“Strategy” is a fancy word. For us at Blue Seedling, building a marketing strategy simply means deciding how best to deploy the Resources (people + budget) at hand into the most effective Actions (marketing channels + campaigns) to reach a company’s Marketing Goals (outputs or KPIs).
Marketing Strategy:
Resources + Actions → Marketing Goals
So what are your marketing goals? And how do you create a budget to reach those goals?
In this video, Blue Seedling CXO Netta Kivilis answers these questions + shares the lowdown on building an initial marketing strategy and budget. The video was recorded during our B2B marketing workshop for Microsoft ScaleUp startups in Tel Aviv.
Here are some key takeaways:
- Our favorite Marketing KPI (Key Performance Indicator), or goal, is Sales Opportunities. Learn more here.
- When deciding which marketing channels to focus on, use your ACV (Annual Contract Value) as a compass to guide you towards the channels that are going to be most effective for you.
- There are two ways to build a marketing budget:
- Top down – The CEO or CFO allocates X percent of the company’s operating budget to marketing. You then use this number to plan marketing goals and activities.
- Bottom up – Given the company’s revenue goals, you first estimate how many sales opportunities are needed to meet those goals (based on ACV, close rate, etc). You then estimate how many opportunities each marketing channel will be able to contribute and how much budget will be needed.
Here’s a simple spreadsheet to help you get started.
You can watch the full video here.
