MARKETERS WITH DOCUMENTED PLANS

Transcription

1 2. PLANNING 101 MARKETERS WITH DOCUMENTED PLANS When we broke these numbers down by company size, we found that the smallest companies were the least likely to have a documented marketing plan only 56% reported having one. Companies with employees were most likely to have a documented marketing plan nearly 82%. 1

2 2. PLANNING 101 MARKETERS WITH DOCUMENTED PLANS 1. Introduction When we broke these numbers down by company size, we found that the smallest companies were the least likely to have a documented marketing plan only 56% reported having one. Companies with employees were most likely to have a documented marketing plan nearly 82%. Planning your marketing programs is tough. For many marketers, planning a year s worth of programs sounds as easy as reading the future in a crystal ball. To predict even roughly how your marketing team will execute against its goals, you need a lot of information. You need access to ultra-accurate data, and you need razor-sharp analytics to make that data useful. As you map out your plans, you need to be flexible enough to jump on new opportunities, and organized enough to keep your programs synced. You need to have a handle on the smallest, most nit-picky details, but you also have to see the big picture. To find out, we took a survey of 493 B2B and consumer marketing professionals from companies and teams of all sizes, and with all different levels of technology adoption. As 2013 drew to a close, we asked each one how they planned, implemented, and analyzed their multi-channel marketing efforts. With such a broad base of respondents, we felt confident that our results would give us real insight into the state of program planning today. So what are the latest trends, tactics, and techniques that marketers are using to plan marketing programs in 2014? 12

3 2. PLANNING 101 MARKETERS WITH DOCUMENTED PLANS 2. planning 101 When we broke these numbers down by company size, we found that the smallest companies were the least likely to have a documented marketing plan only 56% reported having one. Companies with employees were most likely to have a documented marketing plan nearly 82%. We issued our survey at the end of 2013, when many marketers were solidifying their plans for 2014 the perfect time to get a glimpse of planning strategies. We were curious: how do marketing teams lay the groundwork for a year s (or a month s) worth of goals, strategies, marketing themes, campaigns, and tactics? We ve divided our findings into two key areas: Documentation: Success and Satisfaction Measuring and Reaching Goals 23

4 2. PLANNING 101 Documentation: Success & Satisfaction First, we asked about documentation. At Marketo, we ve always found that a written, agreed-upon plan is one of the best ways to generate stakeholder buy-in, individual accountability, and clarity of expectations. But how well are marketers really documenting those plans, and how closely to those plans do they stick? Here s what we found: Overall, 34% of our respondents did not have a documented marketing plan in Surprising, right? How were those marketers setting goals and executing against them? Your documented strategy can live in a static document, Google Doc, spreadsheet, or even in a PowerPoint presentation. Just make sure it shows how tactics relate to strategy, covers monthly goals, and is easily accessible to your team. 67% of all participants reported that their team typically stayed on strategy either most of the time or all of the time, which was good news. Companies with documented marketing plans were nearly twice as likely to stay on strategy most of the time or all of the time compared to those without. In short, we confirmed that a documented strategy is an actionable strategy without documentation, you re significantly less likely to meet your goals. NO: 34% Did you have a documented marketing plan for 2013? YES: 66% 34

5 2. PLANNING 101 When we broke these numbers down by company size, we found that the smallest companies were the least likely to have a documented marketing plan only 56% reported having one. Companies with employees were most likely to have a documented marketing plan nearly 82%. We also found that a documented marketing plan corresponds directly to overall satisfaction with the marketing team. Over 77% of respondents who were extremely satisfied with their marketing teams had documented marketing plans, compared to only 12.5% of those who were extremely unsatisfied. According to our respondents, a documented plan goes a long way toward satisfaction. How Satisfied Are You With Your Marketing Team? 77% - Extremely Satisfied 75% - Quite Satisfied 58% - Fairly Satisfied 52% - Slightly Satisfied 12% - Not At All Satisfied Documentation is crucial to transparency and planning. From a strategic standpoint, where does each program fit best? Each week, you need to document your work processes, so that they can be mapped to a larger strategy. Joe Lucas, Director of Marketing Operations, InsideView 54

