What is a Marketing Roadmap?
Have you ever got in a driving seat without knowing how you are going to get to your destination?
The answer is probably ‘no’. Most of us would pre-plan our route, or follow guidance from our Satnav for either the most direct route, or a route that avoids pitfalls such as major roadworks or busy areas.
The same applies to your business. If you know what you want to achieve this year (your destination), you need a ‘marketing roadmap’ for how you are going to achieve it. Having a marketing roadmap (otherwise known as a marketing plan or PR plan) is the most time-efficient and cost-efficient way of reaching your destination (or achieving your goals).
How Does a Marketing Roadmap Benefit your Business?
Without a roadmap, you may be using the scattergun approach (trying lots of random marketing activities and hoping that one of them works!), or being reactive (such as reacting to what your competitors are doing). These approaches mean that you can easily lose control of your marketing objectives and budget, and not achieve what you are setting out to do for the year ahead.
With a roadmap, you’ll know exactly which activity you are going to carry out during which month, the budget you are going to spend on each item, and the likely outcome you’ll achieve, all in line with your company objectives. There are different levels of complexity when creating a roadmap, although we suggest creating one that is easy to follow and easy to adjust, as no business runs exactly to plan throughout the year!
How to Create Your Marketing Roadmap
Review previous marketing activities and objectives
If you already carried out marketing activities last year, you will need to review which items worked well and which didn’t work so well based on your objectives for that year. For example, which items brought in your best new customers and did those activities fit within your budget?
Are your objectives the same for this year? You may need to adjust each of the items for this year or add new ones, such as your budget; removing items that didn’t work; or boosting items that worked well.
As an example, we offer both marketing & PR services, although our PR support was more in demand than marketing last year, so we are looking to promote our PR services further this year. We have adjusted our ‘roadmap’ to include this different positioning.
Work out your key dates
Does your business have key dates that you need to work towards and include in your roadmap?
Here are some examples of key dates:
- your company’s anniversary month;
- relevant awareness days (here are some examples);
- events you are sponsoring/ organising/ attending;
- sales promotions (such as Black Friday);
- items that other teams in your business may need your help in promoting or providing marketing support.
Work out which are the busier/ quieter months in your business and create relevant ideas around those. For example, to encourage more business during quieter months (as long as your business has the capacity and staff backup), create campaigns to boost leads/ sales around these times. In time for busier periods, ensure all your marketing processes/ platforms are working seamlessly and are up-to-date so that you can handle the extra capacity.
Create a Marketing Roadmap Grid
Next, create a grid with the months of the year on the left-hand column, and the marketing activities on the top row. For the marketing items, you could include items such as
- social media posts;
- web blogs (see blogs examples here);
- case studies (see case studies examples here);
- emails;
- press releases;
- events;
- campaigns;
- advertising;
- SEO activities;
- video;
- marketing collateral
- and more.
Now start adding in your activities on the grid, based on your key dates and objectives, including a budget for each.
Review, review, review
Businesses do not always run how you expect them to; just as when driving to your destination, you may need to make an unexpected diversion or pit stop.
Once you have created the first draft of your ‘roadmap’, it is always a good idea to review it regularly. You may end up with several adjusted versions of your roadmap if some campaigns or activities need to be moved, altered, scrapped or extended. However, it is a lot easier to navigate if you have already created your roadmap, so you can see which other activities and budgets may be impacted.
Download our marketing roadmap template
We have created a simple marketing roadmap template, giving you some suggestions to help you create your first marketing roadmap. As the template is created in excel, you can then tailor the marketing activities in the top row to suit your specific business.
You can download the ‘marketing roadmap template’ below
Good luck – let us know how you get on!
If you need any support in completing your marketing roadmap, please do get in touch!
About the author:
Emma Estridge is the Founder and Director of Mushroom Marketing & PR. With over 25 years’ experience in marketing and PR, she has worked both in-house for leading brands and in partnership with a wide range of agency clients.
You can link with Emma on LinkedIn here
Got marketing or PR questions? Emma offers a free 30-minute online meeting to help you get clarity and direction. Book your session here