How to Get Upper Management On Board With Your B2B Marketing Plan

As a CMO, part of your work is to uncover new methodologies and plans that can work for your business. You have done the research, and you might have even tested it out. Now you need approval from your managers to implement that shiny new B2B marketing plan. 

Uncovering a B2B marketing plan that will work for the unique needs of your company is no small feat. However, the hard part may still be ahead of you. You want to make sure that your superiors are supportive of your work, understanding of the tasks at hand, and, perhaps most importantly, are willing to back you up with the budget that you need to execute it properly. 

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Set up the meeting

The very first step to implementing your B2B marketing plan is to let your managers know that it exists. Set up a meeting for your upper management team, and make sure the agenda is clear. It might be a good idea to send an email to give your meeting the attention it deserves. This is not the kind of meeting that you mention in passing to your supervisor in the hallway. Rather, this is the kind of meeting that requires a calendar invitation, and probably an email follow-up explaining the purpose of the meeting. 

You want to let them know ahead of time that they will be presented with a new plan and a new budget. In your meeting invitation, including “teasers” about the plan, mentioning key elements or out-of-the-box components that will grab their attention. At the bottom of the email invitation, add a line about discussing a proposed budget that requires their approval. 

Own it

management b2b marleting

In the B2B world, a lot of your meetings might take place without so much as a whiteboard. As the CMO of the company, in a digital world, you want to bring technology into the board room. You’ll want to wow your supervisors with a PowerPoint presentation – or even take the time to create an interactive presentation like one of the free templates on Prezi

Include all of the relevant details of your B2B marketing plan, and be open to questions about the smaller details that you might think are obvious. Once your presentation is prepared, take the time to review it. More than once. You want to be the captain of the ship – and practice is key. 

Follow up

After the flawless presentation of your ideas for implementing a new marketing plan, the room might sit silent. Or, your upper management team might have asked dozens of questions throughout the presentation, turning your 30-minute meeting into an hour and a half. However your meeting ended, you likely don’t have final approval from the managers. You might need an extra push to get that budget approval you’re seeking.

This is where your follow-up is vital. Sending out an email to those present at the meeting is a basic first step. Thank them for attending and for taking the time to meet with you. Attach a copy of your presentation PDF for their records. And most importantly, include a deadline for their response. 

You’ve now given upper management all the tools they need to make a decision. Your next step is to make sure it happens. You’ll want to schedule a follow-up email close to the deadline, to check in on the status of their decision-making process, and ask if they have any additional questions. 

Want to call in an expert? 

Sometimes, presenting your new marketing plan to upper management can seem daunting. Why not bring in an expert to do the hard part for you? At StepUp, our team can support you throughout your work – from presenting a marketing plan and growth strategy, to helping you implement it. Set up a call with a member of our team to consult on what kind of marketing strategy will work best for your B2B company. We’re here for you, every step of the way. 

 

Check availability for a free Discovery Session with a StepUp Strategist>>>

 

Digital marketing for B2B

 

 

 

How to Set SMART Marketing Goals That Translate to Sales

Are you ready to level up your goal setting game and crush your targets like a pro athlete crushes their training regimen? Well, strap on your game face and get ready to take notes because we’re diving deep into the world of SMART goals, and using the analogy of a professional athlete’s training to show you how to set and achieve your own big wins. Just like a pro athlete doesn’t just show up on game day and wing it, you too need a solid plan to crush your goals. So, let’s get started and turn you into a goal crushing machine!

Setting goals using SMART criteria when preparing for your inbound marketing can make or break your plan’s success. Inbound marketing requires a methodical approach in order to be successful and drive sales or any other specific goals. That’s where SMART criteria come in. They help prioritize work, monitor progress and make it possible to identify which points are in need of improvement. So here’s our approach of setting SMART marketing goals for an effective inbound marketing plan.

 

The SMART Criteria

The SMART criteria serve as a guide in setting objectives that are easy to understand, carry out, and monitor. They are a ubiquitous method used throughout a host of varying principles, in order to set goals in most any type of scenario. The acronym SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. 