6 2. PLANNING 101 Insights From Real Marketers CAUTION: What are the biggest planning mistakes marketers can make? Amy Palmer Sr. Marketing Manager, Integrated Programs, Pentaho Joe Lucas Director of Marketing Operations, InsideView 1. Unrealistic expectations. Don t set goals you know you can t meet. If you re working with vendors to execute a program, be realistic in setting their deadlines too. 2. Unambitious expectations. While you have to be realistic, you still should push your team to adhere to the best practices, even when they re inconvenient or add stress to your workload. 3. Not looking cross-functionally. It s easy to get a little myopic when you re planning. Even if team s activities don t directly impact yours, you still need a holistic, cross-functional view of all of the teams in your organization. Prevent overlap, but also find opportunities for synergy or to leverage. 1. Unclear expectations. A lot of marketers are using marketing automation, but they aren t leveraging the modelers, or they don t have a clear view of lifecycle marketing, which leads to unclear expectations or a lack of goal setting for the program. 2. Poorly planned and/or undocumented data gathering. What s the base level of data needed to qualify a lead for your sales team? When you capture a lead, what data will you gather, and how will you fill in the rest? Are your forms using uniform values? 3. Lack of follow-up plan. As you plan, marketers need to get all of their ducks in a row for a follow-up plan. How will you leverage a feature or program for your future marketing strategy? 6

7 2. PLANNING 101 MEASURING AND REACHING GOALS We ve talked about satisfaction and strategy, but what about meeting your marketing goals? Your marketing team might be doing amazing work, but you still need to prove your worth. Meeting measurable marketing goals will keep your team on track, and help you demonstrate your accomplishments to the company. An impressive 16% of our respondents said that they always meet their goals, and a healthy 55% said that they usually do. Unfortunately, 22.5% of our participants said they don t even have measurable marketing goals that s no way to earn a seat at the table. We also found that marketers using documented plans were significantly more likely to meet their goals yet another good reason to establish (and document) your marketing plans up-front. How Often Do You Meet Your Marketing Goals? 16% - Always 55% - Usually 16% - Half The Time 7% - Occasionally 7% - Never "The pressure is on for marketers to move as quickly as possible, which makes it hard to be strategic but you can t efficiently market without a clear strategy." Joe Lucas, Director of Marketing Operations, InsideView 7

8 3. PROGRAMS: HOW MANY, WHERE? Marketing programs are the sets of individual activities that marketers plan to achieve their goals, and, of course, the goals of their entire organizations. When you sit down to plan the when and why of your marketing activities, programs are the what your campaigns and paid programs, your physical and virtual events, your webinars, your Pay- Per-Click ads, your social campaigns, and more. We asked our marketers how many programs they currently ran, the channels they currently used, and their plans for programs in the coming year. We ve broken down their responses into four key areas: Number of Programs Programs Multi-Channel Program Planning Activity and Execution 8

9 3. PROGRAMS HOW MANY PROGRAMS DO YOU RUN? When we asked marketers how many programs they ran, we were surprised to learn that 42% of our respondents run less than 5 programs per month. While running more programs isn t always better, we ve found that it s hard to optimize your programs if you aren t testing, and it s hard to test if you re only running the bare minimum you need to give yourself some wiggle room. There s no magic number of programs that every marketing team should run, but in today s multi-channel world, you want to reach your customers in as many ways as possible. If you re running less than 5 programs a month, that might be hard to achieve. Number of Marketing Programs Run (By Company Size) Less than Employees Employees Employees Employees Employees Employees 9

10 3. PROGRAMS HOW MANY PROGRAMS DO YOU RUN? You might assume that bigger companies would naturally have bigger bandwidth and execute more programs. But as you can see from our results on the previous page, companies don t always increase the number of programs as they grow. Here are some good reasons why: Bigger companies, as we ll talk about later, don t always have bigger marketing teams. On a related note, larger companies often outsource their marketing efforts to agencies. So while their own teams may run very few programs, their agencies might run many more on their behalf. Larger, longer-established companies may take a less aggressive or experimental approach to their marketing than smaller, newer organizations. You can definitely run too many marketing programs. For example, we don t want to over-contact our database, so we set up all of our campaigns within our marketing automation tool, and set a communication limit this keeps us from sending anyone an more than twice in one week. Debbie Lakatos, Sr. Demand Generation Manager, Hach Company There s such a thing as too many programs, especially when it comes to . If you inundate one segment of your database with too many s, you risk landing in the spam folder. 10

