significantly overspend if its marketing spend is proportionate to its revenue. 

The problem is that it’s not based on achieving an objective. Spending 12% of revenue on marketing every month may seem reasonable, but it may only be enough to keep up with your competitors if they’re also doing the same. It may even lead to losing market share, especially if your competitors are using the following approach.

Option 2: Zero-based budgets

The alternative is to work backwards from your goal. 

We talked about having a true north metric above which requires knowing how much profit/revenue does this business want to generate by when?

Let’s say the business wants to grow by $500,000 revenue in 12 months.

If each customer brings in $2,000, then you need 250 new customers. This means, your breakeven marketing budget would be $500k (acquire 250 customers @ $2k each). 

If you aim for a gross profit target of 50%, then your marketing budget is $250k and you have a target acquisition cost of $1,000. From here you can work out how many leads, demos, or clicks you’ll need to acquire one customer giving you a target cost per lead, cost per click etc. 

But… we aren’t able to get that granularity

If your marketing is relationship-based, driven by word of mouth, or your CFO is a bit… ‘traditional’ this step becomes harder – but stick with it.  

It’ll make your life 100X easier to engage stakeholders by presenting your marketing plan in a way that’s connected to their objectives. 

We surveyed hundreds of C-level leaders about their views on marketing plans and the findings were clear – they want marketers to report their campaign performance on financial metrics (profit, ROI) rather than what they view as vanity metrics (reach, traffic). 

Ultimately, It’s their job to ensure that every $1 spent generates >$1.01. Even if they say something to the contrary, the reason to invest in marketing is to grow the business – and whether we like it or not the CFO has the source of truth; Money in and money out.  

When you have a budget based on a business objective with clear CPA targets, conversations like “What if we increase the budget by 15%?” become more exciting to stakeholders – as they can tangibly see how this connects back to their objectives.

So, for the sake of your ability to engage stakeholders, it’s worth getting this clarity. 

3. Audience

Before we decide where to spend our budget, we must know who we’re trying to reach.

You probably have a fairly good idea of who your target customer is – it’s about to get a whole lot clearer. 

Below is an extensive grid of firmographics, psychographics, demographics and behavioural traits you can use to pinpoint exactly who your ideal customer is and where to find them. 

Using S.T.A.R, you’ll review this customer profile weekly, adding new insights to gradually hone in on who your target customer is. 

CategorySegmentExampleFirmographicsIndustry / vertical:
Employee numbers:
Revenue:
Budgets:
Business maturity:
Business model:
Process / operations:
Job title:
Department:Professional Services
20-50
£1M – £10M
£100k+ marketing budget
Growth stage
Recurring revenue
Uses a CRM (e.g. Hubspot)
CMO / Marketing Director
MarketingGeographicsCountry:
Region:
Cities:
Postcodes:
Urban / rural / suburban:
Language:
Climate:
Population / density:
Communities:United Kingdom
South East
London
NW, W
Urban
English
Fair
Dense
London SEODemographicsAge:
Sex:
Gender:
Education:
Nationality:
Race:
Income:
Weight:
Height:
Religion:
Marital status:
Homeowner status:
Parental status:30-45
Male & Female
Men & Women
Bachelors Degree
Not Applicable
Not Applicable
£60k – £100k
Not Applicable
Not Applicable
Not Applicable
Married
First time buyer
Has kidsPsychographicsInterests:
Beliefs:
Budget:
Motivations:
Emotions:
Values:
Opinions:
Attitudes:
Activities:
Roles:Wellbeing, foodie

Marketing is maths

High disposable income

Wants career progression

Why am I not hitting my potential?

Honesty, integrity

Anti social media

Left wing

SUP, yoga

Volunteer

BehaviouralBenefits sought:
Occasion:
Intent: 
Device ownership:
Habits:
Buyer stage:
Events attended:
Books read:
Offline Communities:
Online Communities:More leads
Revisiting marketing plan
Increase website leads
iPhone
Visits pricing page
Awareness
BrightonSEO
Influence, 
EO, The Agency Collective
Online Genius Slack Group




4. Which channels should we test?

How you allocate your marketing budget optimally depends on which stage of marketing maturity your business is at. 

The best performing marketing teams tend to focus on one core channel at a time rather than trying to do a little bit of everything. The table below outlines a strategic approach to budget allocation, based on surveying hundreds of marketing teams.

MaturityDescriptionStrategyBudget allocationPhase 1We haven’t found our one core marketing channel that drives exceptional results.Invest a small amount of budget in a wide variety of channels to identify one channel that drives disproportionate results.100% on experimentationPhase 2We have found our one core marketing channel that drives exceptional results.Focus intensely on that one channel until you see diminishing returns.~90% on core channel

~10% on experimentation
Phase 3We have saturated our core marketing channel and are seeing diminishing returnsSlowly diversify your channels, adding one or two new channels that you can double down on, while strengthening your one core channel.~80% on core channel

~20% on experimentation

Phase 1: Find your core channel

If you’re just starting out with marketing, your goal should be to find one channel that will drive exceptional results towards growing your true north metric. Ironically, the best way to find this one channel, is to run a small experiment across multiple channels to see which ones look promising. 

While painful to see budget wasted on low-performing channels, this is a necessary step – and the sooner you get through it, the sooner you get to your True North channels.

So what are you looking for? 

Example: How we found Leadformly’s Core Channel

When we launched Leadformly, we tested PPC, podcast marketing, and content marketing as three channels to experiment on. Podcasts failed miserably for us, and while we scraped a small profit on PPC, it was nowhere near as promising as content marketing. 

