Next-Level Marketing Strategy Guide [Step-by-Step]

A complete step-by-step guide so that you can create a measurable marketing strategy that will have you dominating your marketing efforts.

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Take your Marketing Strategy to the next level right now!

In this video, I talk about the key elements you need to consider when creating your marketing measurements (Success Metrics or Key Performance Indicators).

There are three ways to develop your marketing success metrics, by your:

• marketing strategies and objectives
• management direction
• team’s roles and responsibilities

By marketing strategies and objectives:
– Write your strategies so that you can measure them as KPIs

By management direction:
– Understand indicators are essential to your management and make a direct or indirect connection to them

By your or your team’s roles and responsibilities:
– Make a connection of your metrics with sales.

As a B2B Marketing Consultant, Author and Speaker, I focus on helping marketers to build marketing and sales alignment. I also help global companies tailor their marketing to a local audience. In addition to my YouTube Channel, I also write blog posts and own my podcast. Check out blog posts and podcast episodes and subscribe to Apple Podcast.

Want to see how I can help you? Schedule a call with me. Let’s talk.

TRANSCRIPT

Hey, thank you so much for coming to my webinar seriously. This is my last webinar. I’ll talk about how to create a measurable marketing plan. If you attended my webinar last time, I got Beyonce to welcome us. All right. So that was the last time the welcome slide was. And you probably think, okay, who will welcome us this time? Who? Guess what, the greatest showman of all. I got Jack Welch, Hugh Jackman.

I always got his name confused. I always think like Hugh Jackman. I mean, I’m sorry, Jack human. It’s ridiculous. But I love this GIF. I mean, is that cute? Originally, I was thinking about using, you know, Brooklyn nine. Detective Boyle. Do you know him? I mean, I saw this one first. And I was like, Oh, this one is good. But then I found this one. I was like, Oh, this one’s even better. So seriously.

Welcome to my show. And a quick intro about myself, Pam Didner.

I’m a B2B Marketer. That’s what I do. I live and breathe B2B Marketing. And what I usually do is help marketers identify ways to support this sales team. And I do that through content marketing, sales enablement, and the martech. Stack, collaboration and communication.

So anything I do is usually in terms of sales enablement, content marketing and Account-Based Marketing. Global content marketing, effective sales enablement, better-supporting sales as a marketer. And the third book is a little ebook I wrote in February this year, the modern AI marketer, about artificial intelligence and how it will impact the b2b marketing landscape. If you’re interested in any of these topics, check them out.

Today, we will discuss creating a measurable marketing strategy or plan.

I already got the next three webinars planned out. The first is how a marketing mindset can lead to better career opportunities. I want to talk about how you can build a marketing mindset, right? February is about how to create successful sales enablement strategies. From a marketer’s perspective, I’m looking into what you can do to better support your sales team and March and how to create a global content marketing plan.

The March webinar is for you if you need to scale content across the regions, especially to different countries. Feel free to register at Pamdidner.com, forward slash webinars or go to my website directly and click on Resources and the webinar, and you can register from there.

So these are the three topics for q1.

If you have attended my webinar, you know that I am always talking about marketing from the perspective of how you can think to solve problems. So I provide templates from time to time, but not always. What I want to do is help you think through how to address some of the challenges for today and how to create a measurable marketing plan. So if you think about it, there are two ways to address this or two ways.

I want to look into a measurable marketing plan. The first one is marketing plans, that specific element. The other one is measurable. How do you tackle how you think through creating a measurement that makes sense for your marketing plan?

So let’s talk about a marketing plan.

If you have attended my June webinar, I talked about seven key elements of a marketing plan seven. You know, what do you need to accomplish? To whom do you market? What is the product launch timeline? What can we say? What are the marketing channels and campaign timelines? What are the key initiatives or the years, and how much money and headcount do you need to make that happen?

So these are the seven key elements I discussed as part of the marketing plan you must incorporate. And by the way, marketing plans can mean different things to different people and divisions, but the one I’m talking about right here is for the annual planning, right? If you look at the annual or quarterly planning, these are the seven key elements you meet. And if you are just looking at those questions, you’re like, Okay, what, Pam? What can I do?

What do I need to do to address those questions? Well, here are the templates, right? For what do you want to accomplish? Accomplish? It’s a two-pager. To whom do you like it as a persona? What is the product launch timeline? And I have templates that you can use to create a high-level timeline for product launches and events. What can we say? That’s a messaging framework? I have a template for that as well.

What are the marketing channels and campaigns? Timelines?

So, again, templates, I have the campaign timeline templates and the marketing channels summary slides that you can use for the key initiative. I created a table where you can identify some of the key initiatives you need to do and inform your management and, of course, management and headcount. How do you divide and categorize your marketing budget by persona by vertical, by different organizations, or even by different quarters?