11 3. PROGRAMS Programs But while over-burdening your database is an obvious no-no, you can also go too far in the opposite direction if you don t contact your database enough, you can t stay top-of-mind. When we asked marketers how often they any segment of their database each month, the majority (67%) said they send s less than 10 times each month, and 45% said they ed portions of their database less than 5 times each month. Keep in mind, those numbers reflect any programs, sent to any one segment of a company s database. If you have 5 different segments, for example, you can send 5 different programs without ever contacting the same person twice. These low numbers probably indicate one of two things (or both) not enough segmentation, or a lack of adequate marketing technology. In fact, when we broke down the numbers, we found that: 46% of marketers sending less than 5 s each month weren t using any marketing tool including both Service Providers (ESPs) and marketing automation platforms. A whopping 58% of marketers using an ESP send less than 5 s per month. 27% of marketers who use marketing automation send less than 5 s per month. Only 15% of marketers who ve been using marketing automation for more than a year send less than 5 s per month. 11

12 3. PROGRAMS Programs It s clear from these numbers that marketing technology especially marketing automation goes a long way toward beefing up your sends. Marketing automation makes it easier for marketers to segment their database, and makes it easier to execute campaigns. But technology isn t the only thing that amplifies your capabilities. We found that documented planning also has an amplifying effect: Number of s Sent (Per Month) Documented Planning Strategy Less than No Documented Planning Strategy As you can see, across the board, a documented marketing plan and coordination amongst teams increases the number of s a company sends. Once again, documentation has an impressive impact on the marketing department s ability to execute. 12

13 3. PROGRAMS Multi-Channel Program Planning We heard (and talked) a lot about multi-channel marketing in Prospects and customers now engage with brands across multiple channels, so if your marketing isn t multi-channel, watch out your competitors marketing tactics probably are. We asked our respondents to rate their usage of the following channels: Social Physical and virtual events Webinars Pay-Per-Click ads You can definitely run too many marketing programs. For example, we don t want to over-contact our database, so we set up all of our campaigns within our marketing automation tool, and set a communication limit this keeps us from sending anyone an more than twice in one week. Heidi Bullock, Sr. Director of Marketing, Marketo 13

14 3. PROGRAMS Multi-Channel Program Planning A few key findings: was the most popular channel: 32% of all respondents said they use it frequently; and only 14% said they never used . 48% of all companies, over 30% of the smallest companies, and 35% of the largest companies reported using social media very often in their marketing programs. Physical events (like tradeshows, user conferences, etc.) were more popular among bigger companies than smaller ones. A whopping 35% of the largest companies said they ran physical events frequently, compared to 10% of the smallest companies. Webinars were used frequently by only 9% of our surveytakers; 40% said they never used webinars at all. Usage of Pay-Per-Click ads seemed to be the least effected by company size. Companies with employees, employees, and employees all reported similar rates of usage about 35% never used PPC; 65% did. Virtual events were the least used marketing channel: 51% of all survey-takers said that they didn t run virtual events at all in 2013, and only 7% said they used the channel frequently. Use of Marketing Channels, By Popularity Programs - run by 86% of marketers Social Channels - run by 81% of marketers Physical Events - run by 77% of marketers Webinars - run by 60% of marketers PPC - run by 53% of marketers Virtual Events - run by 49% of marketers 14

15 3. PROGRAMS Does More Activity = Better Execution? We also examined how running more programs might affect marketing satisfaction. Companies running the fewest programs were easily the least satisfied with their teams. But running more programs didn t necessarily improve satisfaction. We already knew that it s hard to maintain satisfaction across areas as your organization scales, and we found that in 4 out of 6 of the areas discussed on the previous page, organizations running between 81 and 100 programs per month are happier with their teams than those who run At 53%, companies who ran between 61 and 80 monthly programs were the most likely (compared to both smaller and larger teams) to rate their marketing teams highly aligned with other teams within their company. Almost every marketing team struggles to maintain alignment with other teams especially with sales but marketers who rise to the task stand to benefit from improved communication, buy-in, and efficiency. Our results suggested that marketers who are aligned closely with other teams hit a sweet spot with their marketing programs they don t run too many programs, but they also don t run too few. 15