“Specific” refers to avoiding ambiguity and communicating clearly all critical aspects of a goal such as what needs to be done, why is it required, who should do it, and when and how should they do it. “Measurable” means that a goal should have clearly defined criteria in order to assign a numerical value corresponding to its progress, usually a percentage of the current progress against the final goal. “Attainable” simply refers to set realistic goals that are within your reach in relation to your means and resources. “Relevant” specifies that any set goal should directly relate to a core aspect of your business. Lastly “Timely” means setting a satisfactory due date or duration for each goal. To help you set SMART marketing goals you can request a free one-on-one session with our marketing strategist. 

 

Request A Free One-On-One Session With Our Marketing Strategist
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Setting Your Goals

Smart marketing goalsThe trick to setting marketing goals is converting them to numbers, committing to carrying them out, and monitoring their progress. Buzzwords like “engagement”, “visits”, or “conversions” cabe ambiguous and unclear. This can result in confusion over what exactly needs to be done. What’s even worse is when these buzzwords are used to justify their own shortcomings. The solution is that by using SMART criteria, even abstract terms can be easily flipped into goals. Defining, for example, the goal to “increase conversions” as “X% increase of website visitors that proceeded to fill-in an interest form within the period of next quarter” immediately turns this vague statement to an actionable marketing goal.

Prioritizing Your Goals

Of the many goals that can be set for marketers, the most recurring ones are increasing visits, working on contacts, and acquiring customers. We believe that companies need to assess their current state and focus on just one of these accordingly. Firstly, if you are just starting off with your website or already have good conversion rates, you should focus on increasing your visits to ramp up your business. Secondly, if you have enough traffic but are not getting enough sales leads, you should focus on working on your contacts. Lastly, focus on customer conversion if you have enough traffic to your website. Visitors show interest in your products and services converting to leads, but just don’t proceed to purchase and becoming paying customers.

Determining Key Inbound Marketing Metrics 

When setting for measurable goals, it is important to be able to determine a key metric for each one. Then, compare this key metric to a pre-set benchmark. Of course, the list of different metrics can be endless, since it’s dependent on the goal. However, we’ve found that it helps to have certain metrics in mind when setting your inbound marketing goals. With regards to blog posts, these are CTA (Call To Action) clicks, overall blog page views, number of shares on social media, and number of inbound links. When setting up email metrics, key metrics to watch are open & click rate, delivery rate, bounce rate, and unsubscribe rate. For measuring the effectiveness of content offers, it’s important to monitor the number of landing page visits, the readers to leads conversion rate, and social media shares.

Creating Your Plan

So you have set your SMART marketing goals, prioritized them according to your company’s current needs, and determine key metrics for each one. Now it is time to put it all together into an actionable plan to follow and implement. Consider this plan as a tool to assist you in concentrating all of your inbound marketing efforts around a single ultimate goal, and help you achieve it. 

It helps to break down your plan into three main activity sections: attracting, converting, and closing. Firstly, attracting customers involves optimizing your marketing materials and web pages, defining your target demographic, crafting your message, and developing an ad framework by choosing the appropriate media and ad types. Secondly, for converting customers it helps having defined a clear conversion path to an offer, such as CTA, landing page, follow up emails, and top of the funnel offer. Lastly, closing a customer requires some type of marketing automation system, segmentation to specific groups, optimizing web pages, having appropriate content offers, and sending the right emails at the right time. These three sections are in line with the three sections mentioned in our one-page marketing plan article.

Taking Your Inbound Marketing to the Next Level

A lot can be achieved through setting and implementing a good marketing plan yourself. However, B2B companies have to keep up with the increasingly competitive industry landscapes and their specialized needs. This is why most B2B companies have the tendency to drift attention to core operations rather than focusing on marketing efforts. We at StepUp have been helping b2b companies and industrial manufacturers in strategizing, planning, and implementing their inbound marketing efforts, while they focus on their bottom line and core operations. Contact us to claim your discovery session on how to create and implement a positive ROI digital marketing growth plan for 2020.

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Digital marketing for B2B

 

 

 

One Page Marketing Plan: If It’s Not Simple, It Simply Won’t Work

“Marketers with a documented strategy are 313% more likely to report success”

[Coschedule 2019]

 

Building and implementing a marketing plan is crucial for marketing success. If you want to achieve great results on a limited marketing budget, it requires structure, knowing your market, USP, and a versatile system in place to organize it all. After years of helping companies grow and build authority in their respective fields, we at StepUp have concluded – Simple is Better. Let us guide you through creating a simple and effective marketing plan that will help you crush it this year.