So regarding the budget breakdown, I won’t go through every single one in detail, not today. However, you can check my YouTube channels for the best marketing plan for next year and its seven key elements. And each video is only about eight minutes long. John, my video editor, has done a great job editing the 29-minute video into three short videos you can follow. So you will see the latest video, the past three, tomorrow. And I just published part one yesterday and also part two today.

So if you are interested in checking all the seven key elements I talked about just now, the seven the two pager persona, high-level timeline for product launches, messaging framework, marketing channels key initiative, and the budget breakdown. Those are seven key elements. You can check out the videos, right? The key tips you need to be aware of, is you need to know when you create the annual plan.

Do you need to know the three things you want to communicate?

Well, if you are talking to me today or pitching to me today about your plan, what are the three key points you want your management to know about? You need to identify that, right? Then use the third-party data or some sort of SWOT analysis, which means the strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, do that analysis and find the key nugget to prove and substantiate the points you want to communicate.

And then reinforced that discreetly throughout the presentation. So when I was talking about the presentation here, these are the key elements you should have. But how you structure your flow will be different from company to company to from industry to industry.

Okay, so you still need to think in terms of what your storyline is. What do you want to tell, and you have those key elements that they care about, then you flow it the way you want to? Does that make sense? So don’t take the template as it is. Modify it as you see fit. And modify it based on how you want to communicate. But the most important thing is, what are the three key messages you want to get across? Do you want more budget? Okay, that’s talking about that.

What must you add to those seven key elements to get more budget?

You want to change your content, which is very important; you need to refresh all your content because we are in a COVID-19 situation, right? Then use some of the data to support that. Right? Then you must ensure that you incorporate it into the seven key elements. Does that make sense? All right. So don’t take the template as it is. Use it as you see fit for your company and based on what you want to communicate.

Now let’s talk about measurable Okay. When I talk about measurables or measurements, I mean success metrics. KPIs key performance indicators. So measurements equal success metrics equal key performance indicators. These are the terms I use interchangeably for my compensation and often when you are talking to your managers. They probably use slightly different terms.

Some people will use dashboards, some people will use, you know, indicators, whatever or management by objective, whatever you want to use just to make sure that you are consistent with your companies in terms of how their major marketing or different functions are six, our organization, right, but four here isn’t measurement, success metrics, KPI key performance indicators. So how to measure marketing success?

Marketing success, from my perspective, can be measured based on the objectives and strategies you set, based on the management direction, and based on your or your team’s roles and responsibilities. Does that make sense?

So I am going to look at the measurements from three different perspectives.

One is based on the objectives and strategies you said. The other one is, you know, top-down, your management has set a direction, and then you follow that. And the other one is just based on what you do. Okay. I showed this several times; I threw out a couple of my webinars, and from a marketer’s perspective is very important to align your management from the get-go in terms of what you want to accomplish.

And the best way to align them is the cover slide of your marketing plan, starting with the business goals and objectives. This is something that your management is incredibly familiar with, right? They know what they want to achieve, and they know what the objectives are. With that being said, you connect that to the marketing objectives and marketing strategy and try to tie that together.

Then you identify who are the type of segments or the customers you want to market to and the target countries that assume that you are a global company that you market to multiple different countries. The key marketing tactics are not every single one, not a tedious one. But can you summarize at a certain level KPI key performance indicators? So the KPI is tied to the marketing objectives and the marketing strategies.

Okay, so let me show you an example. This is an example of a two-pager.

This company wants to increase its revenue to $500 million. Right? The business objective is to empower the customer to decide by delivering, so they will deliver end-to-end software solutions to theirs, right? And the marketing objective is about solid leadership, building brand awareness and driving demand. And if you are looking at the marketing strategy right now, the thought leadership is really about the content.

You need to create solid content and then use a paid media effort to share that information. Right. And they want to also support and launch campaigns in five different countries for the new product. They want to create relevant content for the countries that didn’t are on the priority list. So there’s the priority country they want to go after they are some non-priority country, they are going to provide some relevant content kit, they want to scale the content management tools into three different countries.

We also want to ensure they integrate marketing automation and CRM tools.

So for this marketing strategy, remember I said it is based on your strategy and objectives. You’ll KPI at the higher level, not necessarily at the team level, should be something related to the number of thought leadership content that will be produced, the number of the leads and the local level number of leads, sales accepted leads, and a qualified marketing leads, right. And because they are launches, so the certain percentage of positive press coverage, and the for, you know, number of the product launches, and also content management tools implementation in three different countries with a number of the users trained, right? So this KPI or the measurements aligns with the marketing strategies to see the connection at a much higher level.

