What should your marketing achieve in a business plan?
Your marketing plan should get the fundamentals right first (positioning and the four Ps), then execute them across today’s channels. Practically, that means being deliberate about your owned, earned and paid marketing, striking the right balance between building brand and generating leads, and backing it with a disciplined sales approach to convert the leads you create.
What comes first: fundamentals or execution?
Start by separating the fundamentals from the execution, because the fundamentals haven’t changed but the execution has changed forever. Positioning your brand and the four Ps (product, price, promotion, place) are as important as ever. What’s changed is how you deliver them: where marketing once meant TV, print, radio and cinema, you now have social, digital and a multitude of channels. So the job in the plan is to nail the fundamentals, then ask how you execute them in the modern world. Tie it straight back to strategy: given your purpose and vision, what does marketing actually need to do, and what should your website, email campaigns and social calendar be updated to achieve? Get that alignment right and marketing stops being random activity and starts pulling in the direction of the plan.
What is owned, earned and paid marketing?
It’s the simplest way to break down the promotional P, the one that comes up most in our workshops. Owned marketing is the channels you control: your website, emails, social channels and case-study or credentials documents. These you can update daily, so they’re the quickest wins once you know your purpose and vision. Earned marketing is coverage you attract rather than buy: speaking at a conference, publishing a thought-leadership piece or blog that gets shared, being written about. It costs mostly time. Paid marketing is exactly that: sponsoring an event, performance and digital media, TV ads, where you’re spending money and should expect a measurable return. The science of marketing-mix modelling is getting much stronger at showing which of these is actually driving results, so treat owned, earned and paid as a portfolio and measure what works.
What’s the right balance between brand and lead generation?
Roughly 60% of your time and budget on brand and 40% on lead generation (Binet & Field, The Long and the Short of It, IPA 2013). Marketing splits into those two buckets: brand building grows awareness and credibility, so when someone hears about you and lands on your site it makes sense and looks trustworthy; lead generation gets more people to come to you and buy. The reason you can’t rely on lead gen alone is the sawtooth effect: run a lead-gen campaign and results spike, then fall back to the baseline, spike again, fall back. Add sustained brand building and the whole sawtooth tilts upward, so each drop lands a little higher than the last. Both matter, but brand is what stops you starting from scratch every campaign, which is why the balance leans slightly towards it.
How do you drive sales once the leads come in?
With discipline, because in competitive categories it’s the one-percenters that get you over the line. Most marketing-driven organisations run a funnel: a set amount of activity produces a set number of leads a week, which convert at some rate, so you need to know what a lead costs and what a conversion costs. For B2B, keep a top-20 wish list of the clients you’d love over the next three years and nurture them meaningfully over time. Wendy Evans, in “How to Get New Business in 90 Days and Keep it Forever”, argues that four genuinely meaningful connections (an invite to an event, a useful article, a real coffee, not just a weekly email blast) dramatically lift your chances of winning that business. For B2C, the focus shifts to converting fast: if you’re spending to drive traffic to a site, store or dealership, your sales team has to be excellent at closing it.
How 24HRBP approaches this
In a 24 Hour Business Plan session we get the marketing fundamentals down first, then map the owned, earned and paid mix and the brand-versus-lead-gen balance against your strategy, with the sales discipline to convert what marketing brings in. The aim is marketing that pulls towards the plan, not activity for its own sake.
Watch the full episode on The 24HR Business Plan Podcast: Episode 8 - Marketing Strategy in Business Planning