Strong economics – A good piece of evergreen content should generate a consistent, or increasing, number of leads over time. The cost of creating content is one-off and upfront, so the profitability of this channel improved over time. Growth potential – We brainstormed 100+ pieces of content, making it clear that if it worked, there would be no shortage of content we could produce to scale it up.Unfair advantage – As we own a network of websites that already reached millions of marketers and small businesses, we had a natural advantage to promote content. 

Phase 2: Focus on your core channel

Once you find the core channel that you’re ready to go all in on, stop everything else. If you decide to focus on Instagram, stop running Twitter ads – even if they perform well. 

As touched on above, when we discovered that content marketing would be our core channel we stopped our PPC ads – even though they generated a small profit. 

Attempting to maximise both channels is a fool’s errand. The increased value you will get from focusing on one channel will outweigh any performance benefit from dabbling across multiple.

Phase 3: Find your next core channel

You’ll inevitably saturate your core channel and begin to see diminishing returns. It’s at this point that it makes sense to go back to a more experimental approach to find your next channel to focus on intensely.

At this stage, you’ll ideally want to find a channel that meets all the criteria in phase one, but also complements your original core channel. 

2: Triage

Once your marketing strategy is clear, it’s time to start brainstorming ideas and triaging them to identify the likely best performers.

Creating a flow of Ideas

Ideas are the lifeblood that fuel your marketing plan. 

Whether your marketing team meets weekly or bi-weekly, one of the main objectives of this meeting should be to leave with at least 10 fresh ideas, optimisations or experiments added to your marketing backlog. 

The goal isn’t to commit to all ten. We’ll get to that in a moment; but to simply create a continuous flow of ideas that the marketing team can pick and choose from.

There is no recommended size or scope for an idea – it could be as small as increasing ad group X’s budget by 10% to run a superbowl ad.

Marketing meetings are for fusion

Ideas should be brainstormed ahead of the marketing meeting in private.

There are plenty of reasons for this, from valuing the input of introverts to avoiding time wasted on half-baked ideas. 

While ideation is far more effective when done asynchronously, there’s still value in discussing and prioritising ideas in the marketing meeting – as this leads to fusion; Ideas combining to form new ideas. 

Prioritising campaign ideas

Once you have at least 10 campaign ideas or optimisations, you’ll want to prioritise these using a prioritisation framework so that you can identify which ones to commit to. 

“All models are wrong – but some are useful”

– George E.P Box

We’re not aiming for scientific precision here – just a general sense of which campaigns are likely going to be most effective. I recommend the ICE-A framework (impact x confidence x effort x audience quality), but you can also use PIE (potential, impact, ease) or ICE. Whichever one you choose, you should end up with a prioritised list of campaigns like this:

Once you’ve highlighted your highest priority ideas, it’s time to promote them to the marketing plan to be fleshed out into more detailed campaign briefs.

3: Action

This step is all about refining your campaign ideas with other peoples’ perspectives and keeping the team aligned.

And that all starts with the brief.

Crafting The Ultimate Campaign Brief

Regardless of its complexity and size, every campaign should at minimum have five elements documented in your marketing plan:

Campaign summary (name, channels, overview)Expected results (as a range e.g. 50-75 leads)Expected budget Timeframe (start and end date)Prioritisation score

Like showing your work in maths, this is primarily about helping teammates and stakeholders understand how you arrived at the decision to run this campaign, increasing the likelihood of securing buy-in.

I recommend using a tool like TrueNorth to share campaign ideas for feedback in a centralised place where you record your campaign results.

For more complex campaigns, or those that are more budget intensive, you may want to add additional details, particularly around what resources you require and the creatives. 

The Secret to Making Sign Off Seamless

Getting sign off can be painful; It’s often slow, inconsistent, and prone to decisions being made subjectively – sometimes even politically. 

If the first time a stakeholder sees a campaign is at the 11th hour, your odds of getting the campaign signed off are significantly hindered.

Fortunately, the solution to this is simple. 

Inviting stakeholders to collaborate and give feedback asynchronously (i.e. not in a meeting) on the campaign pitch early creates buy-in and promotes transparency – making it harder for campaigns to be rejected on political or inconsistent grounds as their reasons/comments will be on the record and seen by all. 

At Venture Harbour, we use Slack – and built a (completely free) Slack app specifically for managing campaign sign off. If your company uses Slack, feel free to give it a spin here. 

4: Report

Many marketers despise reporting. It can feel like time wasted. Time that could’ve been spent on ideation or optimisation.

What’s clear from surveying stakeholders is that reporting is essential to building confidence. In fact, reporting back on a campaign that didn’t perform well builds more confidence than reporting back on only those that have performed well. 

Why does this matter? 

Building confidence is an essential ingredient for three things that will make or break your ability to succeed as a marketer:

Getting budgetGetting sign-offCareer advancement 

Of course, stakeholder confidence will affect almost everything – from how you’re treated in meetings to how seriously your proposals are considered. In short, whether or not you like reporting – it pays to do it well.

Effective “Fluff-Free” Reporting

We’re all drowning in data, yet starving for insight.

Most marketers track user interactions down to a forensic level of detail. Yet, when asked the embarrassingly basic question of whether a campaign generates more than $1.01 for every $1 spent – we sometimes struggle. 

When reporting back on a campaign, it’s important to remember your audience. In almost every circumstance, your boss wants to know if the campaign worked or not in tangible terms. Sugar-coating the results with customer feedback and vanity metrics will do you no favours. So how do you make reporting back effective?

When you refined your campaign in the action step, I mentioned that the ultimate campaign pitch had five essential ingredients:

Campaign summary (name, channels, overview)Expected results (as a range e.g. 50-75 leads)Expected budget Timeframe (start and end date)Prioritisation score

The purpose of ingredients #2, #3, and #4 is to level-up your reporting. 

