Download

I’ve presented hundreds of marketing plans to senior mgmt. The lesson I’ve learned was that it’s important to have 1-2 summary slides to ground senior management about the plan before diving into details. Senior management tends to go from meeting to meeting and their minds run at 180 miles a hour. Before you do a deep dive into your plan, it’s important to have 1-2 summary slides to ground them and set the expectations up front.

Let’s talk about a marketing plan 2-pager. For this episode, I want to touch on the first part of a 2 pager. Then, I’ll address the last part of the 2nd pager in the next episode.

What should be included in your summary slides which I call a 2-pager?

Slide 1:

  • Sales goal and business objective
  • Marketing objective
  • Marketing strategy

Slide 2:

  • Personas
  • Marketing Tactics
  • Success metrics

For this episode, let’s talk about slide 1, starting with ‘Sales goal and business objective.’

Goals refer to the revenue or growth goal of a company. So, if you work in a big company and support a product division, it can also be the sales goal of a product division. It’s important to make the connection between marketing and business objective. Even if the link may be somewhat indirect, it’s critical to show that you understand the sales goals and business objectives.

Example sales goal: reach 30% Market Segment Share or growth rate in 2017 or achieve $10M in revenue

Basically, business objective refers to what your company will do to solve or enable your customers.

Example:

  • Empower our customers to make superior decisions by resolving [their specific pain points] or by using a wide of array of [your solutions, products or services]

So, Marketing objective is “What”: What do you want to accomplish with your marketing efforts to support business goals? This should tie back to your sales goals and business objectives.

Here are some examples:

  • Build brand awareness as a trusted, professional provider for your company’s technologies and services
  • Drive demand through lead generation & nurturing in [specific] industries or verticals

In general, marketing objectives are about building brand awareness, driving demand, facilitating purchasing or enabling the sales team.
The next is marketing strategy. Marketing objectives are ‘what’ while Marketing strategy is ‘how’. How will you accomplish the objectives?

Here are a couple of examples:

If your objective is ‘build brand awareness’, this statement can be one of the strategies.

  • Provide valuable educational and thought leadership content through multi-channel marketing

If your objective is lead gen, this can be your strategy.

  • Implement marketing automation and CRM to track and nurture leads from end to end.

However, if your objective is facilitating a purchase, one of your strategies can be:

  • Deliver a seamless customer experience by unifying online and offline marketing.

There! Your first slide of a two pager. It should have a sales goal, business objective, marketing objective, and marketing strategy. Let your management know that you understand sales goals and business objectives and your marketing plan is set up to fully support business growth.

I’ll talk about the 2nd slide of a two pager in the next episode.

Please, send me your marketing questions and thoughts here or via Twitter @pamdidner.

What can Pam Didner do for you?

Being in the corporate world for 20+ years and having held various positions from accounting and supply chain management, and marketing to sales enablement, she knows how corporations work. She can make you and your team a rock star by identifying areas to shine and do better. She does that through private coaching, keynote speaking, workshop training, and hands-on consulting. Contact her or find her on LinkedIn and Twitter. A quick note: Check out her new 90-Day Revenue Reboot, if you are struggling with marketing.