So this is another way I want to show you another approach very quickly. This is another way to showcase the connection between strategy and objective but the plot eyes to small businesses. By the way, let me say that applies to small businesses or teams with very limited budgets, right?

So if you have a limited budget, a small team, or a small business, this applies to you. So this is, again, business goals, objective business marketing, objective marketing strategy, and KPI, right? Very simple is what I call a one-pager, not two-pagers anymore. And this is what I work with my clients, one of my clients, and the business goal is to achieve 15 million in revenue, right, and the business objective is they want to maintain growth in segment a while expanding in segment B. So it’s very sales-driven, an incredibly sales-driven type of business objective.

The marketing objective is to ensure that they have an integrated brand strategy to drive the growth of these two segments.

That’s it, very simple, nothing complicated. And the strategy right here, you can see, is to build brand awareness by encouraging opt-in encouragement for a certain persona. The MQL is about Contact Us form people filling out the contact us form from the website. They want to do something new this time. They want to enable sales via targeted and strategic Account Based Marketing.

So when I was working with Susan, she said, Hey, Pam, we need to do something different for next year. And I want to submit or discuss with my management what we can do for next year, right? A lot of time, your management will ask you what’s new. Even though they don’t give you a budget, they still aren’t asking you what’s new and what we will do. What are we going to do differently in marketing?

She wants to pitch and discuss with management and say maybe we should do Account Based Marketing to align with the sales team. And you can see the strategies right here. It’s very much aligned with, I’m sorry, KPI. The key performance indicators are very much aligned with strategy. Right? They’re encouraging them to opt-in, and that’s the subscribers, right? So it’s the number of people subscribed.

The MQL is quantified as the Contact Us form, you know, filling out the contact us form from the website. So you just number the people who filled out the form, right?

Web-based lead generation.

And because they want to build some thought leadership, they have to have content to reach out to people. So a number of the content created for outbound marketing is also critical. They need to create content regularly. Right? If they do Account Based Marketing, they want to be able to track the marketing’s contribution to sales. So did you see the connection between how you write the strategy and how that translates into key performance indicators?

And I told her, I said, you know, putting you here, to show that this is a new initiative, that you are giving a lot of thoughts in terms of, Hey, you want to do something different for next year to make an impact for the company and also for the sales team. Right? Then I take a slightly different approach when I work with Susan because she is a small business, right? Small Business has a small budget.

The seven key elements don’t apply to her specifically, right?

She doesn’t have to create such a big heavy marketing plan because her budget is very small. Her budget is only $220,000. To be honest, that’s not right. But she has over 200 line items of that $220,000. What I asked her to do is I said, so, what have you done this year? I do a lot of, you know, opt-in. I do a lot of demand gen, which gets leads. And I also do a lot of thought leadership, which I think is great. So for this year, can you categorize that 200 line items budget into three buckets: solid leadership, Brain Awareness and dementia?

So right here, and she said, but it’s not one to one kind of relationship. I say – don’t worry about it, do the best you can. Right. So she categorized this way. Right? $220,000, about $10,000, is really on the salt leadership and for the art, the team is about 100,060 $300. The main thing is about another $100,000. I say okay. How much content did you create?

Well, my goal for 2020 is to do 1010 blog posts per month.

And so that’s 120 as a great can we do cost per acquisition? You know, can we not? Not yet. So that’s good. So projected to be December 2020. So how much content have you created? Well, 11 per month, about 140? Great. Green light. Yes, we achieved a goal. Excellent. Right? The Brain Awareness, in terms of the number of subscribers, that she committed to 195 per month, that’s 220 340. Total. And based on that, I say, How are you doing so far?

Well, not so good. Pam, because of a COVID? I’m not doing that well. Right. So it’s an average of about 96 new monthly subscribers, projected at 11 156. All right, so that’s just put that yellow. Together, we did not accomplish the goal. The domain is web lead. This is Lea, and she is responsible. This is not sales. Leads. This is not anybody else’s is not Biz Dev is not str is. The people come to the website and fill out the contact us.

So she is committed to getting that to get an average of about 123 leads per month, but so far, again, not so good. Only 90 per month. Okay, so we put that read. When I help her write this, I say you must tell your management you accomplish a lot with less than $220,000. And also she wants to get more budget. And I say, your marketing budget is only point zero 9% of the total revenue. The industry benchmark is about three to 7%. Right?

And she does everything in a team of three people that have done content creation, marketing, outreach, analytics, everything, the whole enchilada.

So you need to remind your management, hey, we’re $220,000. We accomplish a lot. Does that make sense? So that is the one slide. A KPI slide is a dashboard slide to show your management how you are doing. And don’t show the code, by the way, don’t show how it is. There is some stuff that you do very well, great. There’s some stuff you just, you know, fall behind. Well, then just show it as a fact.

