Preparation for drafting a B2B marketing plan

- [Instructor] Marketers are doers. Our minds are racing all the time thinking about how to plan to get things done quickly, cheaply, and effectively. Think about what you have to do to plan a holiday feast. Identifying a list of delicious dishes you want to serve is the preliminary planning part of your meal, right? Once you have a list of dishes, then you go shopping for ingredients. This analogy can apply to marketing planning as well. You need to do some preparation before tackling your plan head-on. You're planning for the plan. Here's the holy grail of preparation process and the corresponding questions to ask yourself, your team, and your stakeholders. What is the objective of your plan? Are you seeking budget and resources? Are you rallying the team? Are you meeting the company's revenue or market segment share goals? You can have multiple objectives. Make them as crisp as possible. Who will prove or view your plan? C-suite, direct manager, internal stakeholders, marketing peers? Knowing who you create your plan for will help you determine the table of contents and the flow of your presentation. What about the concerns of your audience in the context of your plan? The finance team or the accounting team is concerned if you are going to overspend your budget. Different stakeholders have different concerns. Here are some examples of common questions they would like to see as a part of your plan. Marketing trends and customer behaviors. Highlight things like competitors' marketing success and failures, future trends that management needs to be aware of. How have our customers' buying and content consumption behaviors changed over time? Success measurement. Divide your success measurement into primary metrics and the secondary metrics. Primary metrics are marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, revenue opportunities, et cetera. Secondary metrics are social media metrics, content downloads, website traffic, brand sentiment sometimes, press coverage. Then explain strategies and key tactics to accomplish our business goals. Strategy is how, how to go about the plan at the high level. Key tactics is the next level down. Find the balance to showcase strategies and the key tactics without adding a laundry list of everything you'll do. Next, countries and language priorities based on our business focus. Country priorities and language translation are not necessarily the same thing. Case in point, French French versus Canadian French, traditional Chinese versus simplified Chinese. This is especially important if you are a global enterprise and work closely with different geographies. After that, content and messaging to support launches, campaigns, and sales enablement, content editorial and content roadmap, and also, what are the talking points and the unique differentiators of our products? Incorporate them as a part of your plan. Speaking of campaigns, what challenges will be encountered in implementing the martech stack? Is our CRM to the marketing automation fully integrated? In addition, what are other internal stakeholders' concerns? And this will come to play when you interview your stakeholders directly, which I will address in the next video. Lastly, marketing efforts you'd like to start, continue, or stop. Give some thought on what changes you want to make by analyzing your data and evaluating your marketing channels and results. Say one of the media campaigns didn't meet a goal. Can you explain why? Can you also discuss what needs to be done to optimize or try completely different media channels? So, to delight your family and friends with a holiday feast, the first step is to prepare a list of dishes that you want to make. To create a solid marketing plan, the first step is to create a list of questions that address your stakeholders' needs and concerns, and at the same time to balance that with your own marketing recommendations and directions. Answer these questions by looking back at the past and looking ahead to the future so you'll be able to create a plan capable of achieving your goals.