4 Key Results of
Advanced Marketing Planning
“I would like to prove that our efficiently executed plans based on our strategy effectively impacted our business in a positive and meaningful way,” says every B2B marketer as often as it comes up in conversation.
Let’s unpack this loaded statement and see just what we’ve gotten ourselves into. First, a few observations from some domain experts.
Increasingly, marketers are feeling pressure to demonstrate marketing’s business impact:
72%
68%
nearly 3 in 10
are being asked to demonstrate marketing’s effects on pipeline and revenue.
are required to show ROI from all marketing investments.
have specific revenue-based quotas, an increase of 5% from 2017.
At the same time that marketers’ feet are being held to the fire, their budgets are shrinking. In 2017, marketing budgets declined from 12.1% of company revenue in 2016 to 11.3%, according to the 2017-2018 Gartner CMO Spend Survey.
In order to drive revenue goals, marketing executives in B2B organizations must collaborate with different functions and
business units. While the alignment of marketing and
sales goals has long been essential, the most successful
marketing plans are also aligned with the goals of
functions and business units across the organization.
How can B2B marketers better align their marketing
goals with those of the entire organization
while enabling collaboration and enhanced
responsiveness to market changes? Using
advanced marketing planning software can help.
Here, we’ll discuss the four key positive results B2B
organizations can realize by taking a more structured
approach to marketing planning:
“I would like to
prove that our efficiently executed plans based on our strategy effectively impacted our business
in a positive and meaningful way.”
- Every b2b marketer ever
click to explore the 4 key results Of Advanced Marketing Planning
key 1: alignment
BETTER ALIGNMENT WITH KEY STRATEGIC GOALS.
A goal without a plan is just a wish and a plan without goals is just activity. Ask yourself, “Are my marketing activities leading to new revenue?” If you can’t effectively track which activities are tied to new revenue, you can’t be sure. Nor can you accurately determine how changes to your marketing plan might influence your goals. When you can measure progress toward specific goals, you can clearly see the connection between the specific actions in your marketing plan and their business outcomes.
Although aligning marketing with sales goals is essential to driving revenues, just 22% of marketers say their organizations’ sales and marketing relationship is tightly aligned, according to the VisionEdge Marketing Annual Marketing Performance Management Benchmark Study. Advanced marketing planning solutions can not only enhance alignment between sales and marketing, but also align marketing with the strategic goals of functions and business units across the organization.
By centralizing the planning function and forcing the entry of goals, organizations can drive consistency across their business, ensuring that, while plans might contain very different tactics, they will be similarly structured using an identical taxonomy. The commonality across businesses further enables the sharing and transfer of resources with significantly reduced ramp time.
Although
aligning marketing
with sales goals is essential to driving revenues, just 22%
of marketers say
their organizations’ sales and marketing relationship is
tightly aligned.
- VisionEdge
Marketing
PAYOFF 1
Increased revenue growth and improved profit margins are consistent themes for well-aligned organizations.
STANDARDS
VISIBILITY
ADAPTABILITY
VIEW SOURCES
The ability to create A campaign hierarchy, following industry models.
A large B2B organization’s marketing plan may include hundreds or even thousands of products, each with multiple marketing channels and buyer personas, spanning months or even years. With so many moving parts to manage and monitor, a marketing planning solution that can create a campaign hierarchy based on industry models and organizational needs is invaluable.
Defining the differentiation between plans, programs, campaigns and tactics keeps all stakeholders on the same page. Grouping programs together within a specific marketing campaign allows for more efficient analysis of related activities. A marketing planning solution that lets you customize your hierarchy based on your demand waterfall helps to effectively track the buyer’s journey and identify the touchpoints and tactics that are most effective at conversion.
key 2: standards
Provide consistency with campaign structures across functions, business units and geographies.
It’s no secret that marketing and finance don’t speak the same language — but
too often, even marketing and sales teams don’t agree on definitions when it
comes to marketing activities and goals. This failure to communicate creates confusion, causes conflict and breeds costly misunderstandings.
Each of your organization’s business units, locations and functions has its
own unique knowledge. But when they don’t use the same terminology, it
becomes difficult to share this valuable information. Reduce silos and improve understanding by defining campaign structure and terminology company-wide as part of your marketing planning. When everyone knows what a campaign is, what
a program is and what a tactic is, all of your organization’s stakeholders will be on the same page.
Reduce silos
and improve understanding by defining campaign structure and terminology company-wide
as part of your marketing
planning.
PAYOFF 2
The efficient execution of plans and allocation of resources drives costs down and productivity and profit margins up.
case in point
Zebra Technologies, a $3.6 billion global corporation that builds tracking technology and solutions that generate actionable information and insight, relies on Hive9 to create a standardized campaign hierarchy, naming conventions and taxonomy. The result: clearer, more consistent reporting across teams.
Greater efficiency/reduced duplication of effort.
The time delay in getting the necessary data to demonstrate marketing results is a huge pain point for B2B marketers. If you have to wait until quarterly reports are produced, the information they contain often comes too late to be of much use. And what’s the good of learning at April’s quarterly meeting that a particular marketing campaign has fallen short of its goals since January?
With the wealth of analytics available to track the results of modern marketing tactics,
there’s no reason you shouldn’t have that information in real time. Undoubtedly,
someone in your organization does — but finding that person, obtaining the data and incorporating it into your own calculations is time-consuming and cumbersome.
Advanced marketing planning gives you access to data in real time, so you can
see the results of specific marketing activities without all that manual labor.
Immediately see which activities aren’t generating the projected results,
or where you’re duplicating effort. Instead of waiting till the end of the
quarter, your organization can reduce spending on poorly performing
activities right away and shift some of that marketing budget to better-
performing campaigns. By focusing your marketing budget on activities that
get results, your organization can squeeze the greatest benefit from every dollar.
key 3: visibility
Advanced marketing planning gives you access to data in real time, so you can see the results of specific marketing activities without all that manual labor.