When your campaign has ended (according to the end date set in #4) you should collect your campaign results (using the same KPIs defined in #2) and the actual spend. By promptly sharing the actual results and budget alongside the expected results and budget, anyone in the team can see objectively whether this campaign was a success or not. 

Counter-intuitively, seeing campaigns underperform also seems to increase trust as many stakeholders are skeptical and used to reports being sugar-coated. 

Using S.T.A.R in Your Business

We’re currently in the process of building TrueNorth, a marketing management system that helps marketing teams create adaptable plans, prioritise campaigns, and rally their teams around the marketing plan.

If you’re interested in joining our beta, you can join here. As a Venture Harbour reader you’ll be jumped to the front of the beta queue.

The Ultimate Marketing Plan – Reimagined.

The traditional marketing plan is flawed.

While it does a good job detailing a company’s situation, SWOT, and KPIs, there’s one crucial thing it doesn’t do very well; Adapt. 

Your marketing plan should be a guide that aligns the marketing team and can be followed with confidence to achieve the business’ objectives. It should adapt and improve after every campaign or insight, yet most are updated once a quarter… at best. 

In this guide, I want to introduce you to the marketing plan system that we use at Venture Harbour (called S.T.A.R – more on that in a moment) to align our team and deliver better results from our marketing activity.

What’s in this guide?

The Internet’s full of half-baked marketing plan templates and articles. We’ve gone deep sharing everything; from our processes to insights & tools that’ll help you run your marketing far more smoothly.

Ready to dive in?

What would marketing plans look like if they were invented in 2020? 

Your marketing plan maps your trajectory from where you are today to where you want it to be as a business.

If that trajectory is just 1% off and goes uncorrected you’ll end up miles away from where you intended to be. Which is what happens time after time in every marketing department.

When marketers don’t calibrate their plan often they lose alignment. Marketing teams that aren’t aligned underperform, triggering a nasty cascade of familiar symptoms; Difficulty proving ROI, securing budget, earning confidence and getting buy-in from stakeholders. 

Which makes you wonder – surely there’s a better approach to the ‘quarterly marketing plan in a Google Doc’ that could keep marketing teams aligned and improving over time?

The S.T.A.R Marketing System

The S.T.A.R marketing system is a simple alternative to the quarterly/annual marketing plan that fits into your regular marketing meeting agenda. There are four parts to it:

Strategy calibrationTriage campaign ideasApprove campaignsRun & report back on campaigns

The S.T.A.R marketing system has three main advantages over traditional marketing plans:

1) Consistency – Instead of campaigns being approved politically, with gut feel, or executed without the right level of input from the team, every campaign idea is approved on merit. 

2) Centralisation – Most marketing teams manage their budgets & forecasts in spreadsheets, create briefs in documents, tasks in project management software and track results in data dashboards. This inevitably leads to a breakdown in communicating results back to business goals and teams becoming misaligned. S.T.A.R centralises each step of the process – from triaging ideas, to signing them off, and reporting back.

3) Continuous – Each campaign, whether successful or not, is a piece of the marketing puzzle helping you complete the full picture. Instead of losing these pieces, S.T.A.R helps you record every insight and continuously calibrate your marketing plan.

Before we dive into how each of the four steps work, we’ve created a free S.T.A.R Google Sheet template that you can access by completing this survey.

Strategy

The purpose of any marketing plan is to ensure that as a marketing team you spend your time and money on the things that will best achieve your organisation’s goals. 

Your marketing plan’s direction is set by your marketing strategy. 

This is the most important step to get right as it influences all downstream decisions and results. Your marketing strategy must start by answering four questions with absolute clarity:

Goal: What is the business trying to achieve?Budget: What time & money should be allocated to achieving this goal?Audience: Who are we trying to reach?Channels: What things should we spend the budget on to reach the audience to achieve the goal?

The answers to these questions are your true north; The plan that tells you precisely what to do to achieve the business goal. 

1. What’s My Goal?

If you’re not absolutely crystal clear on what your business goal is – stop. 

Brainstorming campaigns without a clear goal is like an athlete starting a race with no idea where the finish line is. 

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there” – Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland

Finding your true north metric

As a marketing team, you need to know the one metric, that if increased, will achieve the business’ goal. 

While you may have a hierarchy of KPIs, you should still identify the one metric at the top of that hierarchy that the business looks towards to unlock growth.

This starts by understanding where the business wants to go. The timeframe you use for this is up to you, but here’s some food for thought:

How much profit does the business want to be generating – by when?Therefore, how much revenue does the business need to generate? Therefore, how many customers are needed?Therefore, how many leads are needed?

The specific terminology may vary for your business, but ultimately we’re just trying to connect the big picture aspirations of the business with the one number that marketing can directly influence to create a positive cascading impact.

You should end up with a hierarchy of KPIs that highlights one clear metric at the top that, when improved, delivers exceptional results. 

2. What’s My Budget?

Once you know where the business wants to go and what metric you can influence to get there, you need to know what resources you have available. 

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to set marketing budgets, and one is significantly better than the other.

Option 1: Benchmark budgets

This comes in various flavours from arbitrary percentages (e.g. 7-15% of revenue) to the popular ‘Profit-First’ model of allocating a percentage of revenue that always leaves a profit margin, to a simple fixed monthly amount. 

The benefit for this approach is its simplicity and safety. It’s hard for a company to significantly overspend if its marketing spend is proportionate to its revenue. 

The problem is that it’s not based on achieving an objective. Spending 12% of revenue on marketing every month may seem reasonable, but it may only be enough to keep up with your competitors if they’re also doing the same. It may even lead to losing market share, especially if your competitors are using the following approach.

Option 2: Zero-based budgets

The alternative is to work backwards from your goal. 

We talked about having a true north metric above which requires knowing how much profit/revenue does this business want to generate by when?

Let’s say the business wants to grow by $500,000 revenue in 12 months.

