Creating a Q3/Q4 marketing roadmap? Here’s what a fractional CMO wants you to know.
A CMO’s role, whether fractional or full-time, is to assist with the strategic planning and vision for a business’s marketing, including creating and overseeing key operational documents like a marketing roadmap. These operational considerations provide structure and clarity to guide the day-to-day efforts of a marketing team. So when it comes to quarterly marketing planning, a CMO would take business goals, seasonal and industry trends, and performance metrics into consideration.
In this blog post, we’ll be touching on roadmap topics that relate to both B2B and B2C companies, discussing potential priorities and specific considerations for each.
Step 1: Conduct a Mid-Year Review
In creating your Q3/Q4 marketing roadmap, it’s important to consider where you’ve just come from. Take into account any KPIs and other relevant metrics from Q1 and Q2 performance data, gather insights from your sales team and customer feedback, and reflect on any successes or challenges, whether they’re customer-facing or internal to the team. This is also a great time to analyze market trends and take a look around at the competitive landscape.
Having robust operational processes and systems in place will make it easier to streamline this data for review, so that a mid-year review is a simple matter of gathering key data points and perhaps adding it to a template or scorecard. (If you find that this step necessitates excess time and energy on the part of yourself or your team, not to worry: add it as a “gap” in step two below.)
Step 2: Identify Gaps
This stage of planning is all about identifying problems you’d like to solve in your marketing department. These can relate to:
- People: The skills and organization of your internal team, plus any contractors, freelancers, or agencies you might work with
- Tech: The tools you use to get the job done, and how they work together (or don’t)
- Operations: The processes, systems, and structures that underpin your daily efforts and project management
- Business transformation and change management: Any big projects you might have on the horizon, such as launching a new business offering, switching to a cloud-based IT environment, or opening a new location
When it comes to creating a Q3/Q4 marketing roadmap, it’s most effective to prioritize solving marketing-specific problems that will help achieve overall business objectives.
What might that look like in different contexts?
- For B2C, this could mean planning for Black Friday/Cyber Monday, back to school season, and holiday shopping season.
- For B2B, this might mean doing strategic planning for the next year or working on a thought leadership, partnership or events strategy.
- For both B2C and B2B, this might include focusing on driving customer acquisition and retention, lead generation or conversion, or increased lifetime value. It could also include projects like a rebrand, a new CRM implementation, or a major product, channel, or market launch.
Step 3: Set Q3/Q4 Marketing Objectives and Goals
Here’s where we’ll get a bit more specific. You guessed it: we’re talking SMART goals. As a reminder, these are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
Although all of these factors are important, the one we’d highlight most in quarterly planning is “achievable.” Having big goals is important, but being able to reach them is even more so. Take a look back at what you were able to accomplish in the last 6 months. Chances are, unless you make big changes to your team’s structure, technology, or operational processes, you’ll have a similar level or quality of output for Q3/Q4 – unless, of course, you make it a goal in itself to implement a change in any of these areas.
Setting SMART goals will help you narrow down specific projects and steps you can take to address the gaps you have identified in step two. Here are two examples:
- B2C: Let’s say you’re a business that sells backpacks online, and Q3/Q4 is your busiest period of the year around back-to-school season. A SMART goal might look something like: Take advantage of high website traffic volume to conduct an A/B test using two different campaign messages from [X date] to [X date], measuring click-through rates and conversion of each version. Have our marketing analyst summarize the learnings and make recommendations for next year’s campaign.
- B2B: Let’s say you’re an accounting firm taking advantage of the off-season to redo your website. Your SMART goal might be along these lines: Create an RFP for a website and circulate it to at least ten web development and design vendors. Evaluate capabilities and quotes and select one to move forward with.
Of course, these and other goals will vary based on seasonal trends, priorities, the fiscal year that your company adheres to, and other industry-specific considerations.
Step 4: Develop Your Q3/Q4 Marketing Roadmap
Now it’s time to break each goal down into projects. Rank each project in terms of priority and assign budgets, roles, responsibilities, resources, and an estimated timeline for each. When it comes to the timeline, work backwards from the desired launch deadline and break it down into project milestones.
For each project, think about whether it can be supported by your SEO and content strategy, different marketing channels, and other marketing communications if necessary, and create or factor these into workback schedules accordingly.
And don’t forget to assign KPIs and metrics to each initiative, if these aren’t already defined in your SMART goal, to ensure it can be measured and evaluated!
Step 5: Update and Revisit Regularly
A marketing roadmap should be a living document, flexible to opportunities that might arise as well as shifts in consumer behavior and market dynamics. Try not to lose sight of your original priorities, but remain agile and responsive by revisiting your Q3/Q4 marketing roadmap regularly. It can be helpful to build in contingency plans for potential disruptions, or extra time and resources to capitalize on emerging trends.
Above all, a well-defined Q3/Q4 marketing roadmap will position your marketing department to achieve results that have a measurable and meaningful impact on the success of the business.
Looking for a Q3/Q4 marketing roadmap, or a solid strategy for this year and beyond? Book a free consult to find out how a Crisp fractional CMO can help.