16 4. MARKETING APPLICATIONS At Marketo, we use our own marketing automation software to create workflows, run social campaigns, measure engagement, forecast budgets, and more in short, we use our platform as the core of our marketing activities. Our choice to use marketing automation has a huge influence over our program planning, so we were naturally curious about how applications and tools affect other marketing teams. 16

17 4. MARKETING APPLICATIONS MARKETING MANAGEMENT Because is often the cornerstone of a marketing program, we started by asking marketers how they managed their campaigns. We asked whether they used a marketing automation platform, an ESP ( Service Provider), or nothing to manage their campaigns. We were surprised to find that 24% of our participating marketers were using nothing to manage their . Here s what the respondents who use nothing had in common: 66% had fewer than 50 employees 76% had between 1 and 5 people on their marketing teams the smallest possible team size 82% ran less than 5 marketing programs (including events, paid programs, and events) per month 85% ed their databases less than 5 times per month We also saw that larger companies were the most likely to use some kind of tool to manage their . While 35% of small companies used nothing to manage their , that percentage shrunk to 17% of mid-sized companies, and only 9% of companies with between 100 and 500 employees. How Are You Managing Your s? Enterprise Companies (501+ employees): 49.5% = Marketing Automation 19% = Nothing 7% = ESP Large Companies ( employees): 57.5% = Marketing Automation 10.5% = ESP 9% = Nothing Mid-Sized Companies ( employees): 60% = Marketing Automation 23% = ESP 17% = Nothing Small Companies (0-50 employees) 43.5% = Nothing 36.5% = Marketing Automation 28.5% = ESP 17

18 4. MARKETING APPLICATIONS Multi-Channel and Marketing Applications We ve talked about the importance of multi-channel marketing, and we ve found that using marketing automation makes it dramatically easier to diversify our programs. But we wanted to know whether marketers using applications actually run more cross-channel campaigns. Programs Social Channels Physical Events Webinars PPC Virtual Events Which Channels Do You Use? Marketers Who Use Marketing Applications Marketers Who Don t Use Marketing Applications While 58% of marketers not using applications are sending programs (presumably through CRMs or personal sends), they re still far behind teams using marketing applications an impressive 95%. In fact, teams using marketing applications are 30+ percentage points more likely to use programs, social channels, and physical events; more than twice as likely to use virtual events; and more than three times as likely to use webinars and PPC. In summary, it s clear that marketers who are using some type of marketing system whether a marketing automation platform or a simple marketing tool are more successful in diversifying their campaigns. But you can t just blindly diversify, or aim to use as many channels as possible at all times. Every company will have a different mix that best meets their objectives, which is why effective marketers continually optimize and test. When it comes to figuring out your optimum marketing mix, you need to do thorough, continuous analysis to understand which programs perform best. We analyze our programs in Marketo, which allows us to look at pipeline created over cost, rather than just pipeline. Even when a program generates a ton of pipeline for us, it still has to justify its worth with a high pipeline-to-investment ratio. Heidi Bullock, Sr. Director of Marketing, Marketo 18

19 5. MARKETING TEAMS Every marketing team is organized differently, and every team has different challenges and strengths. We talked to marketers on single-person teams, and marketers with teams larger than 40. We looked at how marketing teams scale as their companies grows, and asked our marketers about the influence of various roles, their teams biggest pain points, and their combined ability to plan and execute against goals. 19

