Business
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More. I talked to many marketers in the past 6-8 weeks. All of us are looking forward to the re-opening of the economy. Yay! #can’twait Update the buyer personas and messaging frameworks In the previous episode, I talked about the need to update your marketing plan to align with the reopening. I called out that don’t revise your marketing plan for the sake of revising; you need to understand the behavior changes of your customers which leads to the need to update your buyer personas. B2B customers don’t usually change our behaviors that often so we don’t usually update our buyer personas. However, I think it’s important to evaluate your customers especially after the pandemic. Understand if there are any behavioral changes you have to take into account. And by the way, the behavioral changes may or may not have an impact on how they use your products. And if there’s a change in how they use your project, another factor you need to look into is your messaging framework. You need to determine if your value proposition and talking points need to change or not. So, evaluating your messaging framework and buyers personas are critical pre-requisites before updating your marketing plan. Another capability that’s important for marketers to possess is to be nimble and move quickly. You need to develop the ability to think strategically so that you can connect the dots swiftly and identify what needs to change when a crisis strikes. To help marketers think strategically, I created the “think strategically” series for my monthly webinars from May to August. The whole four months! In May, I did a webinar on “How to Change Your Marketing Plan Again: Continue to Plan for the Unknown.” I summarized the key points of the webinar in my blog post: Important Templates You Need to Update Your Marketing Plan. So check that out if you are interested. You can check it out on my website, pamdidner.com, and download the templates. In June: I’d like to talk about the 7 Elements You Should Include to Your Marketing Plan In July: I’ll touch on the topic of How to Create and Deliver Impressive C-suite Presentations In August: It’s all about How to Sharpen Your Strategic Thinking Skills I want to talk about the June webinar a little bit. The topic is about how to create a marketing plan. This is the topic, to be honest with you, that comes up most often during my mentoring sessions with marketing professionals. I thought I’d take a webinar to address it. If you already have a marketing plan template, GREAT! If you don't, well, it's the time to create one. I simply want to share some critical elements that should be included in the marketing plan, and I'll explain why these elements are vital. If you have an existing template, you can compare my recommendations with your current templates and determine if it's necessary to refine it. If you don't have one, you can check out my template as a starting point, then customize it based on your company's needs. To me, one way to judge if a marketer can think strategically is his/her ability to create a solid marketing plan. After this webinar, you'll be able to: - Identify the objectives and audience for your marketing plan - Determine the elements to include in your marketing plan You can register for any of the webinars by going to my website: pamdidner.com, click on webinars under the Resources tab. You can see the detailed descriptions of each webinar. I hope to see you there. Many marketers work hard to learn marketing disciplines such as SEO, content marketing, video production, email marketing and more which I call “hard skills.” However, it’s the soft skills such as how to communicate with C-suite and how to ask strategic questions that are hard to possess unless you have numerous opportunities to present in front of senior managers or have an experienced marketing coach to work with you. I’ll share many key tips at my webinars. Oh, by the way, I recently launched the FB community, B2B Marketing and More. One thing I want to do on the Facebook community is to have some virtual face time to work with a small group of marketers on soft skills or how to use my templates correctly. I am still working through the details, so stay tuned. If you are interested in joining, just go to Facebook and look for B2B Marketing and More. Again, if you have any questions, reach out anytime. Don’t forget to register the webinars! Stay healthy and be safe. Talk to you next week. Take care.