Boosting Revenue and ROI: Crafting an Effective Marketing Plan to Achieve Growth (Part 2)
In the first part of our series, we have discussed the first steps in building your marketing plan. We suggest going through those steps and looking at your data for the best results. As a reminder, you should:
- reverse engineer your goals. Have a clear understanding of your targets before you hop into executing your tactics.
- take a deep dive into your pipeline and review what is closing next quarters. Additionally, review the historical percentage of the pipeline that has been pushed to future quarters.
- understand the stages’ velocity.
- identify the needed pipeline coverage target.
You have to know your numbers before starting to put everything together. In this part, we will cover the last two steps of the process and explain how you can build a working revenue-driven marketing plan.
COMBINE EVERYTHING TOGETHER
Failure to focus on your revenue goals in the planning process may result in failing to reach your goals. Let’s look at steps that can be taken in the way of aligning your campaigns with revenue targets and funds available.
- Examine your pipeline and identify what is already there. Based on what you see, how many deals do you need to add to your pipeline to reach your goals?
- Understand all the marketing programs you’re currently running. Once you organize your scheduled marketing activities in a clear view, look at it in terms of pipeline. Answer the question: what will be added to the pipeline based on those plans? Keep in mind that you need to examine your entire marketing calendar, and what we mean by this is you need to consider all the programs that just finished running, are running, or will be running in the future, and will affect the pipeline for this quarter. Another important thing to keep in mind is to monitor your marketing activities often to make sure that everything’s performing as expected. If it doesn’t, you need to adjust them as soon as possible. Do you always have real-time data handy?
- Now, when you know how much you already have in your pipeline combined with predicted value that is going to be delivered by your planned (current) marketing campaigns and programs, you can see the gap between where you are today versus where you need to be from a revenue perspective. This can help you identify how much you still need to add to your pipeline to hit your goal. It’s important to understand the gap as soon as possible so you can have enough time to add new programs and campaigns to your calendar to close this gap.
- Figure out the available budget. Do you still have an unassigned budget? Great! It will give you the advantage of adding new marketing activities that will help you to close the gap. However, when you add those items to your calendar, remember about velocity, that it’s not going to be the same for different types of tactics. But what if you don’t have an available budget left? The answer is hiding inside of your pipeline again. Look at your current pipeline and find the items that can be reactivated.
Following these steps will help you to ensure that you are on track to achieve your revenue goals. What you need to keep in mind is that things may not always go as planned. For different reasons, your campaigns may not always perform as you expected. You need to monitor their performance closely, so let’s go over some useful tips on how to do this in the most efficient way.
MONITOR PERFORMANCE REGULARLY
Don’t wait until the end of the quarter to identify underperformance. Always monitor the effectiveness of your marketing efforts on a frequent basis. Having transparency about how your programs perform is essential and so is to have the ability to address any issues as soon as they arise. Although this may seem straightforward, it raises questions such as what specific aspects we need to monitor and what we should do when we see the gap.
Let’s explore these questions further.
What exactly do you need to monitor? First, keep monitoring your sales pipeline to ensure there are no unforeseen shifts. Develop a habit of checking what is going on inside of your pipeline at least on a weekly basis. Review what’s been recently added, Closed, Won, or Pushed to the next quarter and, most important, how much more you need to add to your pipeline to finish your quarter strong.
It is helpful to monitor the performance of each marketing tactic that is in progress to see what is performing and what is not. Examine each tactic based on the number of leads, MQLs or Opportunities it has contributed to your overall goal, compare where you are today versus where you need to be. Assessing your tactics frequently will help you identify problem areas and illuminate programs that don’t work.
What should you do when you encounter a gap in your marketing performance? It’s important to not only identify the problem but also provide a solution swiftly. Instead of simply pointing fingers, take action and find ways to turn underperforming campaigns and untouched opportunities around. We’ve written an entire article on this topic and created an ungated cheat sheet with actionable steps you can take within a quarter to improve your marketing performance. Access the resources and start making a positive impact.
Our questions to you – Do you see the whole picture and is your data up to date? In the complex revtech landscape, fragmented data can hinder effective marketing and sales efforts. By consolidating metrics from both departments in a centralized platform, we can seamlessly track performance and measure effectiveness. Using accurate data is essential to ensure campaigns are built on reliable information and drive successful sales outcomes.
Relying on luck is not a sustainable approach, and a strategic marketing plan is crucial for consistent success. Rebuilding your planning process will help to prevent being in a situation where you face revenue shortfalls. We hope the tips we provided were helpful. Don’t take chances, own your bluebird!
Doesn’t it sound like lots of work? Not with Growegy. Growegy’s real-time campaign performance monitoring ensures you won’t have to wait till the end of the quarter to spot any underperformance. We provide the holistic view of the entire funnel so you can align your marketing efforts to sales needs, accurately monitor the full marketing mix performance and offer your the list of custom-made recommendations to fill the gaps. Schedule a demo with us for more information.
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