20 5. MARKETING TEAMS Lean, Mean Marketing Teams As you d expect, we found that the size of the average marketing team grows as companies do but not as much you might think. Over 46% of companies with between 51 and 100 employees have fewer than 6 people on their marketing teams. Only 62% of companies larger than 1000 had marketing teams bigger than 20, and only 47% had marketing teams bigger than 40. Companies with employees had the largest teams: 55% had teams bigger than 40, although 11% had teams smaller than 6. Among marketers who are using an application, the percentage of teams smaller than 6 drops from 76% to 40%. The reasonable conclusion? Marketing technology and marketing team growth go hand-in-hand. While we didn t have numbers on marketers using other applications, we noticed that marketing teams seem to grow with (or because of) marketing automation adoption. Of the people we surveyed who use Marketo specifically, 46.5% of new Marketo users, 72.5% of intermediate users, and 83.5% of long-term Marketo users had marketing teams of 6 or more. From our survey, it was also clear that companies who aren t using marketing tools also have the smallest marketing departments. Among marketers who aren t using a marketing application, 76% said that they had less than 6 people on their marketing teams. 20

21 5. MARKETING TEAMS Insights From Real Marketers Planning Programs for an Enterprise Team Debbie Lakatos Sr. Demand Generation Manager, Hach At Hach, we sell products in 12 different markets, in industries ranging from municipal drinking water to power generation to beer breweries. Because of the size of our business, and the variety of markets, we have a fairly large marketing team probably about 30 people total. Beyond our marketing automation team the people actually in our marketing platform each day we have a VP of Marketing, directors of our 12 verticals, vertical managers, marketing communications managers, a web-specific team, and a tradeshow coordinator. Our marcom managers are responsible for lead generation, so they re the most focused on strategy. What s going to drive the most demand for each market? What s working, what s not working, and what do we need to change? Most of our business is with customers who are already part of our base, so our marcom managers actually visit our customers, building out detailed buyer personas for each vertical. More than anything, we use marketing automation to talk to our customers about what matters to them most. So even though we have the bandwidth to staff a separate marketing automation team, that team works closely with our marcom managers. They review the results of our programs together the marcom managers bring the high-level strategy; the marketing automation team creates a program plan that supports those goals. 21

22 5. MARKETING TEAMS Marketing Team Challenges What are the top program planning challenges faced by your marketing team? We asked our participants to rate their teams difficulty on 4 different pain points. Most Frequently Experienced Pain Points 1. Constantly changing direction and priorities 92% 2. Lack of coordination with other teams within company 86% 3. Lack of coordination within team 85% 4. Inability to execute 85% #1 Changing Directions/Priorities While larger companies are historically more set in their ways than smaller companies, our surveyed marketers suggested quite the opposite. Marketers at the largest companies reported the most trouble with constantly changing direction and priorities, while the smallest companies were the least bothered. 75% of companies with over 5000 employees said they were challenged by shifting priorities extremely often or quite often. 40% of companies with 0-50 employees said they were challenged by shifting directions extremely or quite often. When we looked at these numbers against the volume of programs our participants were running, we saw that the teams running the most programs also rated changing direction/ priorities as one of their biggest challenges 53% of teams running 80+ programs said they faced this challenge extremely or quite often. #2 Lack of Coordination with Other Teams in Company To be effective marketers, your marketing team can t just support its own objectives your final objective should be to support the goals of the entire company. We found that companies with between 500 and 1000 employees reported the most trouble coordinating with other teams, followed closely by the largest teams those with over 5000 employees. 60% of companies with employees, and 55% of companies with employees said they were challenged by company-wide coordination extremely often or quite often. Only 35% of the smallest teams reported significant challenges with company-wide coordination. 22

23 5. MARKETING TEAMS Marketing Team Challenges #4 Inability to Execute / Lack of Internal Coordination Lack of internal coordination and inability to execute clearly go hand-in-hand. We found that 85% of our survey-takers said that an inability to execute against plans was a challenge, and 75% of that group said that lack of internal coordination was also a major challenge. Much like problem #3 (lack of coordination with other teams), this challenge seems to be the most painful for mid-sized companies those with between 500 and 1000 employees. 58% of companies in this size range reported execution problems either extremely often or quite often 45% of companies in this size range reported significant problems with internal coordination Our best guess about why? These marketing teams may be in that in between stage big enough to have big ambitions, but still working out the kinks in their execution and coordination. Interestingly, teams with the smallest marketing teams have the fewest problems with execution. Only 29% of marketers on the smallest teams (between 1 and 5 people) said they were highly challenged by failures to execute compared to 65% of teams bigger than 40. So why do smaller teams have an easier time with execution? It s safe to say that smaller teams generally have less ambitious plans to execute against, but there might be even more to it. Keeping your marketing team small means more accountability, easier coordination and more frequent communication, so there s less of a chance that ownership gets lost. Smaller teams also are forced to run more efficiently and do more with less. When it comes to execution, failure to designate an owner is a major problem. Try using slide decks PowerPoint slides, essentially to track tasks within a major projects, like a big launch or an event. Each person has their own slide, and when it s time to meet, you view the whole deck together. Slides are easier to collaborate on then spreadsheets, and they emphasize ownership. If you haven t changed anything, your team is all looking at an empty slide! - Amy Palmer, Sr. Marketing Manager, Integrated Programs, Pentaho 23

