In An Agile World, Who Needs B2B Marketing Planning?
With a fiercely competitive business landscape, organisations have pushed the gas pedal to raise their growth momentum. New technologies and tech disruptions are mandating newer ways of working. Constantly evolving customer expectations and buying behaviour are pushing marketing organisations to deliver results and high impact, all the time.
B2B marketing teams are under pressure to deliver high performance. They have to deliver results that have clear attribution to marketing efforts. Without a structured process and framework to achieve the stellar results expected from marketing, it becomes difficult to drive results consistently. And when something works, it becomes difficult to replicate that for another product or offering, region, industry vertical, or business unit. This dents the credibility of the marketing teams, at both the regional and corporate levels.
What Can An Effective Marketing Plan Do For Your Business?
Without an effective marketing plan, marketing finds itself reacting to activities, appealing to and appeasing different cross-functional requests from product teams, sales, and so on, which may or may not be aligned with the overall business strategy and objectives, thus wasting limited resources and time. Effective planning helps prioritize the marketing resources deliberately and proportionately and aligns them to the most impactful areas. Needless to say, effective annual marketing planning becomes critical to the success of marketing. And Forrester’s Marketing Survey, 2022, found that key marketing leaders and decision-makers are increasingly looking at enhancing planning efforts.
Unfortunately, there are quite a few challenges to putting together an effective marketing plan. Most key marketing executives struggle with getting the right information needed to put together a plan. This is mostly because the information is not easily available or is not easy to interpret. At times, the various functions closely guard the information, making it difficult for marketing executives to break the silos to get to them. There can be multiple other challenges, as well. Marketing is also accountable to drive results, be it contributing to influencing pipeline or sales growth. This makes it more daunting for marketing.
B2B Summit APAC
Join me at Forrester’s B2B Summit APAC on September 20, where we will solve this problem step by step. We will uncover the mystery of where the planning information has been hiding. We will talk about key frameworks, which will help you find this information and apply it to a detailed planning process.
I will introduce the Forrester B2B Marketing Planning Process to help you put together effective marketing plans. This session will provide the following benefits:
- It will help you understand the key information required to build an effective marketing plan and the sources that you must tap into to get this information.
- You will gain understanding of the B2B Marketing Planning Process to build plans that are perfectly aligned to your business objectives.
I am thrilled to share our frameworks, best practices, and insights that you will find the most useful at our 2022 B2B Summit APAC event. At the Summit, you will also find opportunities to connect and network with analysts and your peers in the industry, helping you take bolder decisions at work and be more successful in your role. Looking forward to seeing you there!