Marketing Plan vs Budget

Believe it or not, in almost every company there’s the feeling that the marketing budget is not enough. However, effective marketing isn’t about allocating large amounts of money. It’s about effectively handling your available resources. Even though bigger budgets offer marketers greater reach, it’s the focusing of marketing efforts that pay off. That’s why there are as many shining examples of smaller marketing budgets achieving incredible ROI, as there are large scale marketing efforts coming to naught.

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Key Components for Creating a Plan

Setting S.M.A.R.T. Goals

The key to long term marketing success for any business is to set forth an actionable marketing plan that includes S.M.A.R.T. goals. A structure for creating measurable and realistic goals, that can ultimately be tracked and adjusted as required.

Using a TemplateSimple plan

There is an overwhelming amount of marketing plan template options out there. So where should you start and how do you decide which is right for your business? After reviewing dozens of templates, we’ve come across Allan Dib’s “One Page Marketing Plan”, which presents a simple and structured methodology of what we believe is the perfect marketing plan. In this article, we emphasize how the plan works and why you should use it.

The “One Page Marketing Plan”

Setting forth an effective and simple marketing plan requires breaking down your marketing efforts into individual components of three main parts: preparation, going live, and aftersales. This will enable mapping out your marketing into actionable bits to be carried out, and set your marketing plan into motion.

The “Before” Phase 

Your Target Market

Defining your target market into a certain niche is the best place to start, and will influence all other aspects of your marketing plan. Focusing on a niche strengthens your position and increases your chances of building authority in your field.

Your Message

Most companies fail to craft a strong marketing message that stands out from the crowd. a great marketing message is about getting the attention of your audience and furthermore makes them respond and engage. The “1 Page Marketing Plan” walks you through how to craft a compelling message, how to get into your prospects coms=ciesness and position your business as the perfect solution.  

The Appropriate Media

Choosing the right vehicles to bring your message to the customer, is an important factor in achieving good marketing ROI. Firstly, targeting a market niche is a critical component to increase the effectiveness and decrease the costs of marketing. Secondly, monitoring customer acquisition cost and lifetime value, will help in managing resources effectively and adapt as required. Lastly, consider expanding beyond just social media; realize that your own website, blog, and mailing lists, could be your most significant marketing assets.

The “During” Phase 

Capturing Leads

The purpose of capturing leads isn’t to simply save their contact information, in hopes of booking a sale in the future. Its aim is providing them with ongoing value, building authority, and creating trust. Sales will come when they’re prepared to buy.

Nurturing Leads

Following up on your leads is the most important part of marketing. In doing so, consider many alternative ways instead of just emailing. For example, a simple telephone call and promotional packages sent by traditional post containing books and other marketing perks can greatly increase your chances of making a long-lasting impression.

Converting Leads

Lead conversion is where the rubber meets the road and is the result of all previous steps done correctly. To seal the deal, you want to build trust and prove your ability to solve their problem. The use of testimonials, case studies and guarantees are the building blocks for gaining the trust you seek. 

The “After” Phase 

Great Customer Experience

The greatest chance you’ll ever get to really impressing a customer is when you finally get to deliver your products and solutions. Providing a wowing experience in a systematic way, while helping them get the most value out of your cooperation, is how you foster a life-long customer relationship.

Customer Lifetime Value

One of the best ways of increasing your income is through your current customer base. And there are many ways to maximize the value gained from your existing clientele. Some notable ways to achieve this are raising product prices, upselling additional products or services, ascending from low cost or profitability to high cost/profitability products, increasing purchase frequency, and reactivating your past customers.

Referrals

Similarly to income, your existing customer base is one of your best resources for attracting new business. Actions that can increase and accelerate referrals are simply asking satisfied customers for a referral, offering service discounts, gift vouchers, or other forms of incentives in exchange for referrals.

Making It All Happen

If you’ve come so far into our article, it means you either want to improve your existing marketing efforts or considering how to go about devising a successful marketing strategy. That’s where we come in. 

If you want us to help you create an effective marketing plan that works, or to review your existing strategy, we offer a free AUDIT to find the frictions that hold you back from growth.

Check availability for setting your free Marketing Audit >>>

 

Digital marketing for B2B