The next thing I helped Susan do was to take the 2020 spending and the KPI projection. And we just do a very simple cost per acquisition. Right? So why do we want to tell management that if the goals and the demand generation increase, the budget also needs to increase as well? Right? And we want to show we want to prove that to them. So with $10,000, she was able to generate 140 content pieces. That’s about 74 Count, costing $74 Cost Per content piece. Okay, I know this is what I simplified it. I know. And Susan knows that too. But we want to show in a way management can comprehend, right?

So if you want to project to do 165 content pieces, in a way, you need about $12,000. Does that make sense? So is it just math? You want more, and it costs us more? Right Brain Awareness, same thing for $100,000. And the Submit says as much as she tries, she can only get about 1100 56 people, right? That’s about $92 per subscriber. So if you want to increase that to 2500, that will just be $230,000. That is just the way it is.

The same thing applies in terms of the number of 1080 leads is $96. And then that just requires to be $192,000.

But you know, you will need to make the right assumption a lot of time, right? And the assumption is okay for this $96. What are some of the reasons that this may be higher or lower? And you need to write that down in terms of, hey, cost per acquisition is low and needs to increase with the pay media effort. So we discussed this in terms of, hey, what are some reasons or assumptions we want our management? No, no. And you document it right here.

So for here, this is the budget right here based just on the code cost per acquisition calculation. And this is just pure math. There is no human judgment or adjustments that apply to it here. The adjustment we know we are not going to get is $230,000. All right, and just to get new subscribers, we will not get that because that’s not directly tied to the sales. So we judge that one down.

But for this dimension, we judge why? Because in 2021, there are still no physical events that Susan can go to or help their sales team, and everybody has digital fatigue. If nothing else, we all have email fatigue.

We have zoom fatigue, and the demand or number of leads we will get at a high-quality lead will increase.

So with that being said, we judge this one up with Jackie and this one down. We judge this one as well because she wants to do some video production to support Account Based Marketing, and video production will not be somebody $74. Okay, it’s not, it’s going to be substantially more. So she just that a judge, budget that up to about 45. Okay. She also wants to do some research.

She wants to do some Account Based Marketing. And so that’s just budget, the $90,000, $90,000, the total $640,000. And 2020. The budget is 210. Do you think she’s gonna get 3x the amount? Of course not. She’s not. But she’s going to start from that point. That’s her opening positioning. Does that make sense? That’s an open position. You start there and then have a conversation with your management.

And all this is kind of a calculation to the point that management can follow, right? And say, Okay, fine, you want to judge this one down?

Great. This is probably how much we need to spend. There’s a lot of argument now, but I know I simplify it. But this is what, for small businesses or a small team with a finite budget, this is a good way to showcase, in terms of marketing, the impact. And then I tell her to put all this 600 $640,000 into a slide. Right. So $640,000 is going to support your product launch. When would that be going to be organic social pay search key events?

I want to go to a virtual event if I want to do any roadshow. And we are continually going to have a monthly email outreach, and there is a certain amount of money you should spend on the website updates. She put $640,000 in this format that her management can understand.

Then the next thing that she did was a key initiative. The older $640,000 will not be 100% focused on marketing. Outreach, well, we probably have to buy some tools, we probably have to fix some tools, we probably have to add additional codes.

So the back end needs to be integrated even more, right? So some money won’t be spent on website updates or tool that needs to be purchased. If they want to do video production, should that be in-house or outsourced? If it’s in-house, the equipment that needs to be purchased? So write down some of the key initiatives that need to be done, their benefit, and the challenges ahead.

That’s all the slides that she needed for her management discussion. That’s it.

My slides. Okay. However, talking about measurement, right, today’s topic is measurements. I simplified the cost per acquisition a lot. I want to put that out there, right? So, if you sponsor an event and you have a booth, you spend $30,000, you get qualified leads, you probably get 300 names, but out of the 300 names wondering 50, You kind of qualify them. That’s about $200 per lead.

But if you do a paid search, right, and then through the paid search, only about 80 people fill out the contact us form. That’s about $200. Okay, if you do an email campaign, and depending on what email campaigns you’re doing, some of them have a call to action of contacting us. Some of them have a call to action of opt-in that just assumes that you spend 50% and 50% on each and contact us right here is $40 Because you got 50 People actually through the email marketing now you do, and 4050 people say okay, you know what, why don’t you have your salespeople call me that’s cool.

When your dollars, and then sponsored content, you actually did some of the retargeting ads, and also some of the pay is pay ads, and you spend $15,000 To contact us is about 75, then that cost per lead or purse per acquisition is about 266. So the different marketing channels have different costs per acquisition. You cannot just look at this and say, Oh, my God, email is the most efficient. Then I kill my events. I kill my pay search, and I kill my sponsor. I did everything by email moving forward because it’s the cheapest.

