What Is a Marketing Roadmap & Why Does Your Business Need One?
If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you’re familiar with creating an annual plans and strategies. However, many business executive these days agree that the marketing initiatives you plan to deploy 6–12 months from now may become irrelevant or possibly even obsolete. Marketing Roadmap is a new generation of planning.
Splitting your annual plan down into smaller marketing roadmaps can help you remain flexible and adjust as needed to reach business goals. There are many approaches to creating the roadmaps. We recommend covering 6-month with ther first quarter being as tactical and detailed ans possible. The second quarter should outline hypothesis and long-term initiatives that will result from the first three-month implementation. After the first three month of your roadmap have been implemented, you return to edit the following quarter and fill in tactical detail. This process repeats every three months.
So what goes into creating a marketing roadmap and what should it include?
Priority Areas
Start by determining what areas you want to focus on that tie directly to your business growth goals. If this is your first roadmap and you are at the beginning stages of structuring your marketing efforts, then it’s always a good idea to start with a 360-degree Marketing Audit. This audit will help you prioritize your quarter and make sure you can stay focused. Whether you start from a Marketing Audit or not, don’t list dozens of areas you want to devote attention to. Keep it at a manageable level and identify KPIs that need improvement based on your company’s revenue and growth goals. Here are some examples:
- Increase website traffic with SEO. We will tap into SEO and create processes that will help us get consistent with content development. Creating and maintaining editorial calendar, distribute content creation between team members, have a social media curation plan & timeline for each piece of content.
- Social Media Advertising. While SEO efforts are a long term investment, we would need to get the ball rolling faster, getting new leads and sales this quarter. We will review our Google Advertising efforts and make improvements to get better results. We will also start advertising on Facebook Advertising Platform to reach highly-targeted audiences on Facebook and Instagram.
- Lead Quality. Even though we get a lot of leads, the close rate is low due to the fact that those leads are not highly qualified. We’ll need to experiment with our advertising efforts, set up more focused targeting and conduct a few customer interviews to determine the reason and fix the problem.
- Email Marketing. Even though we have an email capturing system, the follow-up and lead nurturing efforts are chaotic and reactive. We’ll need to segment our email list, come up with an email sequence for each segment, write a copy, and set up automation.
Quantifiable Goals
The only way to know if your long-term and quarterly plans reach their targets is by establishing measurable goals. Marketing roadmap goals should have a direct impact on at least one of your overall marketing and sales KPIs. Accurate data is critical to success, and is especially important when documenting results and building long-term confidence that you are moving forward. Give each goal a specific value and establish the time period associated with it. For example:
- Increase website conversion rate by 1% by the end of Q2
- Increase email subscribers by 20% by the end of June.
- Achieve the average $15 cost per customer acquisition for the target audience X.
Not every goal and focus can have a quantifiable outcome. For example you cannot easily measure a website redesign and rebranding, at least not short-term. You might also not have many quantifiable goals if you are just starting out with researching your audience, and building up strategic foundations for your business. But it’s important to give the numerical value whenever you can, keeping yourself in check.
Defined Execution Plan
Identify step by step how you work toward achieving your quarterly goal? Who on your marketing team will take charge of various initiatives within the proposed roadmap? If you have multiple team members involved, be sure to discuss your plans with them first. Then, assign duties and deadlines to help ensure timely deployment of initiatives and, just as importantly, provide empowerment and accountability. Executing a quarterly marketing plan requires a team effort.
Assessment
A marketing roadmap offers much more flexibility than a yearly plan. That said, it is important to assess progress monthly to identify strengths and weaknesses and discuss any needed adjustments before the roadmap period ends. Then, two weeks prior to the end of your roadmap period, evaluate the results-to-date to determine next steps. If you made noticeable progress toward a specific goal, but need more time and need to keep the momentum going, make it a focus area in your next roadmap, too.
If one of your hypotheses and assumptions didn’t pan out, you can learn from it and adjust by changing your marketing efforts in the next roadmap period. Or, you might just decide to scrap it! That’s the power of a quarterly approach. It’s better to see a specific strategy isn’t working after three months versus 12 months of effort and budget.
By taking this approach and outlining your key focus areas a quarter at a time, you’ll have a defined plan for the next quarter that should feel manageable. A quarterly marketing roadmap can also help energize your team and get them excited about jumping in and making a difference with measurable results.
Good luck roadmapping!
About me
Hi there 👋 My name is Leila Quinn, I'm a founder of LAQ Marketing, Fraction CMO and executive marketing coach.
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