Marketers Take Flight

144: The Elements of a Great Marketing Plan

• Lindsay Diven • Episode 144

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It's episode 144, and we're diving into the heart of our "AEC Annual Planning Empowerment" series with a focus on creating an impactful marketing plan for your AEC firm. 🏗️📈

 In this episode, I unpack the essentials of a marketing plan, linking it with your BD (Business Development) strategy to fuel revenue growth. Remember, a marketing plan isn't just a set of tactics; it's your roadmap to market dominance. 🗺️🚀

🔍 We'll explore:

  • The definition and purpose of a marketing plan.
  • Aligning marketing with BD strategies for a laser-focused approach. 🎯
  • Key elements of an effective marketing plan, from SWOT analysis to actionable goals. 📊

Plus, I'll share an example of how to tailor your strategy for specific markets, like targeting higher ed clients in Florida.

Want a hands-on guide to craft your BD plan? Check out the Business Development Planning Mini-Workshop at marketerstakeflight.com/BDPlan. 🏢

📈 And don't miss out on our freebie - a comprehensive Marketing Plan Outline! Grab yours at marketerstakeflight.com/144. 🎁

🔔 Subscribe for more insightful episodes on sales goals, marketing strategies, and personal performance tips.



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Speaker 1:

Hey there, I'm Lindsay Diven and I'm passionate about everything marketing, productivity and career growth. With over 17 years of experience in the architecture, engineering and construction industry, I know firsthand the ins and outs of this exciting field, from my early days as a marketing coordinator to becoming an award-winning marketing professional. In firm principle, I've learned the ropes through countless late nights and challenging deadlines. Now I'm thrilled to bring you the AEC Marketing Strategies Podcast. Here I'll be sharing simple yet powerful, step-by-step marketing strategies that you can implement to achieve the same level of success. Consider me your go-to marketing mentor, someone who truly gets the unique challenges you face in the AEC industry. Whether you're an AEC Marketing Pro or industry newbie, this podcast is your personal coffee date with your marketing bestie. Together, we'll navigate the ever-changing landscape of online marketing and digital trends, ensuring you stay ahead of the curve. If you're ready to unlock the marketing secrets they never taught you in college and tailor them specifically to the AEC industry, then you're in the right place. Now let's get started. Well, hey there, marketers, welcome back, and we are continuing our planning series today by talking about marketing plans, specifically the elements that make up a great marketing plan for your AEC firm. And, as a reminder, this planning series includes podcast episodes, freebies and many workshops to help you prepare your business development and marketing plans. This series kicked off the elements of a great business development plan. You can find all of these, all of the series episodes, as well as today's freebie, a marketing plan outline over on the show notes page over at marketerstakeflightcom forward slash 2222. And if you're really ready to dive deep into business development planning and facilitate this process at your firm, you can sign up for my business development planning mini workshop. In this mini workshop, I teach you my proven approach to writing a business development plan, including how to develop the right mix of strategy, meetings and research to get the plan done, and then I walk you through how to execute the plan so it doesn't just get written and sit on the shelf. You'll walk away with the knowledge and tools and templates to lead the business development planning for your firm. Best of all, it's online and on demand so you can access it at the right time for you. So learn more about this mini workshop and register for it over at marketerstakeflightcom forward slash BD plan.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so let's dive into today's topic. Today I'm going to be talking about what a marketing plan is, the elements that make up a great marketing plan and how to use your BD strategy to develop marketing str strategies that drive revenue growth. Sound exciting, doesn't it? So let's first start by talking about what exactly is a marketing plan. A marketing plan serves as your roadmap to introducing your firm and or positioning your firm's specific services or expertise to your current and potential clients. Really, you just want them to know about you, you want them to be warm, they know you in a certain way and for certain services, to make it easier for your sales team to go in there and get the sale. Furthermore, the marketing plan outlines your firm's specific marketing strategy. It includes concrete actions to be taken, along with anticipated results, and the marketing plan serves as a guide for your firm to execute and measure the marketing efforts results over a specific period of time. In the case for today's episode, we're talking about an annual marketing plan, so over a time of a year, and so this is really important. We can't just say we're going to do all these strategies. We want to link it to results. We want to say here's our desired results from this. That way we can measure our results against something. And if you recall from episode number 20,. The business development plan provides guidance to your firm on what services, clients and projects you'll be pursuing for the year, and so the marketing plan then outlines your marketing strategy to you know in relation to the BD plan. And so the marketing strategy should be based on your BD strategies, because we want, like a lot, if not a majority, of our marketing efforts, tactics, resources, budgets to be focused on revenue growth excuse me, to be focused on revenue growth, and the best way to do this is to make sure that we are deploying those marketing strategies that are aligned with our business development growth strategies. So that is why I started with the BD plan, and today we're talking about the marketing plan.