This is what I am looking at from the perspective of the last interaction.

Attribution, I look at the last stage and that people engage with me. And before they even qualify or contact us. In reality, this is a customer journey. I will probably show up at the event booth. I had a conversation with you. And the conversation went very well. You did a follow-up email marketing to me multiple times, but I didn’t respond. And I was busy. Then I saw a couple of ads and the eyes of retargeting ads and sponsor content that reminded me, Oh, yeah, this company.

I talked to them at the event. And I still do an act, and I decide, oh, then the as a paid search that you did kind of follow me around. And I saw that I would say, you know what, now he’s, now I have time, I wanted to talk to them. So if you think through that, they are multiple different touchpoints before I contact you, but right here, I only take the last stage to calculate my cost per acquisition.

So this is called a multi-attribution model.

You need to think through it. You cannot just say, alright, this is the cheapest. I’m going to kill everything, and I’m going to put money into email marketing because we are calculating the cost only based on the last stage. But before that, they are many different touchpoints that happen. You don’t see it, or you see part of it. Does that make sense? So what I’m trying to say is when you are looking at cost per acquisition, it is not as simple as this may not as simple as what I’m showing here. Right, you need to think through the customer journey and consider that we did this with Susan because the budget is very small. Right.

And also, the company sells environmental software. And they are very niche. Only certain types of companies will be interested in this software. So the customer journey is not complicated. Therefore, we take into the attribution model using the last interaction attribution. So we looked into the last interaction attribution and assigned all the dollars to the last stage because they engage with us when they see many things.

That’s how we calculate. But there are many ways that you can do a first interaction attribution, maybe for the E-commerce site.

You allocate that percentage to the different channels you market to, or you do a custom attribution, etc. I am not a multi-touch or more attribution model expert. But I want to tell you that you have to consider this because measurements and a budget allocation go hand in hand. So whatever you calculate in terms of your measurement will also impact your budget allocation with different channels. So am I talking too fast? So just kind of comments if I’m talking too fast.

Ah, you know, I don’t usually send the presentation specifically. But I will send a version out, or you can email me, and I will send it to you. Because there are a lot of things, I do like this slide. I mean, you don’t need this slide with a chest. Dancing around using a lot of gyms.

When I send out templates or even the presentation, I will not necessarily delete some slides because I don’t think it’s adding a lot of value, if you will.

So, reach out to me directly and send me an email at Hello@Pamdidner.com. And we’re happy to share a slide deck with you. But no questions so far. Right. So everybody’s following was the only question. Okay, great. Alright, the next thing I want to discuss is, does anybody understand when I talk about you measuring based on your objectives and strategy? Does that make it myself? Am I making myself clear? Now? One question did pop up.

Okay. Charlene wants to know where we can download templates. Ah, interesting. No, that’s actually a great point. And the templates depending on what you are looking for. You know, like, I share multiple templates in my community. So shuttling, if you join my community, I will share a slide at the end of the deck and join my community, and I will point to you the area that you can check to get the templates. That’s okay, cool. Excellent. So that is the measurement I want to talk about, that everybody should be aware of in terms of your measurement needs to tie with objectives and strategy.

The next thing I want to talk about is the measurement direction.

Okay, this is more top-down. And let’s go down to the next slide. Remember, as I said earlier, when I do a webinar, I want to help you in terms of how you should think and approach a specific solution. So if it’s about the measurement, you need to consider what you want to measure. Starting from there, you must also understand what your management wants you to measure. These are two different topics.

So because they pay, they pay you every two weeks. So you need to consider what you can do to contribute to the company. There’s a common ground between these two circles, if you will. Senior management tends to care about the following three things. They care about revenue and profit, they care about market share, and they care about growth. And this tends to reflect in the business goals, right? They say I want to increase the revenue, you know, from 15 million to 20 million. I want to increase the market segment share from 5% to 10%. Or I want to see the year-to-year growth. 10%.

So they tend to care about the revenue growth or market segment share and the sales growth from year to year.

Why do you care? You care about how much budget you’re gonna get. You care about how many people you’re gonna get. You care about brand awareness, and you care about dementia. Right? That’s what marketing we care about. So here is what I want to show you. So let’s talk about the measurements in the marketing, b2b marketing terms. Anything that has a drag impact on the revenue tends to be high-quality leads.

I’m not talking about any leads. I’m talking about high-quality leads and leads that fill out the form and say, hey, I want to. I want you to contact me. And at the same time, it has to meet the ideal customer profile of a sales team.

