CASTRO, Cristine May M.

Brand Management

COMPETENTE, Princess Mae B. Written Report

ELEMENTS OF A MARKETING PROGRAM

Marketing in a startup is challenging.

You start with no brand awareness, no resources and little to no budget. In some cases, your
startup is breaking new ground and faced with trying to establish a new market or product
category.

Too many startups fail to have a strategic plan. As a result, the marketing plan quickly devolves
to nothing more than a tactical lead-gen plan with marketers bombarding prospects with email
and phone calls and chasing them around the web with ad retargeting — none of which is
tailored to the prospect’s persona or needs.

I’ve been called into companies who are a year or more into their marketing efforts who are
perplexed why no one understands what they do.

Large, well-established companies share the same concerns. They too fear they’ve lost control
of their messaging and struggle to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Digital marketing technology is a wonderful and valuable thing, but the downside is that it
makes it too easy to execute, so that “doing” sometimes overtakes “thinking.”

So for all the startups — and the well-established giants — let's take a step back from the
martech and revisit the underlying fundamentals that drive a successful marketing program.

The Art of the Modern Marketing Plan

Do you have a marketing plan or a marketing calendar?

Hopefully you have both, with the marketing calendar documenting the tactical execution plan
for the overall marketing plan. In my experience, most startups have the calendar but not the
plan. The risk in only having a calendar is that you end up working towards short-term goals
and miss the opportunity to lay the groundwork for a successful longterm market position.

A marketing plan doesn’t need to be long. A series of well thought out bullets in word or
PowerPoint will generally suffice. And don't carve those bullets in stone — like most other things
today, the marketing plan should be revisited and revised on a regular (I recommend quarterly)
basis.

Key elements of the marketing plan include:

 Marketing objectives
  Personas
 Positioning
 Branding and messaging
 Strategy and tactics
 Measurement

Establish Marketing Objectives

Every marketing team should have three to five marketing objectives — specific goals that they
are working to accomplish.

First and foremost, these objectives must directly tie to the overall business objectives of the
company. With marketing directly responsible for, or firmly within, the path to revenue these
days, some of these objectives may specifically relate to revenue:

 Produce $X in revenue
 Increase conversion rates to Y
 Increase customer lifetime value to Z
 Drive ## of qualified leads
Having quantifiable revenue-related objectives does not negate the need for traditional
marketing objectives related to market reach, position and share, as well as competitive
differentiation and customer satisfaction. Some examples of these types of objectives:

 Improve NPS score to X

 Establish company/product as Y (positioning statement)
o Thought leader, innovator, market leader, expert in, first to … etc.
 Differentiate company/product from Z
 Expand the company’s reach to new market/new demographic
 Improve customer experience
 Advance the company/product brand
When establishing qualitative objectives it is important to:

 Establish a definition of success for each one

 Ensure that they do tie back to company business objectives
 Include at least one that is related to long-term goals (e.g. move Company X towards a market
leader position by doing Y).
 Develop Personas
All marketing activities aim to influence or drive someone to take a specific action. So the first
step to creating a successful marketing plan is to know your intended audience and what they
care about — in other words, persona development.

Understanding what is important to each of your constituents is vital to crafting messaging and
programs that will successfully resonate. Persona development should extend beyond existing
and prospective customers to include potential partners, as well as media and industry
influencers.

Build Your Positioning

Establish Your Market Environment

First, make sure you know and understand your market environment.

 Have you had direct contact with existing customers and prospects? Do you understand their
requirements, their challenges and how they feel about your company? Do you understand
what products are being purchased to work alongside or with yours?
 Do you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors? Not just product
features but sales and marketing strategy, approach to customer support?
o How often do they announce new products?
o How do they position themselves?
o How do your customers and prospects perceive them?
o How active are they on social channels and with the media?
o Do they negotiate on price?
o What market share do they hold? Is it growing or declining? How long did it take them to
achieve their current market share?
o How big is their marketing department and spend? Where are they allocating spend?
 How do influencers, the media and industry analysts talk about your market? Is it a high growth
market? Is it about to fragment? Where do they see opportunity? Does their thinking align with
yours?
 Who are potential partners for your company? What need would you address for them? Are
they partnering with others? Are they engaged with your competition?
Building a comprehensive view of the market environment will ensure that when it comes time
to test positioning and messaging, you've already thought through the dynamics in your
industry. Your market positioning strategy will therefore make sense in the bigger picture.

Branding and Messaging

Your brand messaging strategy is a combination of several branding elements. It defines how
you plan to position and differentiate your brand within the competitive landscape by
 communicating a unique value proposition through a unique brand personality. In short, your
brand message strategy says what’s special about your brand and it’s personality.

Brand message strategy has helped successfully position countless brands. Because of
consistent brand messaging, we know that:

 Pepsi is young.

 Apple is simple design.

 Dove is realistic, attainable beauty.

These brands — whether legacy or newer arrivals on the consumer scene — own a relevant
idea in the mind of the target audience they’re trying to reach. And that idea ensures that those
consumers know what to expect from the brand’s messaging.

Now that you have a brand message strategy in the works, you’ll want to make sure that you
put that content through a relevance test. Any message you want to own must be the most
relevant message to the audience you’re trying to reach.

Strategy and Tactics

Tactics are highly practical things you will do every day. Writing blog posts, sending tweets,
replying to emails, outreach to bloggers, changing page titles and appointments you
make/attend etc.

Strategy is a strong overarching vision, intended to fulfill your predetermined goals and
objectives. Strategy is the plan that ensures all your day to day activities (tactics) contribute to
your monthly, quarterly and annual business goals.