Speaker 1:

So how do you use your BD strategy to direct your marketing plan? First, let me tell you what is not a marketing strategy. A marketing strategy is not just a blog post or a golf tournament. Those are tactics that you use to execute your strategy. If you don't have a larger strategy to guide you, you'll just be guessing at what marketing tactics you should do and, worse, you may not even know what marketing tactic is working.

Speaker 1:

So the first step in using your BD strategy or your BD plan to guide your marketing plan is to identify your ideal clients and potential clients. And if you've written your BD plan for your firm, this is easy because you've most likely identified a list of those current and ideal clients in that plan. And it's even better in that plan if you've also have a list of targeted pursuits. So if you haven't listened to that episode, number 20, even if you're not involved in BD, go and listen to episode 20 so you know what I'm talking about. So, once you have your BD plan, you can take the list of targeted clients and pursuits and identify their industries, markets and key issues, because you'll have some of that research from BD and the list from the BD plan and you, as the marketing team, can conduct your own research on what the current perception of your firm is in those markets and industries and with those clients and identify the gaps in your current brand awareness and where you need to help position your firm for those projects in those specific industries, markets, key clients. And knowing all this then will help you develop your marketing strategies, your messaging and the places you will need to broadcast your marketing messages.

Speaker 1:

You can start to formulate the high level marketing strategies with measurable objectives and goals and better yet. These objective and goals align directly with the sales goals from your BD plan. So let me give you an example so you understand a little clearer. If one of your BD growth strategies includes identifying and winning two key projects for higher ed, then part of your marketing strategy should answer the questions of how well known is our firm with those key higher ed clients, what types of marketing materials and messages do we want to get in front of those key clients, et cetera, et cetera. Furthermore, if those targeted higher ed clients are in Florida, you could start by asking have we done work for Florida higher ed clients before? What's our firm's brand awareness in Florida? What's the perception of our firm, et cetera, et cetera. And then, based on that information, your marketing strategy would be very different. For example, let's say, if you're very well known but not known to those two universities you're targeting, maybe you can focus on a referral campaign from other Florida universities or do some kind of campaign highlighting work done at other Florida universities. On the other hand, if you're brand new to Florida and have no relationships, your focus would be on a brand awareness campaign Continuing.

Speaker 1:

If you have a content marketing plan or content marketing as part of your you know strategies, you may create some thought leadership pieces around specific topics of high interest to those specific higher-ed clients. You see how this makes this a little bit easier to narrow down what marketing strategies to focus on. Knowing that your BD plan has that objective of getting two new higher-ed projects from clients in Florida, you can work with those business developers to develop marketing strategies that focus on that specific objective, because this effort also helps them meet their goals. You might find yourself with better participation and encouragement from your internal partners and once you know your high-level marketing strategies, then you can start brainstorming tactics, and tactics allow you to fill in the gaps to meet the clients where they are. If your ideal client finds expertise by searching the web, which we know a lot of folks do right now at least looking you up when you reach out to them, you may need to create, or you may want to create, a landing page that highlights your specific expertise and some thought leadership content. You might also have some testimonials from other similar clients on this page or on your website. These tactics will align with that larger strategy that is driven from your BD plan and aligns with your BD plan Going back to our Florida Higher-Ed example, because that's a BD focus.

