• 🎯 Set Quantitative Goals
• 🧑🏽‍💻 Build an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
• 🔑 Develop Personas
• 🧪 Test Personas
• 🔬 Competitive Analysis
• 💽 Data Quality
• 🗺️ Map the Buyer’s Journey
• 1. Awareness (Problem) - TOFU
• 2. Interest (Category-Specific) - MOFU
• 3. Action (Product-Specific) - BOFU
• Buyer’s Journey Stages to Marketing Funnel Stages
• 🗺️ Map Content to Stages
• Most Effective Content by Stage
• 📍 Channel Map

🎯 Set Quantitative Goals

Before getting started, you need to know what goals you’re tasked with. Sit down with the exec team and head of sales to determine what the overall revenue goals and expected contributions from each team are going to be for the year.

For example, if our revenue goal for FY 2023 is $5M, how much of that should be sourced directly from sales, marketing, and customer success (renewals, up-sells, etc)?

To make math simple, let’s assume Marketing is tasked with generating $2.4M new ARR from the $5M total. We work backwards from that number to define how many leads, MQLs/PQLs, opportunities, pipeline, and revenue marketing will need to generate in order to achieve that goal.

🧑🏽‍💻 Build an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

We need to build out a profile of what our ideal customer looks like. Then we can begin to figure out where these ideal customers live, eat, and breathe. From there we determine how to start a conversation with key people at the account, which then takes us to personas 👇🏽.

Questions to answer:

• How many employees does the company have?
• What is their annual revenue?
• Where do they get their funding?
• What industry are they in?
• Who is the end-user?
• Who is the decision-maker/buyer?
• How are decisions made? Is the end-user of our product the decision-maker/buyer?
• How many people were involved in the decision, and how long did it take?
• How did they become a customer? Was it sourced via a trade show, word-of-mouth, our website, or something else?

🔑 Develop Personas

Personas are a perfect tool for getting our team to think about the real live person on the other end of the sales or marketing conversation.

Start by building cross-functional working groups to brainstorm and develop these personas, then share them with the company to refine them. It’s also highly recommended to perform qualitative research via conversations with your target personas. Existing customers, industry events, etc.

Key questions to answer:

• At the ideal account, who is involved in the buying process? If more than one person is involved, build out a persona for each.
• What are their challenges?
• What responsibilities do they have?
• How is their performance measured?
• Who measures that performance?
• What are their personal goals? What is the next step up on the ladder for them?
• What makes them look good? What makes them look bad?
• How does your product specifically help address a challenge, make them look good, or help them avoid looking bad?
• What groups/organizations do they belong to?
• Who do they work with on a regular basis?
• Who do they look for guidance and industry information?
• What blogs do they read? What websites do they visit? Do they still read print magazines? Which ones?
• Where do they get their information?
• Are they more active on one social platform than another?

🧪 Test Personas

Time to test and make sure our personas are accurate. If someone has a contact who fits the persona profile (maybe a current customer or former colleague), ask them if it feels right or if anything seems off target. We can also have someone who holds this position in our own company take a look.

🔬 Competitive Analysis

We need to identify and look into each competitor at their product, sales, marketing, and customer retention strategies. This will allow us to identify strategic opportunities that will help us perform better than competition.

Grab a conference room and a white board and start brainstorming with the team. Assign competitors to team members ahead of time. Our sales team is a perfect resource for competitive info, and this exercise is the perfect way to share that knowledge with the rest of the team.

1. Identify the competition
2. Research their products and offerings
3. Understand their value prop, sales & marketing tactics, and customer retention strategies.
4. Prepare a competitive analysis matrix and SWOT analysis

Sample SWOT

💽 Data Quality

Time to look over our Martech stack and make sure the data is accurate and complete. Do we have the right accounts and personas in our CRM? How is the data quality? This is where Mops can make a huge contribution. Drive lead enrichment (Clearbit, Zoominfo, etc) initiatives, database hygiene, cross reference LinkedIn data, etc create proper views and page layouts, etc.

It’s also a great time to look at subscriber KPIs like opt-ins, bounce rates, spam complaints, etc. Every six months run a opt-in or opt-out campaign to verify interest.

🗺️ Map the Buyer’s Journey

There are lots of different models and variations of the buyer’s journey but I’ve found a simple three stage model works best. It’s based off the AIDA model created back in 1898.

Why is this process important? Because it will help us create meaningful content and share it to each key persona and at the right buyer’s stage.

1. Awareness (Problem) - TOFU

Buyer becomes aware of the product-agnostic problem and wants to understand the problem better so that they can tackle it.

e.g. “My application has slow performance.”

2. Interest (Category-Specific) - MOFU

Buyer has identified a problem and is researching ways to fix it. This is not product-specific - it is problem-specific. What are ALL of the potential solutions to this problem?

e.g. “What are the typical causes of slow app performance?” “What are the potential solutions?” “What is the cost/benefit of home grown vs. buying a solution?”

3. Action (Product-Specific) - BOFU

Buyer has identified the way in which they’d like to solve the problem and is now ready to evaluate the vendors that can help them do it.

e.g. “Which vendor is right for me?” “Does it work well with my app and platform?”

Buyer’s Journey Stages to Marketing Funnel Stages

Now let’s map each buyer’s journey stage to marketing funnel stage.

Exit Criteria - Person has taken some positive action to engage with the company

Exit Criteria - Lead has engaged with the company multiple times and has accrued a lead score meeting a pre-set threshold. Or lead has reached out directly for more information.

Exit Criteria - The handoff meeting has been conducted. The SDR and AE have debriefed and agreed that the opportunity is valid or it is disqualified. The AE will take things from here.

🗺️ Map Content to Stages

Because the needs of the buyer are different at each stage, we can typically map out the types of content they will find useful relative to the stage they are in. Here are some example content types for each stage.

Most Effective Content by Stage

A CMI study conducted in April 2018, found that B2B marketers rated blog posts/ articles, white papers, and case studies to be the most **effective types of content for the early, middle, and late stages of the buyer’s journey.

📍 Channel Map

The channel map is essentially your blueprint for success with inbound marketing. Now that we have our content ideas developed and mapped to our key personas, we need to outline how these buyers are going to find and engage with it.

You will note that there are several ways for people to jump into your content. They don’t necessarily all start at the first stage (awareness) and work left to right. Depending on where the prospect is in their journey, they can jump in anywhere along the way. Don’t just focus on top of funnel awareness offers or you could miss a chance to engage with a motivated buyer.

A channel map is a great tool for visualizing the actual steps our buyer will take. We can use it to see where we need more content or maybe where we have too much. Typically, companies will do well at generating their top of funnel content (awareness) but fall short in the middle stage (interest) and try to jump straight from awareness to interest.

Example

Sources:

https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Demand-Generation-Supercharge-ebook/dp/B07NCHL575/

https://growfusely.com/blog/middle-of-the-funnel-content-for-saas/

https://www.semrush.com/blog/content-marketing-funnel/

Resources:

https://clearbit.com/blog/targeted-demand-gen-campaign