When setting your marketing goals, be as specific as possible. Marketing is a significant investment. You’ll need your marketing dollars to be as laser focused as possible on getting some quick wins while you refine your long-term goals.

Your quarterly goals might be:

• Build a GDPR compliant database of 2,000 contacts
• Gain 1,000 followers on your company’s Linkedin page
• Get 50 people to attend your Webinar
• Complete 25 demos
• Achieve 25 downloads of your free trial

While you already know who your competitors are and their strengths and weaknesses, what you need to know now is how they present themselves online. B2B buyers are 57%-70% finished with their buying research before they even contact sales. You need to find out where your competitors are marketing themselves and what messages they are promoting.

Having this information will help you:

• Create a competitive messaging strategy
• Set budgets for specific channels based on competitive voice
• Break through the competitive clutter with unique value propositions

Your value propositions will be the umbrella for all of your sales and marketing messages. Make sure they solve a customer’s problem and differentiate you in the marketplace. You also have to make sure you can prove what you are promising.

Any disconnect in messaging can cause confusion for the buyer who is doing their research online. While consistency in messaging will add credibility to your brand.

Incorporate those messages across your sales and marketing programs:

• Your deck
• Your proposals
• Your website
• Your social media channels
• Your sales training
• Your marketing campaigns

Be very specific about who you are targeting—both at the company level and at the contact level. What does your Ideal Customer Profile (IPP) look like? Try to narrow it down by industry and company size, at a minimum. A company in Industry A may have a different pain point that a company in Industry B. Then, you can develop your Account Based Marketing Strategy (ABM).

Apply those same principles to your buying personas What are the  pain points of the decision makers, the influencers? Use those insights to craft persona-specific messages that can be incorporated into marketing campaigns throughout the buyer's journey.

Thinking about your Tech Stack early on in the marketing strategy is so important that we have a lot more information about it here. Marketing technology tools will be a significant part of your marketing budget. Start with your foundational tools such as your CRM and your e-mail automation tools and then build up from there.

Other Tech Stack considerations include:

• Data migration
• Company-wide alignment
• Supporting the marketing plan
• Long-term planning
• Analytics

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This one too warrants more information. See our page on Sales Enablement. Sales and marketing strategies need to be designed in tandem. If you set a sales target, for example, for each rep to complete 25 demos, then how many leads will marketing have to generate to support that goal?

Similarly, if you set a marketing goal to ‘gain 1,000 followers on your company’s Linked in page, then marketing will need help from the sales team to actively engage with your corporate Linkedin page.

Sales will also rely on marketing for their sales tools, white papers, case studies, etc. And marketing will need ongoing feedback from sales about trends in the marketplace and insights from subject matter experts.

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In addition to your company-wide metrics and your sales-specific KPIs, you’ll also need to drill down into your marketing campaign analytics. You can read more about that here.

These metrics include campaign performance, conversions, website analytics, attribution and marketing ROI, as well as marketing team performance.

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The last step is this section is to finalize your marketing strategy and pull together all the resources you'll need to execute the plan. At this stage, you might have to make some hard decisions relating to what's truly achievable based on the resources (financial and human) that you have available.

The overall plan may be too ambitious and you may have to revisit your goals and objectives to make sure they are realistic. Depending on your resources, it might be smarter to focus the budget on building awareness in the short-term and set more realistic goals such as driving website traffic and building up followers on social media.