If each customer brings in $2,000, then you need 250 new customers. This means, your breakeven marketing budget would be $500k (acquire 250 customers @ $2k each). 

If you aim for a gross profit target of 50%, then your marketing budget is $250k and you have a target acquisition cost of $1,000. From here you can work out how many leads, demos, or clicks you’ll need to acquire one customer giving you a target cost per lead, cost per click etc. 

But… we aren’t able to get that granularity

If your marketing is relationship-based, driven by word of mouth, or your CFO is a bit… ‘traditional’ this step becomes harder – but stick with it.  

It’ll make your life 100X easier to engage stakeholders by presenting your marketing plan in a way that’s connected to their objectives. 

We surveyed hundreds of C-level leaders about their views on marketing plans and the findings were clear – they want marketers to report their campaign performance on financial metrics (profit, ROI) rather than what they view as vanity metrics (reach, traffic). 

Ultimately, It’s their job to ensure that every $1 spent generates >$1.01. Even if they say something to the contrary, the reason to invest in marketing is to grow the business – and whether we like it or not the CFO has the source of truth; Money in and money out.  

When you have a budget based on a business objective with clear CPA targets, conversations like “What if we increase the budget by 15%?” become more exciting to stakeholders – as they can tangibly see how this connects back to their objectives.

So, for the sake of your ability to engage stakeholders, it’s worth getting this clarity. 

3. Audience

Before we decide where to spend our budget, we must know who we’re trying to reach.

You probably have a fairly good idea of who your target customer is – it’s about to get a whole lot clearer. 

Below is an extensive grid of firmographics, psychographics, demographics and behavioural traits you can use to pinpoint exactly who your ideal customer is and where to find them. 

Using S.T.A.R, you’ll review this customer profile weekly, adding new insights to gradually hone in on who your target customer is. 

CategorySegmentExampleFirmographicsIndustry / vertical:
Employee numbers:
Revenue:
Budgets:
Business maturity:
Business model:
Process / operations:
Job title:
Department:Professional Services
20-50
£1M – £10M
£100k+ marketing budget
Growth stage
Recurring revenue
Uses a CRM (e.g. Hubspot)
CMO / Marketing Director
MarketingGeographicsCountry:
Region:
Cities:
Postcodes:
Urban / rural / suburban:
Language:
Climate:
Population / density:
Communities:United Kingdom
South East
London
NW, W
Urban
English
Fair
Dense
London SEODemographicsAge:
Sex:
Gender:
Education:
Nationality:
Race:
Income:
Weight:
Height:
Religion:
Marital status:
Homeowner status:
Parental status:30-45
Male & Female
Men & Women
Bachelors Degree
Not Applicable
Not Applicable
£60k – £100k
Not Applicable
Not Applicable
Not Applicable
Married
First time buyer
Has kidsPsychographicsInterests:
Beliefs:
Budget:
Motivations:
Emotions:
Values:
Opinions:
Attitudes:
Activities:
Roles:Wellbeing, foodie

Marketing is maths

High disposable income

Wants career progression

Why am I not hitting my potential?

Honesty, integrity

Anti social media

Left wing

SUP, yoga

Volunteer

BehaviouralBenefits sought:
Occasion:
Intent: 
Device ownership:
Habits:
Buyer stage:
Events attended:
Books read:
Offline Communities:
Online Communities:More leads
Revisiting marketing plan
Increase website leads
iPhone
Visits pricing page
Awareness
BrightonSEO
Influence, 
EO, The Agency Collective
Online Genius Slack Group




4. Which channels should we test?

How you allocate your marketing budget optimally depends on which stage of marketing maturity your business is at. 

The best performing marketing teams tend to focus on one core channel at a time rather than trying to do a little bit of everything. The table below outlines a strategic approach to budget allocation, based on surveying hundreds of marketing teams.

MaturityDescriptionStrategyBudget allocationPhase 1We haven’t found our one core marketing channel that drives exceptional results.Invest a small amount of budget in a wide variety of channels to identify one channel that drives disproportionate results.100% on experimentationPhase 2We have found our one core marketing channel that drives exceptional results.Focus intensely on that one channel until you see diminishing returns.~90% on core channel

~10% on experimentation
Phase 3We have saturated our core marketing channel and are seeing diminishing returnsSlowly diversify your channels, adding one or two new channels that you can double down on, while strengthening your one core channel.~80% on core channel

~20% on experimentation

Phase 1: Find your core channel

If you’re just starting out with marketing, your goal should be to find one channel that will drive exceptional results towards growing your true north metric. Ironically, the best way to find this one channel, is to run a small experiment across multiple channels to see which ones look promising. 

While painful to see budget wasted on low-performing channels, this is a necessary step – and the sooner you get through it, the sooner you get to your True North channels.

So what are you looking for? 

Example: How we found Leadformly’s Core Channel

When we launched Leadformly, we tested PPC, podcast marketing, and content marketing as three channels to experiment on. Podcasts failed miserably for us, and while we scraped a small profit on PPC, it was nowhere near as promising as content marketing. 

Strong economics – A good piece of evergreen content should generate a consistent, or increasing, number of leads over time. The cost of creating content is one-off and upfront, so the profitability of this channel improved over time. Growth potential – We brainstormed 100+ pieces of content, making it clear that if it worked, there would be no shortage of content we could produce to scale it up.Unfair advantage – As we own a network of websites that already reached millions of marketers and small businesses, we had a natural advantage to promote content. 

Phase 2: Focus on your core channel

Once you find the core channel that you’re ready to go all in on, stop everything else. If you decide to focus on Instagram, stop running Twitter ads – even if they perform well. 

As touched on above, when we discovered that content marketing would be our core channel we stopped our PPC ads – even though they generated a small profit. 

