It’s budget season! The annual cycle of big plans and dreams for next year – new budgets, new priorities. If building a best practice revenue marketing operation that delivers qualified leads and ROI is one of your 2020 goals, we want to share some tips to help you plan for next year. To build a best practice revenue marketing machine, you’ll need to plan on two levels: organizational and program planning.
1. Organizational Planning
Building a best practice marketing operation is no easy task. To pull it off, you have to execute great programs – creative, content, media, data, technology, reporting, inside sales, and sales enablement – with each layer working in alignment. If any of the gears are off, the clock stops ticking.
You need people with the right skill sets, the necessary marketing technologies and data infrastructure, and sales processes aligned to marketing. There’s a lot of competition for talent. Finding the right skill sets is hard enough. Once you get the right people, you also need to define processes and projects, create budgets, deploy technologies, create content, and acquire and clean data. And repeat.
At Demand Frontier, we’ve built a Revenue Marketing Health Check to simplify this process. It is a series of discussions, surveys, audits, and reviews that we conduct with our clients as part of a paid engagement during the discovery and strategic planning stages of a project or client engagement. The approach is customized to the client’s needs and helps us understand what the landscape looks like.
Where is there depth? Where are there gaps?
By asking these two simple questions, we’re not only able to develop an effective, creative program to address the business objectives, but also quickly leverage the resources, systems, people, partners, and data already in place.
Want to get started planning for next year?
ProTip: The 5 Minute Revenue Marketing Checklist
Leverage the tools we use. There are so many areas that fall under digital marketing, the first step in creating a plan is understanding where you have coverage and identifying programs or initiatives that you don’t have a plan and budget in place to address. It’s a starting point that helps narrow down a lot of options and develop a checklist as a guide to planning.
to quickly identify your areas of need. We’ve listed over 60 different categories of marketing organization and program needs. Which ones do you want to prioritize? Where do you need more budget or staff?
This quick survey will boil it down for you in less than five minutes.
2. Program Planning
Establishing the organizational resources and plans is just step one. Once you have the resources aligned, it’s time to translate that investment into marketing programs that drive sales.
To succeed in enterprise revenue marketing, there are many program layers that you’ll need to plan and execute. These include:
- Business case
- Quality content
- Great Creative
- Program development: events, webinars, email programs, account-based marketing, display advertising, and social media
- Media planning and management
- Marketing automation, CRM, and other required technologies
- Marketing database to expand, standardize, and maintain
- Reports and analysis
For the most effective and efficient marketing plans, arrange your calendar and manage it like a media publisher. Leverage your heavy investments into thought leadership – a blog article, whitepaper, webinar, or whatever you put your subject matter focus into, and create a promotional plan to include all your marketing channels – email, display, social, and sales enablement. Generate content and programs that support the editorial calendar for all the layers in your multi-channel marketing landscape. Focus on embedding calls to action for sales engagement throughout every step.
At Demand Frontier, we have an extensive library of best practice programs, including frameworks, tools, project briefs, templates, and reports. They are all designed to help our clients plan and execute revenue marketing operations efficiently. These tools are built from years of experience and represent a collection of best practice methodologies we’ve seen and used along the way.
Happy planning!
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