If I filled out a form, but I’m a small business, and your solution is a target for a mid-enterprise midsize company and the enterprise company, I fill out the form, but I’m not your ICP, which is an ideal customer profile. Therefore, I cannot be counted as a high-quality lead. So they care about high-quality leads. They also care about strategic Account Based Marketing support because that directly impacts sales.

These are the things they care about. But for marketing, what are the things we tend to report or measure?

Well, a number of the webinar attendees, no matter the event attendees, the PR coverage, the ad impression, the sales support, oh, I support the sales, and I gave them 25 content pieces, indirect content downloads, social media metrics, website, traffic, email, open rates, right? This is why I called it indirect. So how do you tie these two together? Okay, but there’s also an exception. There’s always an exception to the rules.

So now there is a direct indirect. I am not saying that marketing cannot show a direct impact. There are exceptions to the rules; let me show you two exceptions. Marketing makes a huge impact on sales. But it’s, like I said, two exceptions. Right? And there’s one very prominent drag impact on sales. So just one add one commercial.

Don’t just become a tennis player. Become the greatest athlete ever. Yeah, that’s more likely to not ask if your dreams are crazy and crazy. So this is the last 30 seconds of a Nike commercial that Nike created with Colin Kaepernick. And this commercial literally within days, Nike sales went up 31%. And they launched this and Labor Day weekend. They see that surge right away.

So there is a drag impact in terms of ads, or commercials can have on sales.

But you have to understand this is just one ad. But Nike has done tons of tons of viral ads. Some kind of hit the jackpot. Some didn’t. So they are still creating a commercial, many people will say, Oh, this commercial, you know, is like, oh, it’s creating impact for the sales team. But you have to understand that Nike has done probably 10 2050 commercials like this, but none of them has a huge impact. So don’t just look at one and say, oh, okay, they did it. Marketing has a huge impact. And we should do a commercial.

That’s not my point. A lot of time, when you are doing stop, day to day, you still have to look into the lease, Account Based Marketing and all other stuff you do daily. Okay, so that’s one exception. I want to share with you that one ad can directly impact sales. Another one is also sales related, for example, Black Fridays, right? And many, many SaaS-based platform companies, like during Black Fridays, actually have done even salesforce.com. When trying to go after small businesses, they also have a discount at the Black Friday sales.

More and more b2b companies are doing this, especially when you have a SaaS-based platform that offers different pricing tiers for different segments.

Like for example, you will target small businesses, right? And during Black Friday, you offer certain kinds of discounts to ensure people subscribe for the whole year. Right. So the deals and discounts still work. And you can still see the drag, drag, drag impact, but you should not use it all the time. That’s not necessarily good for you and the positioning you are trying to conceive or convey for your brand. This only works on certain occasions.

The key takeaway here is you need to make sure you make connections between revenue and marketing. Always allocate a portion of your funding to support sales. Always having something supporting sales is very critical, not just 100% on marketing, right? And focus on providing high sales and high-quality leads; I will address Dominic, I will address in the next slide.

Another thing is when you do content marketing, or you are reaching out to certain you are using certain marketing channels to make sure you have a very clear call to action, contact sales, contact us request demos as appropriate. Don’t do that every single time. That’s not my point. But whenever when you write a copy, it makes sense to say contact sales contact us, and we’ll make it so.

Okay. Now let’s talk about high-quality leads.

To answer your question, you need to work closely with the sales team to define your lead. And that is not based on the scoring. You still can have lead scoring, but you should not use that to pass the leads to the sales team. The lead’s definition needs to be crisp and actionable, and nobody can argue. For example, for lead genius, the qualified marketing lead is deep, the marketing team will pre-qualify the person, and then this person raises their hand.

They call hand raisers who want to see a demo if they pre-qualify this person that meets the sales team’s criteria. They wanted to target different verticals, such as automotive and healthcare financial institutions. So they must qualify this person and ensure they are in these verticals. And at the same time, this person raises their hand, says I want to see a demo, and then they qualify as marketing qualified leads.

And the sales accepted leads are criteria validated by the salesperson.

The prospect is basically, they completed the calibration of the ICP, right? And everybody agrees that, hey, this one is qualified and can move forward.

The sales team can spend time with them. So a lot of time, the MQL is not very clear in many companies, and many use lead scoring. I’m not necessarily in agreement with that, and you have to make your lead definition so clear that there’s no argument. That’s why I call high-quality leads. So that makes sense. So and when I say high-quality leads, what you can control is marketing. So Dominica, for your question, yes. Conversation with your sales team is very important. At the same time, make your definition super crisp. Okay, this

We have a couple more questions that I wanted to ask. And I have a slice that I need to finish.

So hold on to those questions until later. Everybody just holds on to the question because I want to finish his slides. Perfect. So this is one way and this. When you made it so clear like this, I put marketing in a very difficult spot. That means you have to work very hard. I’m not kidding, right? It’s like, Oh, my God, pre-qualify and request a demo, and then you will start thinking about what you need to do to make that happen.