Attempting to maximise both channels is a fool’s errand. The increased value you will get from focusing on one channel will outweigh any performance benefit from dabbling across multiple.

Phase 3: Find your next core channel

You’ll inevitably saturate your core channel and begin to see diminishing returns. It’s at this point that it makes sense to go back to a more experimental approach to find your next channel to focus on intensely.

At this stage, you’ll ideally want to find a channel that meets all the criteria in phase one, but also complements your original core channel. 

2: Triage

Once your marketing strategy is clear, it’s time to start brainstorming ideas and triaging them to identify the likely best performers.

Creating a flow of Ideas

Ideas are the lifeblood that fuel your marketing plan. 

Whether your marketing team meets weekly or bi-weekly, one of the main objectives of this meeting should be to leave with at least 10 fresh ideas, optimisations or experiments added to your marketing backlog. 

The goal isn’t to commit to all ten. We’ll get to that in a moment; but to simply create a continuous flow of ideas that the marketing team can pick and choose from.

There is no recommended size or scope for an idea – it could be as small as increasing ad group X’s budget by 10% to run a superbowl ad.

Marketing meetings are for fusion

Ideas should be brainstormed ahead of the marketing meeting in private.

There are plenty of reasons for this, from valuing the input of introverts to avoiding time wasted on half-baked ideas. 

While ideation is far more effective when done asynchronously, there’s still value in discussing and prioritising ideas in the marketing meeting – as this leads to fusion; Ideas combining to form new ideas. 

Prioritising campaign ideas

Once you have at least 10 campaign ideas or optimisations, you’ll want to prioritise these using a prioritisation framework so that you can identify which ones to commit to. 

“All models are wrong – but some are useful”

– George E.P Box

We’re not aiming for scientific precision here – just a general sense of which campaigns are likely going to be most effective. I recommend the ICE-A framework (impact x confidence x effort x audience quality), but you can also use PIE (potential, impact, ease) or ICE. Whichever one you choose, you should end up with a prioritised list of campaigns like this:

Once you’ve highlighted your likely best performing ideas, it’s time to promote them to be fleshed out into more detailed campaign briefs as a part of your marketing plan.

3: Approve

Whether you require approval from stakeholders or not is irrelevant – this step is about refining your ideas with other peoples’ perspectives and keeping the team aligned.

And that all starts with the pitch.

Crafting The Ultimate Campaign Pitch

Regardless of its complexity and size, every campaign should at minimum have five elements documented in your marketing plan:

Campaign summary (name, channels, overview)Expected results (as a range e.g. 50-75 leads)Expected budget Timeframe (start and end date)Prioritisation score

Like showing your work in maths, this is primarily about helping teammates and stakeholders understand how you arrived at the decision to run this campaign, increasing the likelihood of securing buy-in.

I recommend using a tool like TrueNorth to share campaign ideas for feedback in a centralised place where you record your campaign results.

For more complex campaigns, or those that are more budget intensive, you may want to add additional details, particularly around what resources you require and the creatives. 

The Secret to Making Sign Off Seamless

Getting sign off can be painful; It’s often slow, inconsistent, and prone to decisions being made subjectively – sometimes even politically. 

If the first time a stakeholder sees a campaign is at the 11th hour, your odds of getting the campaign signed off are significantly hindered.

Fortunately, the solution to this is simple. 

Inviting stakeholders to collaborate and give feedback asynchronously (i.e. not in a meeting) on the campaign pitch early creates buy-in and promotes transparency – making it harder for campaigns to be rejected on political or inconsistent grounds as their reasons/comments will be on the record and seen by all. 

At Venture Harbour, we use Slack – and built a (completely free) Slack app specifically for managing campaign sign off. If your company uses Slack, feel free to give it a spin here. 

4: Run & Report

Once a campaign has been signed off, it’s time to set it live. At risk of teaching how to suck eggs, I’ll assume this step doesn’t need any explanation. 

Trust is built (and broken) on reporting back

Many marketers despise reporting. It can feel like time wasted. Time that could’ve been spent on ideation or optimisation.

What’s clear from surveying stakeholders is that reporting is essential to building confidence. In fact, reporting back on a campaign that didn’t perform well builds more confidence than reporting back on only those that have performed well. 

Why does this matter? 

Building confidence is an essential ingredient for three things that will make or break your ability to succeed as a marketer:

Getting budgetGetting sign-offCareer advancement 

Of course, stakeholder confidence will affect almost everything – from how you’re treated in meetings to how seriously your proposals are considered. In short, whether or not you like reporting – it pays to do it well.

Effective “Fluff-Free” Reporting

We’re all drowning in data, yet starving for insight.

Most marketers track user interactions down to a forensic level of detail. Yet, when asked the embarrassingly basic question of whether a campaign generates more than $1.01 for every $1 spent – we sometimes struggle. 

When reporting back on a campaign, it’s important to remember your audience. In almost every circumstance, your boss wants to know if the campaign worked or not in tangible terms. Sugar-coating the results with customer feedback and vanity metrics will do you no favours. So how do you make reporting back effective?

When you created your campaign pitch in the approval step, I mentioned that the ultimate campaign pitch had five essential ingredients:

Campaign summary (name, channels, overview)Expected results (as a range e.g. 50-75 leads)Expected budget Timeframe (start and end date)Prioritisation score

The purpose of ingredients #2, #3, and #4 is to level-up your reporting. 

When your campaign has ended (according to the end date set in #4) you should collect your campaign results (using the same KPIs defined in #2) and the actual spend. By promptly sharing the actual results and budget alongside the expected results and budget, anyone in the team can see objectively whether this campaign was a success or not. 

Counter-intuitively, seeing campaigns underperform also seems to increase trust as many stakeholders are skeptical and used to reports being sugar-coated. 

