How to Plan Your Marketing Roadmap for 2024 (Full Guide)
👋 Big announcement in the edition
Hello, welcome to the 11th edition:
How to Plan Your Marketing Roadmap for 2024 (full guide)
In this edition you will learn:
A Big Announcement From Me
The 5 Common Marketing Problems With an Unclear Roadmap
My Simple Marketing Strategy Framework to Plan a Clear Roadmap
A Detailed View of Each Layer to install your Marketing Roadmap
👋 Big announcement:
I packed 5 years of content marketing expertise into 1 online course. The waitlist is open!
I’m launching a course about my B2B Content Marketing system that helped me to:
Bootstrap a 7-figure agency
Get 100K followers online
Get $49K/month pipeline
📎 Click here to get more information and join the waitlist
(People on the waitlist will get exclusive advantages when the course launches)
Let’s get back to the main topic: How to plan your marketing roadmap for 2024
5 Common Problems When the Marketing Roadmap is Unclear
👁 Lack of Clarity on Marketing Direction (1)
The worst marketing scenario is when you don't have a clear direction. Or even worse, when you have multiple directions at the same time. One step ahead, two step backs, get lost, then start from scratch again.
Some Founders are trying to work with everyone and sell everything because of FOMO, lack of clarity, shiny object syndrome, and co-founders misalignment.
"We don't want to miss any opportunity"
"Get cash first, and then we will refine targeting"
"We are an all-in-one solution for business growth"
🧗🏾 Trying New Tactics While the Foundations are Undefined (2)
The direct output of an unclear marketing strategy is making random decisions. Most often, founders or marketers hear about tactics online and jump from one to another one. They can even get trapped in the “hack loophole”.
This never ending process leads to problem in the team:
Lack of clarity → "where are we going with this?"
Decision Paralysis → "what should we do next now?"
Poor results → "prospects are not interested right now"
✍️ Write Copy With Unclear Messaging (3)
If you publish content, ads, or headlines and change the message all the time, your audience won't be able to 'position' you in their mind. You'll remain an unclear noise constantly fluctuating in the background.
"I don't get what they do, it's always changing"
"I think they boost revenue, but not sure how"
Example of a messaging strategy constantly changing
🪄 Solving the Wrong (or inexistant) Market Problem (4)
Skipping the step of asking customers what they need leads to products that may miss the real problems customers face. Starting with a product idea and then trying to find its market is backward. This often leads to solutions looking for problems, rather than the other way around.
- Client A: "It's interesting but we don't need it now"
- Client B: "We don't have time to train our teams"
- Client C: "Our current solution is doing fine"
🎀 Blame Surface-level Factors (5)
They treat symptoms but not root problems. They focus on surface-level problems because their ego is too big to question the foundations of their business. Blaming external factors is an easy escape:
- "Let's fire the agency, they send poor leads"
- "Our CRM doesn't have the right features"
- "This channel is bad, let's try a new one"
They are changing the color of the wallpaper while the house is built on a ravine.
In summary, if your marketing roadmap is unclear your business will:
Lack proper direction
Try new tactics and hacks all the time
Have an unclear messaging strategy
Solve a wrong or inexistant market problem
Not focus on the right root problems
The B2B Business Negative spiral is a good summary of what happens when your foundations are not solid:
My Simple Marketing Strategy 4-layer Framework to Plan a Clear Roadmap
Your marketing is not doomed to fail. You can install a proper roadmap by carefully working on the right elements, step by step. I’ve designed a 4-layer framework to help you see clearer and prioritize:
It’s composed of 4 distinct (but interconnected) layers that compose your marketing roadmap.
Surface-level: Marketing actions visible by your audience (copy, website, ads, emails...)
Structural: The way you organize your marketing structure (KPI, processes, attribution...)
Strategic: The decisions that shape your marketing strategy (ICP, offer, positioning...)
Product: The product (or service) you are using to address the market problem.
While every layer is important, you won’t be able to succeed without good foundations (layer 4 and 3). They will have an impact on the rest of the marketing actions. Don’t change the color of the wallpaper while the house is built on a ravine.
💬 I will describe each layer starting from the most important.
Layer 4: Your Marketing Roadmap Starts from Your Solution (Product or Service)
This layer is all about making the right business strategy decision:
Solve a market problem of a specific audience
Focus on one market opportunity (not multiple)
Provide a unique solution with a clear use case
That’s why marketing is tightly connected to the product or service. Especially in product-led growth where we talk about product marketing.
Your solution should come from a market problem
If you don’t build your solution based on a market problem, or make bad business strategy decision, this could happen:
- You don't based your solution on a market reality
- You spend time building a solution without feedback
- You struggle to sell as the solution as no one needs it
💡 There are 2 good scenarios to avoid these problems.
