What To Do In Your First Quarter As A Marketing Leader
It’s an overwhelming role being a marketing leader and revenue leader, whether you're a CMO, marketing manager, head of marketing, VP of marketing or just leading your demand gen, does not matter what your title is, this article will support you in setting yourself up for success in your new role at your new company.
This will also be a great resource if you are freshly shifting from a marketing coordinator (operator) to a more strategic role.
( We did an in depth video on how to go about this with Rahul Bakaya - Head of marketing at Prospecta Software , click here to check it out )
Overview:
On a macro level you will need to do the following things:
- Understand the business, audience, goals and vision
- Audit current marketing programs and strategies
- Draft strategy, align leadership and sales
- Optimize existing programs, implement new ones
- Set measurement metrics that the board needs and those that create efficiency
- Execute, optimize, iterate, communicate
Let’s break these down at a tactical level.
Understanding the business, audience goals, and vision
(1 month / 4 weeks)
- Separate out business goals from revenue goals
Example:
A- Business goal = We want to create a category
B- Revenue goal = $5 million ARR in 2023 - Dive deep into customer research
A- find out the most high value segments of customers:
You can do this by listening to sales calls, contacting customers or talking to your sales and product teams.
B- Gather product feedback:
Use customer research period to collect feedback on the product and how they use it. This data will come in handy later. - Research your general industry trends to get aligned with the industry
- Talk to leadership:
The leadership sets the tone for everything, talk to them about their vision and ambitions of the company so that you can build the right strategies accordingly.
Audit current marketing programs and strategies
( 2 weeks )
- Audit the general strategy and see if it aligns with your customer research data
- Examine the paid media channels inside the ad platforms and note the costs of acquisition. Make sure we only have campaigns with a justifiable CAC payback.
- Examine organic channels (if there are any) find loopholes and room for improvement
- Examine your CRM, clean the data in it and optimize it to be the main source of business data.
- Get data on partner channels / affiliate / field marketing etc. We need programs that are producing a positive ROI only.
Draft strategy, align leadership and sales
( 2 weeks )
- Use the findings from your audits and research to create a new marketing plan and strategy.
- Communicate the strategy and findings to leadership and sales
- Use feedback from this communication to optimize your strategy in a way that ensures alignment across the board.
- Get alignment on the final strategy and set the right expectations
Optimize existing programs, implement new ones
( 4 weeks )
- Put the new marketing plan into action
- Setup all your capture demand channels like advertising, PPC, lead aggregation, affiliates etc.
- Start building your content engine to create demand
- Optimize all the old programs to keep only the best ones
- Work on marketing OPS:
A - Analytics / Attribution
B - CRM dashboards
C- Tags
D- Agency partnerships
E- Product collaterals
F- Sales enablement content
G- Build a demand gen function
H- Start marketing hires - Start building a community through content
- Setup metrics that need to be optimized for and the ones that make a business impact
Execute, optimize, iterate, communicate
( Ongoing )
- As data starts to come in use that feedback to improve and optimize
- Run tests and experiment to find new channels
- Start working on brand marketing to lower CAC
- Continue reporting to the board on the performance.
If you follow this general guide, you will hit all the important spots necessary inside a marketing department.
Demand gen and marketing are a constantly evolving industry, so make sure you stay up to date with the latest marketing trends and highlights.
Goodluck !
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