It’s that time of year again (for us anyway) – putting together the detailed marketing strategy and plan for 2021. And yet again it’s hard going. I’m not complaining – if it’s not difficult, then you’re not doing it right. Our job as marketing leaders is to work through the almost-overwhelming volume of data and insights – both internal and external – and somehow distill that in to something concise and executable. Crikey.

This year I was thinking why it’s so tough, particularly in marketing. My conclusion is that large parts of marketing strategy are about finding balance in your activities, making adjustments to budgets and activities to re-balance your efforts appropriately. This runs counter to an innate desire to “Make big decisions”, “Disrupt what we’re doing”, “Try something big, something new”. But most marketing is about balancing investments and activities across an enormous range of target persona, channels, offerings and activities. So why is this so complicated? I think the answer starts with the customer journeys that we’re trying to affect, and the extraordinary complexity of those journeys.

I love this slide from Challenger:

No need to (try!) and comprehend this – the point is that the way B2B buyers purchase from you is a long and winding road, full of shortcuts, blocks, backward loops and interactions between multiple people. To take a specific example from this diagram: yes, Web Searches are part of this journey. And if you thought that was something you wanted to fix in your planning next year because it’s not working so well – then that’s great. But it’s just one tiny part of the experience that one of the customers in a buyer group has for just one of your products. Neglecting the rest of the personas, the process and your range of offerings can lead to a scenario where you are “Robbing Peter to pay Paul”.

To make this more tangible, here are just some of the balances we’re trying to get right this year:

1. Brand vs. Activation. How are we splitting our budgets and investments between “Creating mental brand equity” (to quote Binet and Field) and aggressively generating leads today for sales teams? There’s a great post here, from Shane Murphy-Reuter about the need to balance activities to sow the seeds for the future, with the subsequent farming or harvesting activities needed to generate leads. And this is such a hard balance to get right – feeding the insatiable sales beast is core to our jobs. But we’re not doing our jobs properly if we’re not thinking about years 2, 3 and 4 as well.
2. Balance across the lifecycle. As illustrated above, the idea of some sort of linear funnel for how buyers behave is pretty fantastical. Nevertheless, there are activities we do to either a) Build brand awareness/commercial intent, b) build early engagement, c) create opportunities, d) get the customers over the line or e) look after customers post-purchase. Heavy investment in any of these is so tempting – “If we get share of voice/share of search up, then the rest will just follow?!“, “We need to focus on conversion of engaged users to actual opps for sales!“, “Unless we convert these opps in to $$, why does any of it matter?” etc etc. But again, you need a balance and you need to ensure you’re not lurching too far away from any particular activity, not least because all of these stages rely on the others around them for overall success.
3. Portfolio balance. If you only sell one product, you can ignore this. And lucky you! But most of us work for multi-product companies. And every product needs to double efforts to succeed! The problem of course is that marketing is a long-term gain. If you spent the whole of 2020 building up awareness of product X, ready for your sales team to capitalise on that demand in 2021, but you then move all of your efforts on to product Y, then you probably needn’t have bothered with the 2020 investment. You need to follow up on your work (“Okay, here’s the sales enablement material needed to convert that demand”) and that can make lurches dangerous, or at best, wasteful.
4. Balance across personas. As we all know, customers buy in packs. Or rather, Buyer Groups, to use the correct phrase. And those groups will be a mixture of economic influencers, senior technical folk and end-users. It takes a long time to build up awareness and trust with any group of people and again, shifting effort away from that group, just as they’re getting interested and ready to consider you – can lead to a waste of that historical effort, budget and spend.

So, I strongly feel that lurches, from one extreme to another can be dangerous, given the long-term nature of good marketing work. But obviously resources are finite – how do you manage and communicate this balance? How do you communicate the fact that, a shift in balance from A to B doesn’t mean that A no longer matters?

I’ve started using a 2×2 for this, which I’m finding helpful:

For each quadrant, place all of your activities, personas, lifecycle stages, products in one of the four quadrants (best to do each separately…) and use this as guidance for where to invest more or less:

• (top-left) Opportunities – Invest. These are activities which you think are important to your business, but where you’re under-investing right now. For example, if you felt that “Virtual events” was important for your strategy, but you weren’t doing much of it right now, this would go here.
• (top-right) Secret Sauce – Protect. The most important quadrant here for communication. What are the things which are crucial to your business, you’re already doing them well, and you mustn’t screw them up? For example, if you do incredible work right now supporting sales people with a specific product, and that’s making a lot of money, that would go here.
• (bottom-left) Sirens – Ignore. Sirens, because they’re so tempting – these are generally the new things out there, you read about on marketing blog posts (“Use TikTok to reach a new audience!”) but which are of no relevance to your business selling, say, logistical tracking software. Your job is to ignore these things.
• (bottom-right) The Past – Reduce. Just because something worked for you in the past – a tactic, a persona, a channel, a product – it doesn’t mean it will work forever. This is the tough quadrant to fill. What are you doing right now which, if you were honest, is no longer relevant? If you were bold, what do you think is (now) a waste of everyone’s time? Your job is to actively reduce investment here, and hold your nerve.

A 2×2 implies a process is easy – and believe me this process is anything but. But putting all of your activities in to this framework and using it to help your thinking, will help you decide “What can’t I touch?”, “Where does the balance need to shift?”, “Where can I take money from [to free it up for other things]?”. And it will also help you communicate to non-marketers the breadth of activity and work that adds up to the overall impact of your function.

The trick is to not over-steer. It might be tempting to make bold moves, to put “Everything on red”, but marketing is a long-term game, and you’re gambling with someone else’s money! Getting the shifts in resource right – putting the money on things that are already showing promise, removing budget where it’s no longer making any impact – is the tough, but interesting part of the job. Good luck!