Speaker 1:

You focus these marketing tactics around those first. It really helps you and your marketing team prioritize your efforts, your tactics, the activities you're actually going to be working on, especially since in our AEC firms we are often a very small team with limited resources and budgets when it comes to marketing, and I know a lot of our firms were splitting our marketing time with proposal time. So, if you can, the more focused and targeted you can be, the easier it's going to be to have success. So you'll continue to build this plan around all of your business development objectives, or at least the top priority ones. Again, this comes to time and resources and then eventually this all comes together to become your marketing plan.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so let's talk about the elements of a great marketing plan. This might help to make more sense to you, and before I introduce those elements, let me pause and note that even if you are a single marketing department of one, it is imperative that you develop some kind of marketing plan to support the brand awareness and market positioning for your firm. It may not be as robust if compared to those firms that have a whole marketing department, but you need to at least have some language written down. You might outsource many parts of your marketing functions, like communications, pr, social media etc. But you will still need an overall strategy to convey to your consultants that you outsource the work to. Okay. So off my soapbox, so let's get to the marketing plan elements.

Speaker 1:

So the marketing plan elements. I'm going to go quickly through them and then go into each in a little bit more detail. So the marketing plan elements include number one, executive summary, and that includes a high overview of goals and objectives. Number two, historical overview. Number three, marketing summary and analysis, including your SWAT analysis. Four, objectives, both short and long term. Five, your action plan or your marketing mix. Six the next couple sections are optional, depending on the size of your team in your department. Number six is training and professional development. Seven is organizational involvement. Number eight is marketing budget. Number nine, department organization and responsibilities. And last, reporting. I know I went through that really quick, so let me go into more, go into each section in a little bit more detail and again, you can get this template over at the show notes page. So marketerstakeflightcom forward slash 22.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so, section number one, the executive summary. Again, this should be completed last and it summarizes the other sections of your plan. It really helps your executive team and implementing team members quickly understand and support the plan. Section two, historical overview, and this includes performance and historical trends, and this includes a summary of achievements accomplished in the current year. This include can include any marketing objectives achieved, baseline statistics for your current marketing efforts, like web views, downloads, growth, etc.

Speaker 1:

The next section is market summary and analysis. So here you want to answer the question what's your firm's position in the market marketplace? What's your firm's overall growth strategy? So, is it geographic? Is it market growth, organic, inorganic? If you have a long term strategic plan, what year are you in and how does this annual marketing plan support that long term plan?

Speaker 1:

And then also part of this is the SWAT analysis, and this is somewhat similar to the SWAT and your BD plan, but may also include other strengths and weaknesses of your specific marketing program. So here you know. Just a reminder for those of you who don't know what a SWAT analysis is it's your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. And your strengths are competitive advantages or core competencies that give your organization advantage. Weaknesses are the limitations that a firm has in developing or implementing a marketing strategy. And then opportunities are favorable conditions in the marketplace that could yield rewards for your firm, and threats or conditions or barriers that may prevent your firm from reaching its goals. So during the development of the marketing plan, you know you, or marketers, attempt to match the internal strengths to external weaknesses, or sometimes you may want to try to convert internal weaknesses into strengths and external threats into opportunities. So this is where some of the creativity starts to happen. I really liked putting that SWAT into action, because those are really interesting brainstorming sessions.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so the next section are objectives, and this includes your short term, short term goals, the goals for the current year, and it can include goals that cover business development, communications or PR, knowledge management, new technologies, etc. You should list here any firm wide initiatives related to marketing your firm. This can include new branding, website, anniversary campaigns, acquisitions or mergers, etc. And then you have the long term goals, and these are typically the goals for the next one to three years or whatever your strategic plan horizon is. And so how will your firm look like? What kind of new clients or project types will you be pursuing? What kind of research do you need to be doing now to help position your firm for the future. So sometimes in the marketing plan, the long term goals that are in the BD plans you're starting to work on because you need to start your brand positioning in those markets a couple of years ahead of when we want the sales. And also as part of this planning series, I'm going to be doing a few episodes on goal setting. I can't say it, but I'm going to talk about it Goal setting for sales, for marketing and for your own personal performance goals. So make sure you're subscribed to this podcast so you don't miss an episode.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so the next section in the marketing plan is the action plan or the marketing mix, and the marketing next section should provide considerable detail regarding various marketing and BD activities. There should be a plan of action for each short term goal listed in the previous section, and this section should detail any, should detail each activity or marketing mix. This could also be your tactics, and so you'll list them. Who will be leading an estimated budget and desired outcome or goal for those and that's the important part that I don't see a lot of marketers do is say, okay, well, we're going to do this, you know campaign, you know this Florida higher ed campaign will, but we don't put an objective or goal to it. The goal is just to do it. It's not well, how many more website impressions do we want or improve our? You know we're going to create a landing page and we're going to increase the traffic, or we're going to have more email signups or we're going to get invited somewhere, you know. So you need to have some goals related to each of the items in your action plan Desired goal or outcome.

