Ever wondered if your business needs a marketing roadmap?
You’ve got a vision for your business. You’ve set quarterly, annual, and longer-term goals. You have sales targets and plans, and marketing tactics in place. That should ensure that your business is set up for growth, right?
Not quite – unless you also have a marketing roadmap.
Marketing Roadmaps: Your Key to Growth
A marketing roadmap is essential for any growing business. Here are 5 reasons why:
- It can connect the dots between everyday tactics and larger business strategies. It’s not enough to lay out big-picture plans in a document that won’t see the light of day until the next quarterly or annual planning session. It’s also not enough to execute on a day-to-day level without ensuring that these efforts add up to more than the sum of their parts.
- It can capture multiple levels of business activity. From individual tasks up to campaigns and projects, through to longer-term goals, a marketing roadmap is a full view of the department’s workload and priorities.
- It can provide a clear sense of direction. Aligning the efforts of different team members can be no small feat, but a shared vision and a step-by-step plan will make all the difference.
- It can act as a comprehensive reference and source of truth. Marketers can be notorious for having too many ideas – which is not a bad thing, granted those ideas are corralled into proper planning sessions. Once the plan is set, however, having one key document to refer to can save a lot of time and back-and-forth.
- It can demonstrate the impact of marketing to other stakeholders. By laying out how marketing ladders up into broader business plans, a marketing roadmap can encourage buy-in and collaboration across business areas.
Translating Goals into Action
Maybe at this point you’re saying to yourself, “But I’ve already got a marketing program that encompasses tactics for various channels, and a list of projects that I’d like to accomplish.”
A lot of companies execute their marketing planning from the bottom up, starting with different channels and tactics. This isn’t wrong, per se, but this approach can make it hard to know whether your marketing is performing. How will you know what’s working unless your efforts are tied to specific business goals?
If you’ve already got a marketing program in place, take a look at whether your ground-level tactics can ladder up into higher-level goals. You might ask yourself things like:
- How am I measuring the success of this activity, and does the measurement relate to something I’m trying to achieve for the business?
- Is this the most efficient tactic to achieve the desired outcome?
- Am I spending more time or money than I’m currently getting out of this?
- Am I doing this just because I think I should be doing this, or do I have any data or evidence to back up this approach?
- Am I using the platforms that my target audience are on?
Then, when setting new goals (and putting them into your marketing roadmap!) make sure to boil them down into everyday activities that the team will be able to execute by:
- Breaking them into specific projects and tasks
- Determining their relative priority
- Assigning them
- Setting budgets and deadlines
- Measuring and tracking them
What’s in a Marketing Roadmap?
Marketing roadmaps vary depending on the nature of the business and its goals, as well as the level of detail. A roadmap can be a high-level document that speaks to broader strategy, or get right into the specifics on the level of individual tasks.
That being said, most marketing roadmaps should include these components:
- Goals (with milestones and KPIs, as applicable)
- List of projects or campaigns, broken into tasks as needed, and assigned priority levels
- Budget
- Timeline or schedule, including start and end dates or durations
- Resources needed
- Marketing channels to deploy
- Roles and responsibilities
The next step is to ensure that everyone who will be working from the document is aware of it, has access, and is accountable to check and update it regularly.
More Benefits of a Marketing Roadmap
Being able to define how you will reach your goals is just one of the reasons every business should have a marketing roadmap. It can act as your business’s north star, providing direction, focus and purpose to your efforts.
Other benefits of a marketing roadmap are:
- Accountability to a shared vision
- Efficiency: doing only what is projected to yield results
- Measurability according to KPIs and progress milestones
- Consistency to get everyone rowing in the same direction
- Cost-effectiveness and financial predictability
Interested in creating a marketing roadmap for your business, but not sure where to start?
Book a call with us today!
