Quick guide for planning enterprise online marketing campaigns

Neglecting the planning stage of a marketing campaign can cause bitter ruin.

Often times, a marketing agency will be hired and expected to perform flawlessly without a discovery or planning period. This can hurt the campaign and limit it's success.

For one, the marketing planning process allows for all team members (the brand and leadership team with the marketing agency) to set goals and establish buy-in.

This initial alignment allows for the agency to work efficiently and fluidly with clear parameters. Most importantly it allows the full team to define what is being marketed and to whom. It is often surprising how many agencies and their clients alike fail to create and revisit these definitions. It can be common for a company to have a marketing team working under one assumption, a sales team working under another assumption with a leadership steering the ship in quite another direction. This limits success and cripples creativity.

Clear messaging and position document... Get the vision straight! A marketing team needs to create a document that spells out launch positioning early on. This alignment document can help to reduce the common friction between teams, by creating language, value-statements and buyer personas that are used by marketing team members, sales team, leadership team and anyone involved in communications with the brand message. This will allow the team to build a customer segmentation plan for communications and automation.

Marketing plan fundamentals

1. Define what you are marketing
2. Customer personas: Demographic research on your customers; Customer pain points and example bio
3. Strategy plan with tactics and timeline: define campaigns and content strategy
4. Goals and KPIs
5. ROI: Marketing to sales plan: define the customer journey
6. Channel tactics: Advertising, social media, organic search, print ads, etc
7. Testing, reporting and optimization plan - plus schedule
8. Budgets along the current timeline (6 to 12 months)
9. Roles and responsibilities with members of the team - account for positions that are unfulfilled currently
   1. Production plan: who will produce what during the timeline
10. Approval process for launch