The request for the demo is so important for MQL. Guess what? Look at the legionnaire’s website, everything they do on the front page, the homepage request for a demo on the top request demo here, watch the video so you can request the demo that finds the action in terms of how you’re going to design your call to action, everything you do. Does that make sense? Because now I’d measure about requests with me. So that will determine how I will show my website, what will determine how my email marketing will be, and what content I will create. It has a ramification impact when you define your MQL so clearly.

And look at salesforce.com. You can tell the sales conversion, qualify leads, or even general leads are super important to them. This is only the homepage 12345. Everything is about conversion. Call me on 800 Number anytime contact us. Try for free. Start my free trial chat. Contact us on 800 number let’s chat that’d be done it from a designer’s perspective doesn’t make any sense.

But from a conversions perspective, it makes perfect sense to me.

They don’t want you to miss it. They want you to see on the top they want you to see on the bottom, they want you to try for free. Right. So you can understand how the demand gen how their marketing we measure very critical is about leads. Okay. So next things I want to talk about best you based on your team and your team’s role.

I strongly suggest everybody take this specific slide. You know, do a screenshot. I don’t care. Create the marketing function your own marketing functions, goals, objectives, your own objectives, and your strategy tied to the business goal, business objective, and KPI. And if you are doing a website, this is how I want you to write your KPI. Using your initial API is website traffic. You drive, you know, 10 million website traffic.

Great, but write it down regarding the conversion percentage to MQL. What’s the percentage of conversion to Sal? Write that down to help the management think you are making an impact, not make them think you’re making a connection for them. Does that make sense? If you try content downloads, you have to write down the content download, increase certain subscribers, unsubscribe, or opt to attend the CEO’s product launch event, for example.

Why your KPI? Make that connection for your management.

All right, it’s about helping the management connect the dots. How does an email open rate influence contact sales? So is your call to action from the email campaign happening? To have a customized link to track how content downloads and website traffic relate to opt-in and the webinar attendees. So you’re talking about website traffic? Well, then think about it. How is that related to the opt-in or the webinar attendees?

Can you make that correlation? How does monthly webinar attendance increase the lead qualification? If they attend the webinar six times? Can you correlate that information with a sales strategic account list in your company CRM. So, when measuring, you must look at this level? And you’re like, that’s so much work. I know. I know. I don’t know what to tell you about his work.

Final thought.

So understand when measurements matter to your management and make a direct, indirect connection to the measurements they care about. That’s very critical. Not every marketing metric, like thought leadership, can directly tie to a sales revenue seriously. How can you tie that to sales revenue? You can’t. But you need to help your management understand that.

You still need to do that; we must put the money in there. That’s the perception we need to create. It doesn’t directly drive sales. Understanding how marketing data flows with your company that’s a key point. Make that your new year’s resolution for 2021. Understand how marketing data flows with your company. Set up a process to track your KPI. So that’s my presentation. I want to share the measurement.

It is my passion. I think it is very important for salespeople and marketing people to understand how to set the metrics and KPIs. A quick thing about me. I do a lot of speaking – keynotes, and workshops online. Everything I do now is online. And I do a lot of mentoring and coaching as well. And I do a lot of consulting majority of my clients are enterprise clients and midsize companies, content marketing sales enablement, Account Based Marketing, martech, sales and marketing alignment. Those are my forte.

I built a Facebook community bill your marketing skills to get ahead.

I did that on March 31, at the height of COVID-19. If you want to ask me any questions, you can contact me on any social media channel. But at the same time, you can ask me a question on my Facebook community. I answer every single question myself. So with that being said, two things before I want to close. I know people have questions. In December, I’ll take a break. And I do actually have three webinars that are coming up in January, February and March. I will see you next year or see you in my Facebook community. So Elsa, what’s the question? Share with me, please.

You can stick around anybody if you have to drop. If you want to stick around, feel free. And I will answer your question. Go ahead.

These are pretty good questions. So I’ll start with the first one.

How do you track marketing contribution to sales if you are a large organization but you don’t have a strong CRM tool? Yeah, it’s a tough one.

That’s a very tough one. That’s a very tough one. If you don’t have a strong CRM tool, it’s very hard. If you don’t have a strong CRM tool, you must do a lot of stuff manually. There is no other way out. So my recommendation there are two recommendations. I would suggest number one is you take time and kind of work with your sales team. Do I kind of like to build this? Yeah, I am first. The other one is, is it possible you have a budget you outsource and hire, like a data analyst on Upwork or anybody you know or the agency you work with? And work with that data analyst.