Using S.T.A.R in Your Business

We’re currently in the process of building TrueNorth, a marketing management system that helps marketing teams create adaptable plans, prioritise campaigns, and rally their teams around the marketing plan.

If you’re interested in joining our beta, you can join here. As a Venture Harbour reader you’ll be jumped to the front of the beta queue.

Marketing Plans: How to Create One You’ll Actually Follow

The traditional marketing plan is flawed.

While it does a good job detailing a company’s situation, SWOT, and KPIs, there’s one crucial thing it doesn’t do very well; Adapt. 

Your marketing plan should be a guide that aligns the marketing team and can be followed with confidence to achieve the business’ objectives. It should adapt and improve after every campaign or insight, yet most are updated once a quarter… at best. 

In this guide, I want to introduce you to the marketing plan system that we use at Venture Harbour (called S.T.A.R – more on that in a moment) to align our team and deliver better results from our marketing activity.

What’s in this guide?

The Internet’s full of half-baked marketing plan templates and articles. We’ve gone deep sharing everything; from our processes to insights & tools that’ll help you run your marketing far more smoothly.

Ready to dive in?

What would marketing plans look like if they were invented in 2020? 

Your marketing plan maps your trajectory from where you are today to where you want it to be as a business.

If that trajectory is just 1% off and goes uncorrected you’ll end up miles away from where you intended to be. Which is what happens time after time in every marketing department.

When marketing teams don’t calibrate their plan often they lose alignment. Marketing teams that aren’t aligned underperform. This undermines confidence and triggers a nasty cascade of familiar symptoms; Difficulty proving ROI, securing budget and getting buy-in from stakeholders. 

Which makes you wonder – surely there’s a better approach to the ‘quarterly marketing plan in a Google Doc’ that could keep marketing teams aligned and improving over time?

The S.T.A.R Marketing System

The S.T.A.R marketing system is a simple alternative to the quarterly/annual marketing plan that fits into your regular marketing meeting agenda. There are four parts to it:

Strategy calibrationTriage campaign ideasApprove campaignsRun & report back on campaigns

The S.T.A.R marketing system has three main advantages over traditional marketing plans:

1) Consistency – Instead of campaigns being approved politically, with gut feel, or executed without the right level of input from the team, every campaign idea is approved on merit. 

2) Centralisation – Most marketing teams manage their budgets & forecasts in spreadsheets, create briefs in documents, tasks in project management software and track results in data dashboards. This inevitably leads to a breakdown in communicating results back to business goals and teams becoming misaligned. S.T.A.R centralises each step of the process – from triaging ideas, to signing them off, and reporting back.

3) Continuous – Each campaign, whether successful or not, is a piece of the marketing puzzle helping you complete the full picture. Instead of losing these pieces, S.T.A.R helps you record every insight and continuously calibrate your marketing plan.

Strategy

The purpose of any marketing plan is to ensure that as a marketing team you spend your time and money on the things that will best achieve your organisation’s goals. 

Your marketing plan’s direction is set by your marketing strategy. 

This is the most important step to get right as it influences all downstream decisions and results. Your marketing strategy must start by answering four questions with absolute clarity:

Goal: What is the business trying to achieve?Budget: What time & money should be allocated to achieving this goal?Audience: Who are we trying to reach?Channels: What things should we spend the budget on to reach the audience to achieve the goal?

The answers to these questions are your true north; The plan that tells you precisely what to do to achieve the business goal. 

1. What’s My Goal?

If you’re not absolutely crystal clear on what your business goal is – stop. 

Brainstorming campaigns without a clear goal is like an athlete starting a race with no idea where the finish line is. 

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there” – Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland

Finding your true north metric

As a marketing team, you need to know the one metric, that if increased, will achieve the business’ goal. 

While you may have a hierarchy of KPIs, you should still identify the one metric at the top of that hierarchy that the business looks towards to unlock growth.

This starts by understanding where the business wants to go. The timeframe you use for this is up to you, but here’s some food for thought:

How much profit does the business want to be generating – by when?Therefore, how much revenue does the business need to generate? Therefore, how many customers are needed?Therefore, how many leads are needed?

The specific terminology may vary for your business, but ultimately we’re just trying to connect the big picture aspirations of the business with the one number that marketing can directly influence to create a positive cascading impact.

You should end up with a hierarchy of KPIs that highlights one clear metric at the top that, when improved, delivers exceptional results. 

2. What’s My Budget?

Once you know where the business wants to go and what metric you can influence to get there, you need to know what resources you have available. 

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to set marketing budgets, and one is significantly better than the other.

Option 1: Benchmark budgets

This comes in various flavours from arbitrary percentages (e.g. 7-15% of revenue) to the popular ‘Profit-First’ model of allocating a percentage of revenue that always leaves a profit margin, to a simple fixed monthly amount. 

The benefit for this approach is its simplicity and safety. It’s hard for a company to significantly overspend if its marketing spend is proportionate to its revenue. 

The problem is that it’s not based on achieving an objective. Spending 12% of revenue on marketing every month may seem reasonable, but it may only be enough to keep up with your competitors if they’re also doing the same. It may even lead to losing market share, especially if your competitors are using the following approach.

Option 2: Zero-based budgets

The alternative is to work backwards from your goal. 

We talked about having a true north metric above which requires knowing how much profit/revenue does this business want to generate by when?

Let’s say the business wants to grow by $500,000 revenue in 12 months.

If each customer brings in $2,000, then you need 250 new customers. This means, your breakeven marketing budget would be $500k (acquire 250 customers @ $2k each). 

If you aim for a gross profit target of 50%, then your marketing budget is $250k and you have a target acquisition cost of $1,000. From here you can work out how many leads, demos, or clicks you’ll need to acquire one customer giving you a target cost per lead, cost per click etc. 

