Work with me one-on-one to create your marketing roadmap (+template)

This is how it works:

1. The goal of this piece is to make the process of creating a marketing plan as simple and easy to understand as possible so that you can get started tomorrow.

2. Here is a link to the marketing roadmap template. You can use it, but don't take it as it is. This is just a generic yet inclusive example.?

3. If you have questions or suggestions, please add them to the comments below, and I'll update this post on the fly so we have a unified source of information.

4. Anyone interested in building their roadmap, may tag someone, comment, or DM me to schedule a free 30-minute consultation meeting.

In our meeting, it is okay to ask questions about the roadmap, marketing in general, or even how to maintain your professional sanity in 2023, as part of the conversation.?

I hope I have all the answers :)

This post is pretty much a one-size-fits-all, so it should work for anyone from a single head of marketing in a startup, to a department of 200. The workflow, methodologies, and template will need to be adjusted to suit your needs.

Moreover, in my opinion, product leaders, HR leaders, engineering leaders, founders, etc. can all benefit from the process described here.

So let’s dive in.

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To begin, I assume you have the following ready as part of your marketing strategy:

1. Marketing thesis - A written description consisting of two-three paragraphs including goals, challenges, resources, growth engines, and a zoomed-out timeline. Think about your WHY and HOW

2. Definition of at least one target audience, and at least one ICP within this target audience

3. A User Journey that is lightly defined, without delving into too much detail (link to my post about it + template)

4. The advantages of your product in three prominent areas (the so-called Product Pillars)

5. Minimal alignment between sales and marketing - Pipeline Stages Definitions (link to my post about it + template). For a B2C company, the Funnel Stages should reflect your KPIs and the secondary success parameters that define your success.

6. A mapping of everything needed on the site to improve conversion (CRO), including triggers and making sure that the basic data points are working and responding.

7. A one-page brief for each Growth Engine you mentioned in your Thesis.

8. Planning of the budget, its distribution on the various channels (but really at a high-level), planning of recruitment of personnel (headcount + monthly budget) as well as monthly KPIs, of course.

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All eight elements above make up the marketing strategy and from here, we can begin building our roadmap.

This seems like a huge amount of work, and who has the energy to start working on their roadmap when half of those eight above have not even been started yet? It's totally understandable.

Two things will bring some color back to your cheeks:

• A few of the items I have listed above already have templates and posts I have shared in the past few months. User Journey (point 3) and alignment between marketing and sales (point 5).
• Each of the points written here should take you a few days tops, not weeks to prepare from start to finish. Get all the relevant people in your company/team together and define it using a template. This can be a two-hour meeting which will include populating the template that you will download from Hubspot’s blog or any other source.
• The really complex part that can take about a day to do is point 8 (budget + KPIs). It is worth your time to dwell on them, but don't get too carried away. You should plan as precisely as possible up to a certain limit, then move on, implement, make mistakes, learn, improve, update, and succeed.

A Boomer once said to me, "Strategy execution eats strategy for breakfast."* The statement immediately resonated with me and after a few years, I was also in agreement* with it.

Don't get me wrong, I love planning, really. I believe that every project consists of 80% planning and 20% execution. The magic is understanding when to let go of the planning and say "Let's stop here! What we have is good enough and we must get going."

Why do we need a marketing roadmap?

As a marketing roadmap is a work plan for the department, it is an excellent way to communicate what is going to happen, why it will happen, and what resources are being used (money, time, etc.) to accomplish it.

If our strategy is the flag on the hill, the roadmap reflects the way to that flag.

This way, everyone in the marketing department and in the company can see what is being done.

At the individual level, this alignment and the task definition of each activity help each team member to understand what is expected of them and what they-->the team-->department-->their company considers success.

An organized roadmap allows marketing leaders to sleep better at night and remain less stressed* as a result of having a flexible tool that shows what needs to be accomplished.

* This is based on my own research and that of the CMOs I advise ;-)

What does a roadmap consist of?

My favorite roadmap is the one that is built monthly where each month shows the following:

• First section - Funnel and pipeline KPIs. For example, parameters such as Leads, MQLs, SQLs, Opportunities, Wins and their CR
• Second section - Budget and parameters that reflect effective marketing activities. For example, media budget, CAC, ARPU or ASP
• Third section - Core Focus of Key Activities + Key Campaigns. Core Activities can be, for example, R&Rs, OKRs, rebranding projects, planning the next quarter's roadmap, etc.. i.e. operational things. A Core Campaign can be anything that requires the most attention, or something new, or something significant, or all of the above.
• Fourth section - Breakdown of key tasks of each team in the marketing department.?For example, what the growth team is doing at the campaign level, what the PMM team is releasing this month, or what PR activities the Brand Marketing team is launching this month. Because there are so many activities, I recommend limiting each team to no more than 2-3 campaigns per month.