Look at your currency and see if you can. That person can help you do some analysis data analysis together. Of course, you haven’t. You need to answer specific questions based on specific objectives to see if you partner and work together with Somebody technical. Does that make sense? And then that person does a lot of analysis on your behalf. And then you look into that data and see if you can identify some low-hanging fruit as a quick win that you can do or showcase some of the contributions. I hope that’s helpful. That’s what I would do if I had a budget.

Okay, so the next question is, this is from Jennifer. She says, What is the difference between personas and ICPs? Great question.

I love that question. So good that you ask. Persona is basically. Okay, I want to explain that in probably two different ways in very plain English, and I tried. It’s not like I’m trying to simplify it. But I want to help you understand, okay, in a very simple case, right? In a very simple case, Toyota. Toyota has a market called Toyota’s marketing team. They market to drivers like us. We buy cars with the Toyota brand name.

So the marketing team will market to consumers.

But the sales team, they don’t tell you that doesn’t sell their car directly to me, they go through dealers, right? So the corporate sales team, imagine a corporate sales team, they talk to dealers, they don’t talk to consumers. So that’s assuming they have to increase New Dealers. In some states, they have to identify the people they have to go after to qualify them or make them a dealer. So that’s an ideal customer profile on the sales side. So when I talk about ICP, what sales think is a good candidate that will close to they will close deal with, that’s our sales side.

But when I’m talking about buyer’s persona, it is the marketing people that will make it to the product that they will say, Okay, I love your product, I’m going to tell the DEA, I’m going to the Toyota dealership to buy you buy your car. So do you see the difference? The buyer’s persona is what marketing will do to market to that segment. The ideal customer profile is the people that will write a check for my company to close the deal. They are different, they are not necessarily the same. In some companies, they are the same. But in many companies, they are different. Is that helpful, Jennifer? Any other questions?

So there is one from Kelsey. She says, Is there a place we can visit to understand the percentage marketing budget to revenue for our industry?

No, yes and no. A lot of time, I know that there are a lot of third parties but apple pie, don’t worry, inflammation, like a lot of time foresters or IBC. They will research or survey a certain vertical regarding how much the marketing budget they spend on a specific vertical. And but a lot of that information you have to purchase and they are not cheap. And what I will do, this is why I suggest you do Jennifer.

Google is your best friend. Google is everybody’s BFF at this time. So Google and type into the marketing percentage budget for your industry. And you’re gonna get a lot of probably references and sources. I will pick three or four sources. Okay, and just read them, pick that, and use that as a benchmark to determine the percentage. When talking to your management, you can call those four sources. You don’t call one you call your quote for. So to show that you have done some work. So helpful. Okay, any other questions? Everyone? Is it helpful? Are this helpful, guys? I mean, it’s serious.

I spend a lot of time I’m Jeff. You can do I don’t spend much time on my content, right? I spend like if you follow 80 and 80% and 20% rule, I spend 20% of the time I content 80% of the time. Finally, Jeff is pathetical. What? I’m kidding; I’m kidding. I spend a lot of time on content. All right, so any other questions, everyone?

Vijay has one last question. He asked how to create a messaging framework.

Oh, my God, my favorite topic, favorite topics. And I write a very lengthy blog post. And Elsa, can you send that to me? Can you add that to the length? Yeah, absolutely. I’ll put the link in that. Okay, so I wrote a lengthy blog post and how to create a messaging framework. And I talked about messaging frameworks for products specific for thought leadership and for, say, low, low-cost, high-volume messaging frameworks. I go. You know what?

I won’t go into details, and I have a blog post. I suggest that you read it. And on the bottom of that blog post, I have templates you can download. So you will not disappoint. Seriously many, many people like that template for b2b. So any other questions?

I think this is there is this is one last one. And I think this is a good question to end on, Pam. Okay, so Charlene wants to know, do you know where she would go to find any additional resources to read or access information like this that you’ve talked about?

My YouTube channel is great. If you’re interested, just watch them on my YouTube channels.

And my YouTube channel is always, I wouldn’t say, boring, but it’s very. How should I say it? It’s very relevant for b2b marketing. So I would check on my YouTube channel if you’re interested. And I don’t publish every week. And Jonah, my video editor, and I will determine the right topic why we think it’s good, and we publish, then I create a video for it. So a YouTube channel and otherwise a blog post.

The other one just like asks me questions. Like my Facebook community, I answer every single one of them. And I make sure I answer with substance. I don’t just like creating fluffy answers. I don’t do that. It’s not Pam. Anyway, very, very good. Ah, yeah. I don’t usually share the deck; even a shared deck is a bridge version. So I hope it’s useful. I’m good.

All right, everybody. Seriously, Happy holiday. I will see you guys around next year or at my Facebook community to get by.