But… we aren’t able to get that granularity

If your marketing is relationship-based, driven by word of mouth, or your CFO is a bit… ‘traditional’ this step becomes harder – but stick with it.  

It’ll make your life 100X easier to engage stakeholders by presenting your marketing plan in a way that’s connected to their objectives. 

We surveyed hundreds of C-level leaders about their views on marketing plans and the findings were clear – they want marketers to report their campaign performance on financial metrics (profit, ROI) rather than what they view as vanity metrics (reach, traffic). 

Ultimately, It’s their job to ensure that every $1 spent generates >$1.01. Even if they say something to the contrary, the reason to invest in marketing is to grow the business – and whether we like it or not the CFO has the source of truth; Money in and money out.  

When you have a budget based on a business objective with clear CPA targets, conversations like “What if we increase the budget by 15%?” become more exciting to stakeholders – as they can tangibly see how this connects back to their objectives.

So, for the sake of your ability to engage stakeholders, it’s worth getting this clarity. 

3. Audience

Before we decide where to spend our budget, we must know who we’re trying to reach.

You probably have a fairly good idea of who your target customer is – it’s about to get a whole lot clearer. 

Below is an extensive grid of firmographics, psychographics, demographics and behavioural traits you can use to pinpoint exactly who your ideal customer is and where to find them. 

Using S.T.A.R, you’ll review this customer profile weekly, adding new insights to gradually hone in on who your target customer is. 

CategorySegmentExampleFirmographicsIndustry / vertical:
Employee numbers:
Revenue:
Budgets:
Business maturity:
Business model:
Process / operations:
Job title:
Department:Professional Services
20-50
£1M – £10M
£100k+ marketing budget
Growth stage
Recurring revenue
Uses a CRM (e.g. Hubspot)
CMO / Marketing Director
MarketingGeographicsCountry:
Region:
Cities:
Postcodes:
Urban / rural / suburban:
Language:
Climate:
Population / density:
Communities:United Kingdom
South East
London
NW, W
Urban
English
Fair
Dense
London SEODemographicsAge:
Sex:
Gender:
Education:
Nationality:
Race:
Income:
Weight:
Height:
Religion:
Marital status:
Homeowner status:
Parental status:30-45
Male & Female
Men & Women
Bachelors Degree
Not Applicable
Not Applicable
£60k – £100k
Not Applicable
Not Applicable
Not Applicable
Married
First time buyer
Has kidsPsychographicsInterests:
Beliefs:
Budget:
Motivations:
Emotions:
Values:
Opinions:
Attitudes:
Activities:
Roles:Wellbeing, foodie

Marketing is maths

High disposable income

Wants career progression

Why am I not hitting my potential?

Honesty, integrity

Anti social media

Left wing

SUP, yoga

Volunteer

BehaviouralBenefits sought:
Occasion:
Intent: 
Device ownership:
Habits:
Buyer stage:
Events attended:
Books read:
Offline Communities:
Online Communities:More leads
Revisiting marketing plan
Increase website leads
iPhone
Visits pricing page
Awareness
BrightonSEO
Influence, 
EO, The Agency Collective
Online Genius Slack Group




4. Which channels should we test?

How you allocate your marketing budget optimally depends on which stage of marketing maturity your business is at. 

The best performing marketing teams tend to focus on one core channel at a time rather than trying to do a little bit of everything. The table below outlines a strategic approach to budget allocation, based on surveying hundreds of marketing teams.

MaturityDescriptionStrategyBudget allocationPhase 1We haven’t found our one core marketing channel that drives exceptional results.Invest a small amount of budget in a wide variety of channels to identify one channel that drives disproportionate results.100% on experimentationPhase 2We have found our one core marketing channel that drives exceptional results.Focus intensely on that one channel until you see diminishing returns.~90% on core channel

~10% on experimentation
Phase 3We have saturated our core marketing channel and are seeing diminishing returnsSlowly diversify your channels, adding one or two new channels that you can double down on, while strengthening your one core channel.~80% on core channel

~20% on experimentation

Phase 1: Find your core channel

If you’re just starting out with marketing, your goal should be to find one channel that will drive exceptional results towards growing your true north metric. Ironically, the best way to find this one channel, is to run a small experiment across multiple channels to see which ones look promising. 

While painful to see budget wasted on low-performing channels, this is a necessary step – and the sooner you get through it, the sooner you get to your True North channels.

So what are you looking for? 

Example: How we found Leadformly’s Core Channel

When we launched Leadformly, we tested PPC, podcast marketing, and content marketing as three channels to experiment on. Podcasts failed miserably for us, and while we scraped a small profit on PPC, it was nowhere near as promising as content marketing. 

Strong economics – A good piece of evergreen content should generate a consistent, or increasing, number of leads over time. The cost of creating content is one-off and upfront, so the profitability of this channel improved over time. Growth potential – We brainstormed 100+ pieces of content, making it clear that if it worked, there would be no shortage of content we could produce to scale it up.Unfair advantage – As we own a network of websites that already reached millions of marketers and small businesses, we had a natural advantage to promote content. 

Phase 2: Focus on your core channel

Once you find the core channel that you’re ready to go all in on, stop everything else. If you decide to focus on Instagram, stop running Twitter ads – even if they perform well. 

As touched on above, when we discovered that content marketing would be our core channel we stopped our PPC ads – even though they generated a small profit. 

Attempting to maximise both channels is a fool’s errand. The increased value you will get from focusing on one channel will outweigh any performance benefit from dabbling across multiple.

Phase 3: Find your next core channel

You’ll inevitably saturate your core channel and begin to see diminishing returns. It’s at this point that it makes sense to go back to a more experimental approach to find your next channel to focus on intensely.

