Foresight and Extreme Creativity: Strategy for the 21st Century

Business-to-business marketing professionals are always interested in finding better tools to help them create marketing plans that generate better, and more measurable, response. In our BMI online CRM Field Marketing (CRM-FM) training and certification program, we've developed the Marketer's Action Plan (MAP), a step-by-step process for helping you plan, develop, execute, measure, and adapt any marketing activity. While intended for use with CRM systems, where measurement of marketing programs (also known as in most CRM systems) is made far easier by tracking them within CRM, you don't need to use a CRM system to implement this process in any marketing plan.Even better, the Marketer's Action Plan can be used for any marketing activity that is part of your overall marketing program-from print advertising, to direct mail, trade shows, or online-based marketing activities. The MAP helps you develop an organized mindset for solid execution, and a discipline for measurement in every marketing project you develop for your company or client.The Marketer's Action Plan (MAP) describes the six stages in the process of marketing execution using on-demand CRM to plan, execute, measure, monitor, and improve your marketing plan. This action plan describes both the general execution steps required to develop and execute any type of marketing project as a campaign in your CRM system, and the actions required over the process of the campaign to insure that leads are properly tracked and measured for a campaign, and then moved along into your lead development program, where diligent coordination between you and your sales team helps to convert as many of these prospects into customers, over the length of your sales cycle. This action plan also accounts for the all-important final step of assessing and improving poor sales response for a campaign which is likely to occur during implementation of your marketing program.Steps in the MAP ProcessUsing MAP, the planning, execution, and management stages for any individual marketing activity can be broken down into six action steps for any marketing project (campaign) in any on-demand CRM system, as follows:1) Create Your Plan;2) Plan for Measurement;3) Execute;4) Track, Measure, Monitor, and Assess;5) Evaluate, Adapt, and Improve;6) Follow ThroughStep 1. Create Your PlanMarketing is mostly tactical: There are formal marketing plans and there are informal ones, but for marketing professionals in the real world, the best plan is a set of tactical marketing projects (CRM campaigns) you can develop and put into action immediately to meet the marketing opportunities that generate sales response for your company.After all, when everyone gets up from the table from the marketing planning meeting, what's left is a list of tactical activities that must be executed: Ads, mailings, trade shows, and the other marketing projects that must be developed and executed. Each of these tactical activities is a campaign in your on-demand CRM system, and the complete schedule of these campaigns comprises your marketing plan. The MAP helps you optimize each of these tactical activities for maximum sales response and measurability.Define your campaign's objective: The first action planning step is to define the objective (or goal) of the campaign. Nearly always, this can be expressed as a description of the execution of the marketing project (campaign) at hand, tied to the goal to be accomplished by this project.For example, the execution of any specific direct mail campaign is to develop a mailing targeted to one or more identified mailing list(s), to meet the goal of generating measurable sales leads for followup by your company's sales team; for a trade show, the purpose of the execution is to draw potential prospects to your booth at the show, qualify and capture their contact information, with the goal of generating a measurable number of leads to be followed up with by your company's sales reps after the show. …