Increased visibility across the organization.
Traditional marketing planning is rife with delays and communication breakdowns. When
all the pieces of the marketing puzzle are scattered across the organization, it can be difficult to put them together.
Sharing spreadsheets among team members, departments or business units is a recipe for error: Someone looking at an outdated version can draw inaccurate conclusions leading to costly marketing mistakes. Playing phone tag or chasing email chains to track down key information from other teams or locations is frustrating and time-consuming.
Marketing planning software helps to eliminate these delays and difficulties, enabling everyone involved in your organization’s marketing planning to view the big picture at a glance. The connections between the various programs, campaigns and tactics that make up your marketing plan are easy to see, and each team can understand how their work relates to the company’s larger goals.
Of course, it’s not just about the big picture. In addition to the 10,000-foot view of your marketing plan and budget, a marketing planning solution should also give you the flexibility to display, sort and filter information in a variety of ways. The ability to filter by campaign type, region, product, attributes, calendar, planned spend, actual spend and more gives you greater insights.
Improved integration of reports and data across CRM, MAP and Work Management systems.
For most B2B organizations, there’s no shortage of data. Instead, the difficulty is transforming the endless stream of information into actionable insights. Even if you use CRM, MAP and Work Management systems to manage and analyze your data — as most B2B marketers do — consolidating and synthesizing data from these disparate systems is a challenge.
Cobbling together data from multiple sources increases the risk of human error, not to mention wasting time and resources. Data-driven marketing planning automates many of the manual processes involved in managing and manipulating marketing data, ensuring that your entire organization always has current, accurate information.
Consolidating all your marketing data into one platform under a standardized process can increase your organization’s labor efficiency by as much as 10%.
Marketing planning software that provides a robust, visually intuitive dashboard allows you to better organize information and empowers you to do more with that information. The flexibility to customize reports and sort data to display the big picture or dive deep into the details provides more actionable insights to optimize your marketing. By transforming dull data into visually intuitive charts, graphs and hierarchies in a dashboard view, it’s easy for your marketing team to show other stakeholders the progress of your marketing campaigns and demonstrate their ROI.
PAYOFF 3
Less time spent measuring and tabulating, more time spent analyzing and taking action will impact growth through better decisions and profitability by more efficiently utilizing resources.
How B2B organizations measure the results of their marketing:
4
70%
70%
70%
70%
use CRM
use marketing automation
use web analytics
use Excel spreadsheets
Agility to course-correct to maximize performance.
In today’s ever-changing marketplace, being able to turn on a dime can make the difference between success and failure. Advanced marketing planning delivers the knowledge you need to act quickly, adjusting marketing campaigns and tactics for optimum results.
Once an art, marketing is increasingly becoming a science. Instead of basing your organization’s marketing decisions on what worked in the past, advanced marketing planning builds on real-time information to deliver marketing plans that work now and into the future. With an accurate, up-to-date analysis of your current marketing plan’s effectiveness, your organization can focus its efforts and budget in the right places.
key 4: Adaptability
Communicating quickly to the multiple stakeholders involved across the organization is key to smart marketing decisions and timely execution. When your marketing planning software streamlines collaboration and communication, you can reach an agreement rapidly so no time is lost putting desired changes into effect. With the ability to forecast expected revenue, measure actual revenue and predict outcomes, you can feel confident in how the changes will affect your marketing budget, timeline and results.
PAYOFF 4
Capturing market opportunities drives growth while course corrections redirect valuable resources to more productive activities.
case in point
GE Energy Connections’ Industrial Solutions used Hive9 to improve the organization’s marketing rigor, initiative visibility and impact. Implementing a campaign framework that automatically ties to financials improved the spending decision process. With all of its marketing information in one location, the organization can access data and make decisions fast.
conclusion.
A structured approach to marketing planning can help B2B marketers achieve a multitude of benefits. These include better aligning marketing goals with those of the organization, creating consistent metrics to enhance company-wide understanding of marketing activities and optimizing marketing budgets and outcomes.
By integrating marketing data from disparate sources and applications, advanced marketing planning solutions provide the insights marketers need to course-correct quickly, advancing the organization’s revenue goals.
Hive9 helps marketers build confidence in their plans and performance. Our solution is a complete planning, financial management and performance application in one system to create a more data‑driven organization while saving marketers precious time. Planning includes a flexible calendar, structured campaign hierarchies, team collaboration, goal setting, revenue modeling, and projected performance to meet top level targets. Financial management includes budgeting, planned costs, integration to actual expenses and extensive reporting capabilities. Finally, our performance capabilities span all levels of marketing measurement, from top of funnel views, responses and cost calculations to full waterfall measurement, flexible attribution models and predicted performance vs. goals. Our API Connectors save time and headaches, and our flexible reporting helps the content marketer up to the CMO.
Demand Gen Report is a targeted online publication that uncovers the strategies and solutions that help companies better align their sales and marketing organizations, and ultimately, drive growth. A key component of the publication’s editorial coverage focuses on the sales and marketing automation tools that enable companies to better measure and manage their multi-channel demand generation efforts.
info@hive9.com
info@demandgenreport.com
alignment
standards
visibility
adaptAbility
alignment
standards
visibility
adaptAbility
close
sources.
Demand Gen Report, 2017 Marketing Measurement and Attribution Survey Report
Demand Gen Report, 2017 Demand Generation Benchmark Survey Report
Demand Gen Report, 2017 Marketing Measurement and Attribution Survey Report
Demand Gen Report, 2017 Demand Generation Benchmark Survey Report
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