Effective Marketing Plans Made Easy

Marketing plans can be complicated and cumbersome to put together. After all, you’re trying to align the prospect, the salesperson, and the marketer. However, there is a simple way to put the customer at the center and map the tactics that will help you create the success you are seeking.

Oftentimes, leaders and marketers alike get caught up in the tactics. Instead of their asking, “How do we leverage marketing to achieve our goals?” I hear questions like “Should we launch a new email newsletter?” and “Should we be on Instagram?” Or, worse, a leader will hear about something someone else is doing and bring this idea to the team to execute.

This is the epitome of throwing something against the wall and hoping it will stick.

Some of your initiatives will work, but without a structured approach to marketing decisions, you won’t know why. This is further complicated by the fact that, every month, hundreds of new platforms, media outlets, influencers, technologies, and the like emerge to “help” you reach your target market. In 2011, there were 150 technologies available to sophisticate your marketing efforts. Today, there are more than 8,000 and growing.

When you add the number of media outlets, events, digital platforms, and endless creative ways to distribute your brand name and message, the volume of options can feel less like a mountaintop from which to shout your name and more like a landslide that will suffocate you and your message.

This is where your marketing plan should assist you—except that, often, marketing plans aren’t actually helpful. You’ll find an endless variety of explanations through Google for what should be in a marketing plan and how it should be formatted. But you’re not looking for a pretty document; you’re looking for a plan that keeps everyone on track to make money.

Instead of a massive report that reads more like a business description than a marketing plan, your marketing plan should simply state who will buy from you, why they’ll buy from you, and how you’ll get that message to them so that they do buy.

No more tomes collecting dust instead of dollars. Instead, I advocate for two documents that your marketing team should reference weekly, if not daily. You’ll have a marketing-strategy document that includes your buyer personas, key messaging, and brand truth as your decision-making criteria. And you’ll have an actionable document outlining your outreach as your tactical marketing plan.

Your marketing strategy should encompass your decision-making criteria. Your tactical marketing plan should show how you will distribute your communication to your buyer personas.

So where do we begin? With buyer personas’ preferences, of course.

People love to buy but hate to be sold. This, in a nutshell, is why sales and marketing alignment is so critical. Because the only way to be aligned is to be absolutely focused on the customer. Marketing and selling must bring value to the buyer.

It’s a shift in thinking—a shift away from specializing in your product and toward specializing in your audience. As we discussed in the previous chapter, the real goal is to sell what your market is actually and already buying. Individuals are not buying products, services, features, or even benefits.

They are buying a change that will make their lives easier, happier, or more profitable.

They are buying forward progress. Period.

Sounds obvious, until you add the emotion behind revenue generation. Sales is the lifeblood of every company; if you can’t close a deal, it doesn’t matter how superior your mousetrap is. Sales is high stakes not only because most salespeople’s potential income is based on how much they sell but because the stability and livelihood of everyone else at the company are also on the line.

The sales life is one person going out there one day at a time, reaching out to one decision maker at a time, and closing one deal at a time—all while trying to hit an ever-increasing number.

There is no finish line in sales. Ever.

Because of this, salespeople spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how to be better than the competition, how to communicate value, and how to react to what a decision-maker is saying, as well as focusing on doing anything it takes to move a prospect one step closer to a sale.

Every conversation adds to their knowledge and arsenal of information to help them better advocate for their products, but it also makes salespeople insanely product focused. Salespeople champion “us,” and this constant “why choose us” advocacy can make anyone myopic.

But when you embrace the idea that you are helping people to be more successful, you are forced to change how you approach business development. Sales and marketing alignment means embracing, throughout your entire organization, a servant-leadership mentality through which you teach your prospects how to make the best decision.

Your legacy in turn will eventually be about the transformation you created for others. If you incorporate this endgame thinking into your day-to-day reality, it’s not only the right thing to do for your market; it’s the right thing to do to fulfill your potential and role in this world.

It is a relief for people, or buyers, to make a choice and move forward.

They cross something off their lists and move out of indecision and into progress. And here’s the rub: even though it’s your product or service that creates the progress, it is your customer who gets and deserves the credit for it.?

As humans, we are the central characters of our own stories, so our business-development approach needs to reflect this truth.

This is the hallmark of world-class business development.