Marketing teams are known for keeping their eye on a thousand things at once: user research, product roadmaps, campaign assets, editorial calendars, brand messaging, user activation strategies, takes a deep breath – just to name a few!
With all these priorities come different stakeholders, teams, and timelines. It’s easy to see how, among all these competing initiatives, some can fall through the cracks. As a marketer, how do you keep all your plans and research organized? How do you share it with key stakeholders from other teams?
To help navigate these challenges, we’re unleashing Confluence’s Ultimate Guide for Marketing Teams. In this eight-chapter eBook, you’ll learn about best practices for common marketing initiatives, including:
- Nailing your brand’s positioning and messaging
- Crafting effective buyer personas
- Constructing a product launch plan that gathers relevant feedback from all teams involved
- Making a buzzworthy marketing plan template that helps ensure buy-in from the rest of your company
Read our free eBook: The Ultimate Guide for Marketing Teams
There are a few reasons you may be lacking in some of these crucial areas. Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?
Your marketing strategy is unfocused (or nonexistent)
When devising a marketing strategy, it’s easy to get distracted by the latest shiny object cropping up on everyone’s feeds. But just because something is popular with, say, millennials, doesn’t mean it’s the right fit for your product’s marketing strategy.
Creating a marketing plan template helps you narrow your focus to the opportunities that best align with your product’s vision. Create a template that includes:
- A competitive analysis
- Marketing messaging, budget, and risks
- A SWOT analysis
After assessing these key areas of any initiative, it will become clear to you whether your strategy should involve nano influencers, A.I., podcasts, or any of these buzzworthy channels du jour at all 😉.
Create a buzzworthy marketing plan template
Your stakeholders are siloed
Let’s say your team has been busy, heads down on its next campaign or marketing launch. Then, when you’re nearly ready to launch, you present your plan to product, sales, design, and engineering teams, only for them to unload a ton of problematic dependencies or competing priorities. Oops.
Creating a stakeholder management strategy at the beginning of your planning process will help you identify who needs to be pulled into your projects, and at what point. By taking a process-forward view of whose workflows will be affected, whose approval is needed, and whose end product will change, you are ultimately creating a more effective end result that runs smoothly, and includes all necessary input.
Read our stakeholder management guide
Your product launch plan is tenuous
Similar to eliminating stakeholder silos, understanding how to approach a product launch requires a thought-out plan (and perhaps fewer TikTok epiphanies). Using a product launch plan template ensures that product and marketing teams are on the same page about the purpose of the feature being built, and everyone agrees on the messaging behind it.
Create a product launch template
You haven’t fleshed out your positioning statement
Instead of focusing on vague buzzwords to nail your messaging strategy, try a different type of “MadLibs” to focus your positioning statement:
You’ll also need to ask your team to answer a few key questions about what differentiates your product, identify all your target audiences, and evaluate your competitors. These strategies will help inform an effective positioning statement that is true to the ethos of your product.
Once you’ve hammered out a positioning statement, you’ll have the groundwork for a full-blown messaging house. Here is where you’ll articulate your campaign’s value pillars and product promises, as well as the emotional benefits of using your product.
Get a detailed overview of how to create a positioning statement and message house here:
Remember that, as marketers, you are handling a ton of important initiatives. The more plans and processes you put in place to standardize your methods, the more room you’ll have to be more creative with your end result.
Learn more about the four topics discussed above, as well as resources for editorial calendars, buyer personas, company blogs, and more, in the eight chapter eBook Confluence’s Ultimate Guide for Marketing Teams.