Speaker 1:

And then the next section is training and professional development, and this is an optional section. I used to include this section in my marketing plans because I had to get my department budget approved and training for my employees was part of that budget, and I also oversaw the seller do our training and had that as part of my budget as well. So thus I included it in my marketing plan. So that was included. So I created a section in my marketing plan called training and professional development because of that, and in this section I listed any and all training provided to seller doers, business development and marketing staff for the upcoming year. I listed any internal training because I did a lot of training internally, and then also training conducted by outside consultants and some of the topics that I've done in the past. You know, client management roles and responsibilities, positioning to win or capture, planning, networking, preparing for client visits, proposal planning and management presentations, building strong client relationships through debriefs, social media, thought leadership so they kind of ran the gamut. Those were just some of the topics we covered in the past. So again, that was in the training and professional development section.

Speaker 1:

You might not have a need for this, depending on how your department and budgets are set up. So section number seven is organizational involvement and from my previous job from a corporate level, we listed the key organizations that will expand our brand recognition and build relationships with key decision makers. So we listed the location, the organization and firm representatives. So for us at the corporate level we also did market level marketing plans. It's kind of a meta, you know, a division level marketing plan From a corporate level. We had some key organizations that were very like kind of big ticket budget items. So we put those in my marketing plan because it was really where the CEO was involved in those type of organizations. And again, this is an optional section, depending on how your firm's budget and expenses are tracked. Again, I had to account for my department's organizational involvement in the budget. So I put stuff like you know, there are S&P memberships and stuff like that in there, as well as key corporate involvement that were you know some of these organizations. It was like $50,000 to join, so stuff like that I put in this organizational involvement.

Speaker 1:

And then the next section, section eight, marketing budget, and this section is usually in a table format in the document or could be a separate Excel, just kind of how you want to format it. But there should be a budget for each initiative listed in your action plan or marketing mix section and, depending on how your budgets are set up at your firm, you may include line items for your marketing staff, like for their salaries. I'm going to be doing a future podcast specifically on how to develop your marketing budget, so stay tuned for that. It's going to be a lot of fun. Okay, the next section, number nine, is department organization and responsibilities, and in this section you want to describe how your marketing department is structured and organized and include an organizational chart if applicable. Again, if you're a marketing department of one, you still might want to list, like your name, but then list a box for everything that you do, because it's really imperative for people to understand, especially firm executives and principals, to understand all the different responsibilities in a marketing department, even if it's the same name in all those boxes. So don't skip this, even if you're just a marketing department of one.

Speaker 1:

And then last is reporting. In the reporting section, you wanna summarize the reporting developed by your marketing department to just demonstrate the ROI of the plan as well as sales and business development effectiveness, and so you wanna provide a summary of who will develop the report, the frequency of each report. Some reports could include your monthly marketing or sales report. This might be the same as what's listed in your BD plan. Another one you might have a communications quarterly report and we used to prepare these and these would measure the impact of a variety of internal and external communication efforts, including website traffic, social media, media placements, internal engagements, et cetera. We would align this communications quarterly report directly back to those marketing initiatives, and so it's really nice to have those the marketing objectives and strategy listed first and then build the reports around those and then a hit rate report, which some of these are an overlap with the BD reports.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so those are the elements of the marketing plans I have created in the past and have helped my clients to create. You can create a marketing plan for your entire firm or, depending on your firm's size or markets, you can create a marketing plan for each office or market or division or studio, however you're organized. And if you wanna get a copy of the marketing plan outline for free, just go over to the show notes page over at marketerstakeflightcom, forward slash 22. And if you wanna learn, step by step, of how to facilitate the BD planning process at your firm because we wanna start with that and that'll make your marketing planning so much easier go ahead and check out my mini workshop at marketerstakeflightcom forward slash BD plan. Again, this is just one episode of several that will be focused around planning. So make sure you subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any great episodes from me or any of the great business developers and marketers I have scheduled to appear on the show. Okay, until next week. Bye for now.

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Lindsay Diven, CPSM

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