It’s that time of year again—time to start planning a marketing roadmap for the year to come. Though it can be a little overwhelming, taking a proactive approach to your marketing strategy will set your business up for success in the new year.
Whether you’re creating a marketing roadmap for the first time or just need a refresher, we’ve broken down the key factors to consider while you plan for 2024.
Why Roadmapping Matters
To put it simply, roadmapping matters because the most effective marketing strategies are intentional. You may know where you want your business to be at the end of 2024, but you need a roadmap to outline the steps you’ll take to get there.
Experienced marketers use the roadmapping process to consider not just where we’re going, but where we’ve already been. If you haven’t already, take time to examine your previous year in marketing with an objective lens. Identify where you saw the greatest return on investment (ROI), and where you saw less success than you expected. These data points will inform your next steps towards success.
4 Key Roadmapping Considerations
When you start the roadmapping process, it’s important to get clear on what you can reasonably accomplish in the next year. We recommend focusing on these four themes to get started:
- Align Team Objectives: Your marketing objectives shouldn’t exist in a silo. Get connected with sales, customer service, operations, and any other teams to understand the bigger picture of your organization’s objectives for the year ahead. For the best results, your marketing team’s objectives should work side-by-side with other team objectives towards a larger goal.
- Keep Your Customer in Mind: Remember the specific personas you want to engage and target them directly, rather than getting sidetracked by what other departments may want or “trendy” things that might not resonate with your customers. Trends come and go, but a genuine understanding of your customers’ needs can last a lifetime.
- Preliminary Budgeting and Resource Allocation: Recycling the prior year’s budget is a common marketing mistake. Even if you had a successful year, take time to reexamine where your resources are focused and what kind of ROI you’re seeing in those areas. Analyze your marketing performance data and allocate more resources towards the areas that produce ROI. You can also try teasing your budget backward. Calculate your company’s revenue goals, then determine the budget and number of marketing leads you need to get there. Typically, this looks like spending 2-5% of revenue on marketing, but the use of those funds must be clearly measurable to land leads that create ROI.
- Identify High-Level Brand Goals and KPIs: A marketing roadmap should have a clear direction towards several high-level objectives. Focus on SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound) goals that have clear measures of success. Once you’ve set SMART goals, identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will benchmark your progress toward each goal.
It’s important to plan ahead, but ultimately, your marketing roadmap should be a living document that you revisit often. The marketing landscape is always evolving, and your approach will need to evolve too. To make sure you’re following a data-driven approach, stay on top of tracking and analyzing your KPIs consistently throughout the year. The numbers won’t lie, but they will lead you in the right direction towards your objectives.
Introducing Your 2024 Roadmapping Resource
Creating your own marketing roadmap may seem daunting, but the GANI team is here to help! We’ve compiled a free guide to building your own 2024 marketing roadmap from start to finish, with actionable steps and practical advice from our experience.
This free guide will take you through the roadmapping process from start to finish in seven steps, including:
- Understand Your Business Goals
- Define Your Target Audience
- Choose Effective Marketing Channels
- Create Compelling Messaging
- Set Key Performance Indicators
- Outline Your Budget
- Measure Performance and Adjust Accordingly
With each step, we’ve outlined high-level advice and key points to consider from our team’s decades of marketing experience. We’ve also included related marketing resources we recommend for additional learning, plus space to make notes as you build your plan.
Have questions about how to implement your roadmap? Get in touch with a member of our team to see how GANI can help.