At this stage, you’ll ideally want to find a channel that meets all the criteria in phase one, but also complements your original core channel. 

2: Triage

Once your marketing strategy is clear, it’s time to start brainstorming ideas and triaging them to identify the likely best performers.

Creating a flow of Ideas

Ideas are the lifeblood that fuel your marketing plan. 

Whether your marketing team meets weekly or bi-weekly, one of the main objectives of this meeting should be to leave with at least 10 fresh ideas, optimisations or experiments added to your marketing backlog. 

The goal isn’t to commit to all ten. We’ll get to that in a moment; but to simply create a continuous flow of ideas that the marketing team can pick and choose from.

There is no recommended size or scope for an idea – it could be as small as increasing ad group X’s budget by 10% to run a superbowl ad.

Marketing meetings are for fusion

Ideas should be brainstormed ahead of the marketing meeting in private.

There are plenty of reasons for this, from valuing the input of introverts to avoiding time wasted on half-baked ideas. 

While ideation is far more effective when done asynchronously, there’s still value in discussing and prioritising ideas in the marketing meeting – as this leads to fusion; Ideas combining to form new ideas. 

Prioritising campaign ideas

Once you have at least 10 campaign ideas or optimisations, you’ll want to prioritise these using a prioritisation framework so that you can identify which ones to commit to. 

“All models are wrong – but some are useful”

– George E.P Box

We’re not aiming for scientific precision here – just a general sense of which campaigns are likely going to be most effective. I recommend the ICE-A framework (impact x confidence x effort x audience quality), but you can also use PIE (potential, impact, ease) or ICE. Whichever one you choose, you should end up with a prioritised list of campaigns like this:

Once you’ve highlighted your likely best performing ideas, it’s time to promote them to be fleshed out into more detailed campaign briefs as a part of your marketing plan.

3: Approve

Whether you require approval from stakeholders or not is irrelevant – this step is about refining your ideas with other peoples’ perspectives and keeping the team aligned.

And that all starts with the pitch.

Crafting The Ultimate Campaign Pitch

Regardless of its complexity and size, every campaign should at minimum have five elements documented in your marketing plan:

Campaign summary (name, channels, overview)Expected results (as a range e.g. 50-75 leads)Expected budget Timeframe (start and end date)Prioritisation score

Like showing your work in maths, this is primarily about helping teammates and stakeholders understand how you arrived at the decision to run this campaign, increasing the likelihood of securing buy-in.

I recommend using a tool like TrueNorth to share campaign ideas for feedback in a centralised place where you record your campaign results.

For more complex campaigns, or those that are more budget intensive, you may want to add additional details, particularly around what resources you require and the creatives. 

The Secret to Making Sign Off Seamless

Getting sign off can be painful; It’s often slow, inconsistent, and prone to decisions being made subjectively – sometimes even politically. 

If the first time a stakeholder sees a campaign is at the 11th hour, your odds of getting the campaign signed off are significantly hindered.

Fortunately, the solution to this is simple. 

Inviting stakeholders to collaborate and give feedback asynchronously (i.e. not in a meeting) on the campaign pitch early creates buy-in and promotes transparency – making it harder for campaigns to be rejected on political or inconsistent grounds as their reasons/comments will be on the record and seen by all. 

At Venture Harbour, we use Slack – and built a (completely free) Slack app specifically for managing campaign sign off. If your company uses Slack, feel free to give it a spin here. 

4: Run & Report

Once a campaign has been signed off, it’s time to set it live. At risk of teaching how to suck eggs, I’ll assume this step doesn’t need any explanation. 

Trust is built (and broken) on reporting back

Many marketers despise reporting. It can feel like time wasted. Time that could’ve been spent on ideation or optimisation.

What’s clear from surveying stakeholders is that reporting is essential to building confidence. In fact, reporting back on a campaign that didn’t perform well builds more confidence than reporting back on only those that have performed well. 

Why does this matter? 

Building confidence is an essential ingredient for three things that will make or break your ability to succeed as a marketer:

Getting budgetGetting sign-offCareer advancement 

Of course, stakeholder confidence will affect almost everything – from how you’re treated in meetings to how seriously your proposals are considered. In short, whether or not you like reporting – it pays to do it well.

Effective “Fluff-Free” Reporting

We’re all drowning in data, yet starving for insight.

Most marketers track user interactions down to a forensic level of detail. Yet, when asked the embarrassingly basic question of whether a campaign generates more than $1.01 for every $1 spent – we sometimes struggle. 

When reporting back on a campaign, it’s important to remember your audience. In almost every circumstance, your boss wants to know if the campaign worked or not in tangible terms. Sugar-coating the results with customer feedback and vanity metrics will do you no favours. So how do you make reporting back effective?

When you created your campaign pitch in the approval step, I mentioned that the ultimate campaign pitch had five essential ingredients:

Campaign summary (name, channels, overview)Expected results (as a range e.g. 50-75 leads)Expected budget Timeframe (start and end date)Prioritisation score

The purpose of ingredients #2, #3, and #4 is to level-up your reporting. 

When your campaign has ended (according to the end date set in #4) you should collect your campaign results (using the same KPIs defined in #2) and the actual spend. By promptly sharing the actual results and budget alongside the expected results and budget, anyone in the team can see objectively whether this campaign was a success or not. 

Counter-intuitively, seeing campaigns underperform also seems to increase trust as many stakeholders are skeptical and used to reports being sugar-coated. 

Using S.T.A.R in Your Business

We’re currently in the process of building TrueNorth, a marketing management system that helps marketing teams create adaptable plans, prioritise campaigns, and rally their teams around the marketing plan.

If you’re interested in joining our beta, you can join here. As a Venture Harbour reader you’ll be jumped to the front of the beta queue.