24 5. MARKETING TEAMS Insights From Real Marketers The Need for High Visibility Joe Lucas Director of Marketing Operations, InsideView Communication is a huge pain point for all marketers, especially when you re planning multiple programs. At InsideView, we were recently in high gear with pre-show promotion for a huge industry conference, but we also had a big announcement about our Microsoft partnership, and we had our day-to-day operations and press releases to plan. At one point, we risked sending out 20 different messages to the same list of people. The challenge is always to be timely with our messages, without overburdening our list. At the end of that day, it s all about smart management. We rely on clear communication, visibility into timelines, and coordination across all of our teams. We use open seating to promote cross-communication between teams for example, our marketing operations manager sits with our leads qualification team and SDRs, giving her insight into problems and developments. Some aspects of our editorial calendar are set far in advance, but we also need to be flexible enough to allow for new developments and last-minute changes. 24

25 6. MARKETING CALENDARS Regardless of the size of your team or how many programs you re running, every marketing team needs a calendar. Whether you re a team of one or a team of 50, a calendar is crucial if you want to keep track of your activities, coordinate with your co-workers and customers, and most of all plan your programs for the future. Your marketing calendar should be the central point of coordination, communication, and visibility. You don t want to be referring to 10 different versions of program documentation as you plan, they will rarely be in sync and you ll waste time checking and double checking the details; you want a single, uniform, always-current view of your marketing programs. Heidi Bullock, Sr. Director of Marketing, Marketo In general, the bigger the company, the more important marketers rated the need for a marketing calendar. Overall, 69% of respondents rated marketing calendars extremely important or quite important, while only 7% rated them not at all important. Marketers at companies with employees valued calendars most only 3% of this group said that calendars weren t important, and 84% said calendars were either extremely or quite important. 25

26 6. MARKETING CALENDARS WHAT ARE YOU USING TO TRACK? We asked our respondents what they were using to track their marketing calendars. Although only 7% of our marketers rated calendars as unimportant, 13% said they weren t using anything to track their calendars. And when we cross checked the two groups, we found that 6% of those who said calendars were extremely or quite important weren t using any calendaring system at all. How Marketers are Tracking Their Calendars Spreadsheets 32% Google Calendar 18% Nothing 13% Outlook 9% Whiteboard calendar 8% Desktop calendar program 8% Online calendar tracking software 7.5% Other 4.5% 26

27 6. MARKETING CALENDARS WHAT ARE YOU USING TO TRACK? Although 18% of marketers were using Google Calendar, the second most popular tracking method, one of the problems found with this solution is that it isn t synced with your marketing autmation platform, so you have to continously reconcile your planning efforts with other systems. Here are the calendaring solutions ordered by level of satisfaction, as reported by our participants. The percentages represent the number of marketers who said they were extremely or quite satisfied with the solution: Marketing Calendar Solutions, by Level of Satisfaction There was little to report about the other solutions each one hovered near the 50% mark, and none were significantly more applauded than the others. This reflects the unfortunate reality that most marketers use what is readily available to track their calendars instead of finding a solution that satisfy their needs. Online calendar tracking software 80.5% Outlook 53% Google calendar 52% Desktop calendar program 51% Spreadsheets 51% Whiteboard calendar 48.5% Users of online calendar tracking software are the most satisfied by far over 80% of users said they were highly satisfied with the solution. 27