In order for strategy to be effective you should already have outlined your goals (it’s surprising
how many companies don’t do this), and know your intended audience. All goals you set should
be SMART:

Specific – Can the detail in the information sufficiently pinpoint problems or opportunities? 

Measurable – Can a quantitative or qualitative attribute be applied to create a metric?
Actionable – Can the information be used to improve performance?
Relevant – Can the information be applied to the specific problem faced by the manager?
Time-related – Can the information be viewed through time to identify trends?

Here’s a quick overview of what your strategy and tactics may look like for an overly simplistic
goal. Of course you will usually have several goals running at the same time and you actually
should structure your strategies to differentiate your business.

Goal:

Increase sales revenue by 25% by the End of the Year

Objectives

 Increase Awareness of our website to Target Audience (TA) by 100% by the end of the
year

 Increase Traffic To Website by 50% compared with last year

 Increase Repeat Purchases by 10% compared with last year

 Increase Average Order Value from £50 to £55 this month

Example Strategy:

1. Engage Target Audience at key touch points in their day when receptive to brand messaging
2. Drive traffic from new unique visitors to your website

3. Encourage Repeat Purchases from Existing Customers
4. Increase Average Order Value from within the cart

Example Tactics:

1a. Run TV ads targeted at TA in the middle of the day

1b. Run Facebook Advertising at lunchtimes based around similar interests
1c. Acquire Coverage in National Magazines targeted at TA using PR
1d. Run Online Banner Advertising on XYZ sites targeted at TA in the evenings

1e. Sponsor Local Sporting Events

1f. Create content around the shopping & lifestyle needs of your customers

Measurement

5 Metrics to Measure Marketing Effectiveness

1. Marketing contribution to revenue: This is the big one — what percentage of

overall company revenue can be traced back to your marketing team’s efforts?
Obviously, the higher the number here, the more effective your initiatives. That said,
there’s a lot that goes into telling this story and it doesn’t necessarily tell the whole
story, as some areas of effectiveness, like brand awareness and website activity, may
take longer to translate into revenue or may benefit the company in non-monetary
ways.
2. Pipeline growth and acceleration: How do your marketing activities help grow and
accelerate the pipeline? How does this growth and acceleration change from one month
or quarter to the next? Your team’s ability to regularly fill the pipeline with new leads
and to keep those leads moving down the funnel is a critical component of overall
effectiveness. Additionally, it’s important to pay attention to both growth and
acceleration, as having one without the other can be a warning sign that something isn’t
working as planned and/or that you need to re-focus your efforts to keep the pipeline
both full and flowing.
 3. Conversion rates: Conversion rates can tell a number of different stories depending on
where you’re looking. For example, you might measure conversion rates based on
channel to determine the effectiveness of efforts on any one channel or you might
measure conversion rates based on stage in the buyer’s journey to determine the
effectiveness of particular campaigns to move leads down the funnel. In cases where
the end goal is to spur further action (which should be the case for most marketing
activities), both of these are critical in determining how well you’ve done.
4. Cost per lead, cost per opportunity: Your marketing team might surface a lot of
quality leads and do a good job of converting those leads, but if the cost of doing so is
extremely high, how effective are those efforts really? Yes, you’re achieving the desired
results, but are you doing so in the most effective way possible? Are those leads worth
the price tag? (Note that the answer could very well be yes here, but it is a question you
need to ask.) On the flip side, you might find that investing more upfront yields higher
quality (re: more valuable) lead and opportunities and, therefore, a better ROI. Your
goal should be to find the sweet spot that balances cost with quality and results.
5. Brand awareness: Understanding brand awareness is especially important in
industries with longer sales cycles and even just in general, as buyers today tend to do
far more research on their own before ever reaching out to a company for more
information. It’s important to note that often times the results of brand awareness are
more long term, so don’t expect an immediate return here. One way to frame the
effectiveness of your brand awareness is to consider it in conjunction with your pipeline.
For example, if you find that your have strong brand awareness but your pipeline is
lacking, you should ask what you else you can do to use that awareness to fuel more
conversions.

Properly Understanding Metrics is All About Perspective

Once you capture these metrics, you also need to determine what benchmarks you will use to
define success and improvements in these areas. For example, you might use these metrics to
determine effectiveness in comparison to your own results from previous quarters, years, etc.
or you might use them to determine effectiveness in comparison to industry benchmarks.

In general, when it comes to determining marketing effectiveness, your end goal should be to
paint a comprehensive picture of how your marketing efforts contribute to the company’s
bottom line. This comprehensive picture not only includes your marketing team’s ability to bring
in new leads and help convert those leads, but also how those results compare to the effort put
into those activities in terms of factors like cost and awareness.

As you do so, remember that no one metric alone will tell the entire story, and in fact the story
that some metrics tell might even differ when you look at them in light of other factors (e.g.
brand awareness in light of pipeline growth and cost per lead or cost per opportunity in terms
of conversion rates). As a result, properly measuring marketing effectiveness is also about
taking on the right perspective.

How ever it is that you define and frame effectiveness, using the metrics listed above will put
you in a good position to get the complete picture you need to fully understand what’s working
and what’s not.
References:

https://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/the-elements-of-a-strategic-marketing-program/

https://ervinandsmith.com/blog/branding/message-strategy-quick-steps-to-finding-a-relevant-
idea-you-can-own/

http://charliesaidthat.com/digital/digital/difference-between-marketing-strategy-vs-tactics-an-
example/

https://www.salesfusion.com/resource/measuring-marketing-effectiveness-5-metrics-need-
track/