1/Problem-first Business
Choose a specific audience in an industry and identify a PUR problem (painful, urgent, recognized).
Conduct interviews, experiments, and lean startup methods to identify a good solution to this problem.
Then, your job is to launch a solution fast, and get feedback even faster. The fastest the feedback loop, the fastest your business will grow.
2/Audience-First Business
Build an audience (social media, newsletter, video channel, offline, blog) first around a key topic or problem.
Run discovery workshops and discussions with community members to 1. identify common problems and 2. co-create a solution
Distribute the solution directly to your community of loyal fans and rely on them to spread to other groups (growth flywheel)
In other words, always start from your audience to develop your solution. Then, your goal is to iterate as fast as possible based on market feedback. If your product or service doesn’t answer a specific market problem, the rest of your roadmap will be harder to install.
Layer 3: Your Marketing Strategy supports Your Marketing Roadmap with 4 main Pillars
In Marketing, 20% of your decisions will influence 80% of your actions and results. This is coming from the famous Pareto principle.
So if you set up the right decision with strong and clear decisions, the rest of the job will be easier. But the question is, what should you decide? There are multiple strategic components but I’ve highlight 4 main ones.
Ideal customer profile: who do you target?
Positioning: how do you position your brand?
Messaging Strategy: what messages do you use?
Offer: how do you solve your audience’s problem?
These 4 pillars constitute the foundations of your marketing strategy:
Ideal Customer Profile: who do you target?
You are probably experiencing a heavy 'shiny object syndrome' as you want to target everyone. You don't want to miss opportunities. But the key is to target a very specific segment of power users to build momentum and initial traction.
Positioning: how do you position your brand?
Positioning is the place that a brand occupies in the minds of the customers within a category. You should not have a broad positioning to please everyone's taste. Be bold and position your business with a specific niche, offer, tone of voice, value proposition, unique selling point.
Messaging Strategy: what messages do you use?
Once you understand the problem and how your product can solve it, use the Before/After/Bridge method. This helps show how your product can change things for the better, making it a must-have for your customers.
Offer: how do you solve your audience’s problem?
No matter how cool your brand is, if your offer doesn't solve a PUR problem (painful, urgent, recognized), you won't get repeatable revenue. Provide a clear solution to your audience's current limitations with your offer.
Layer 2: Your Efficiency and Results Depend on your Marketing Systems
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
A bottleneck often appears between strategy and execution. Teams have a lot of ideas, strategies, and tactics in mind but they struggle to implement. This often comes from a lack of organization, prioritization, and planning.
The key to implement a strategy and generate results is your system.
Your system should answer to 7 questions:
How do you plan your marketing actions?
How do you set objectives for your marketing actions?
How do you prioritize your marketing actions?
How do you allocate resources for your marketing actions?
How do you track the results of your marketing actions?
How do you analyze of your marketing actions?
In my opinion, the best tool to plan, prioritize, and track results of experiments is the marketing backlog.
I wrote a full edition (paid) on how to create a backlog :
And you can also learn how to install it in this free video:
Layer 1: Your Marketing Actions are the Only Work Visible by Your Audience
Your marketing actions are everything that is above the visibility line. In other words, it’s all the touch points that you push to your audience.
This includes (but not limited to):
Content
Social media
Design
Copy
Paid ads
Website
While desired positioning is important, the real positioning is the output of those brand touch points. Because your audience will perceive your business based on what they see in the market (not what you write in strategy slides).
📌 Marketing actions will work well only if the rest of the strategic work is done correctly
It’s important to understand that those marketing actions are all rooted into deeper strategic work (the 3 other layers). For example - to write a great headline you need:
A clear target audience
A pertinent messaging strategy
A bunch of answers from your ICP
A good copywriter making sense of all that
Here is a visualisation this concept:
A Process to Select The Best Marketing Tactics
1.Choosing the right tactics should always start from your audience:
Study WHY they buy → Know what message to say
Research HOW they buy → Know where to say it
Research → Strategy → Plan → Execute
2.But let's face it - it's also about practical resources:
Your Budget → How much can you spend on marketing?
Time to get Results → How long can you keep until ROI?
3.You should diversify your tactics for 2 types of results:
Fast results (quadrant 1 & 2 in the graph)
Long term results (quadrant 3 & 4 in the graph)
I've designed a quadrant graph (enclosed) to help you for this:
What is the best marketing tactic?
In my opinion, the best tactic in 2024 is content marketing. That’s why I created an entire course to explain my 5-step content strategy. You can join the waitlist now - here is the course program:
Alright that’s the end of this edition - I hope you enjoyed it and that it will be helpful for your marketing roadmap.
📎 Click here to get more information and join the waitlist
Any interesting recommendations to know more about messaging (this will probably be tackled in your training) and creation of ICP?
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