What does the process of building a roadmap look like?

It is very inclusive and includes the management, various departments, and the majority, if not all, of the people in the marketing department.

BUT (!) There is a fine line between undertaking the roadmap building process in a flexible and inclusive manner vs. doing it in a rigid and centralized one.

Being too flexible means too many people are involved and you have to consider too many opinions, set meetings and so on. That way the process stretches like chewing gum and may become irrelevant over time

Too rigid and centralized means that many people from the company and specifically from the marketing department do not feel a part of it and do not "believe" in it. You will find the right balance between being too flexible and being too rigid and centralized in time, I guarantee it.

The overall methodology that takes hold is an integrated methodology:

• First of all Top-Down - The big milestones in the roadmap are defined by the CEO and marketing leader. That is, what they believe are the major events that will occur this year.
• Then move to Sideways-In - Ask the other departments that marketing needs to support for their major achievements, such as sales, product, HR, etc. Specifically, the initiatives or campaigns they have planned for this year and for which we will provide marketing assistance.
• And finally, do Bottom-Up - The marketing team sits down and lists both big and little milestones during this process. Put everything here, including any campaigns or initiatives we might want to undertake.

Yes, it is complicated, but with practice, it will become simpler.

At the end of the article, I listed a few things that can simplify the process for you.

How do you plan the resources you have for executing the roadmap?

By now, you have a long list of campaigns and other efforts and they are organized in a partial manner on a desired calendar, some of which marketing leads, others just supporting.

But who said we even have the necessary manpower?

Therefore, we must make two tables.

• One table is a "stupid" one?- It totals all of the required man-hours based on the requirements and activities outlined in the timeline. Each month, we have a certain number of man-hours available for a designer, programmer, content writer, campaign builder, and so on.
• 2. The second table is more "real" - It shows how many total man-hours we have each month minus their vacation time. It doesn't have to be and will never be an exact science because there are sick days and other factors, but it's worth doing your best.

When we compare the columns and rows in these two tables, we will notice resource conflicts.

Suddenly, it appears that we will require 80 hours from a designer in a given month when, in fact, we only have 20 hours from him that month, for example.

This stage is known as Conflicts Creation, and it reflects a gap between what is desired and what is actually happening.

There are two ways to resolve these conflicts:

1. Reduce the number of tasks required.? Instead of making 4 sets of banners, let's make just one. Instead of doing 2 articles a week, let's do two a month, and so on.
2. Prioritization and postponement of tasks - It's as simple as that: whatever is less important and has a smaller impact on the flag on the hill, we'll have to "simply" postpone it in a month/quarter/half.

This step is technical and time-consuming, but it will become simple over time, and the decision-making system you built here will be able to complete it relatively quickly. It is expected to take up to three days.

** What do you do after everything is in place?

To avoid prolonging it, I'll simply list some actions here without going into too much detail at this point:

1. The roadmap can be managed in Excel or any Monday/Jira/Asana system. As soon as it is set up, you can hold an all-hands meeting with everyone in the company and go over its top sections - monthly KPIs, monthly budget, and monthly core focus.
2. Determine when each activity should begin (like in a Gantt). For example, if we want to launch a feature on Product Hunt, we won't start working on it the day before the campaign, right? After all, we estimated the number of man-hours required for each month and each task within it. As soon as the items are quantified, we must record the time we began working on one or more projects in the log.
3. Begin working as soon as possible and keep everything up to date as you go. In the first quarter, the main goal is to run water through the pipes and see what happens. I promise it will squeak and make unpleasant sounds at first. It's a process with a learning curve, but it's well worth it.
4. Create a weekly work plan - the roadmap we created is monthly. Each team should take it and divide it into weeks - what do we do each week, when do we start working on one project or another, what are our main focuses each month, and so on. There's no need for anything fancy or detailed, but every team manager should turn monthly planning into weekly practice.

My God, is there anything that can make all this a little easier?

Yes!

• Create a roadmap for the one or two quarters as a starting point, rather than for the entire year.
• Do not lead it yourself as a marketing leader. The person in charge of such a process is either the Marketing Operations manager if one exists, or a Project Manager with strong interpersonal skills and in-depth knowledge of the product and the company.
• The method of task reduction and prioritization is critical for avoiding insanity. If there are too many tasks, as I suggested, reduce the number of requirements for each task and defer less urgent tasks to continue.

You now have a tool that unites everyone and reflects your strategy for reaching the goal you set for yourself :-)

I'd love to hear more suggestions for process optimization, given that the goal here is to keep things as high-level as possible without losing context and to provide as much value as possible to a diverse group of people with varying levels of knowledge and experience.

I’m clicking "Publish" and hope the browser doesn't crash.