28 6. MARKETING CALENDARS Insights From Real Marketers The Flexible Planning Paradox Heidi Bullock Sr. Director of Marketing, Marketo At Marketo, we put together our marketing program calendars a whole year at a time. Like most companies, we have to get many layers of programs on the calendar first, we ve got our big rock programs, which include big events like our Summit conference, and big content assets like our Definitive Guides. Once those are on the calendar, we re freed up to plan more granular programs. But often we can t plan those programs ahead of time because we don t know what our budget will be for that month, or we don t know how close we ll be to meeting our goals, or how available our vendors will be. That means we need to plan a lot of our programs on the fly monthly, or even weekly. The Flexible Planning Paradox: Staying on Top of the Numbers We need the flexibility on our calendars to jump on opportunities as they present themselves, which is a challenge for all marketers. One of the hardest parts about staying flexible is that you need a really firm grip on your budget and how you re tracking against your goals. If you don t know how much money you have left to spend, you can t safely jump on an opportunity. And if you don t know how close you are to meeting your goals, it s hard to tell how important that new opportunity is. Program Planning Pain Points: What can be planned ahead of time, and what requires responsive, on-the-fly decision making? How can your entire team stay updated on one another s activities when you re using multiple calendars? How do you balance the need to optimize programs with the need to diversify programs? 28

29 6. MARKETING CALENDARS What Does Your Calendar Need to Do? We asked our participants to rate the importance of six major capabilities in a marketing calendar. Here s how our audiences rated them, ordered by percentage who indicated that a function was extremely or quite important: Easily move activities around the calendar to optimize the schedule 67.5% Track tentative vs. confirmed marketing activities 62% Filter by different attributes (e.g. channel, product, audience, segment) 59% View metrics related to programs scheduled for the current month 56% Access from a mobile device 55% Provide access to stakeholders inside and beyond the marketing team 52.5% According to our survey, the ability to easily move marketing activities from one calendar slot to another is the most important function of a calendar. Not only did it receive the most votes for high importance, but it also received the lowest percentage of votes for unimportant, at only 5%. We also saw that this kind of flexibility was the biggest pain point for marketers using a whiteboard calendar to track their programs only 14% of marketers using whiteboard calendars said they could rearrange activities with true ease. On the other end of the spectrum, marketers using online calendar tracking software reported the best calendar flexibility 39% said their systems easily rearranged activities. At Hach, we used to plan our program an entire year at a time, but that didn t give us the responsiveness we needed it didn t allow us to watch, learn, and rethink to get the best possible outcome. Now we focus on 3 months at a time. We plan and develop for 3 months, see what s working, adapt as needed, and then plan for the next 3 months. Debbie Lakatos, Sr. Demand Generation Manager, Hach Company 29

30 CONCLUSION In planning your marketing programs, you ve probably encountered the problems discussed in this survey, and we hope you ve picked up a few insights along the way to plan better in the future. Depending on the size of your company and team, your use of marketing tools and platforms, and your company s business objectives, you ll develop different strategies. That said, our survey suggests that these are the elements of any effective marketing plan: A clear, documented, agreed-upon marketing strategy A mix of techniques and channels, combined with the ability to measure and improve your plans Marketing tools that allow you to easily execute against plans A calendar that gives your team visibility into one another s activities, combined with the flexibility to optimize your plans 30

31 Marketing Software. Easy, Powerful, Complete. Marketo (NASDAQ: MKTO) provides the leading cloud-based marketing software platform for companies of all sizes to build and sustain engaging customer relationships. Spanning today s digital, social, mobile and offline channels, the Marketo solution includes a complete suite of applications that help organizations acquire new customers more efficiently, maximize customer loyalty and lifetime value, improve sales effectiveness, and provide analytical insight into marketing s contribution to revenue growth. Marketo s applications are known for their breakthrough ease-of-use, and are complemented by the Marketing Nation, a thriving network of more than 190 LaunchPoint ecosystem partners and over 40,000 marketers who share and learn from each other to grow their collective marketing expertise. The result for modern marketers is unprecedented agility and superior results. info@marketo.com DG2LG Marketo, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Designed by SCORCH