Build Marketing Plans with the Most Powerful Tools Available.

You have a brilliant new product or service ready to release to the buying world. Or maybe you have an upgraded version you want to debut to new and existing customers. In either case, you have to have a solid marketing plan and go-to-market strategy in place to get the word out. Attribution should be the first power tool you grab. Make sure the battery is fully charged, put it to work, and be confident in knowing the plan you set in place will be successful.

Marketing attribution – specifically impartial multi-touch attribution – equips you with the best data available to ensure each and every step of your marketing strategy is informed by reliable, unbiased insights. You can’t hope to achieve success if you don’t know what online and offline channels have and have not worked in the past, and you must continually look at what’s most effective as you progress with your new marketing campaign. By examining the attribution data, you can identify the specific touchpoints that are influencing customers and optimize your ad spend accordingly.

But first, let’s take a step back and dive into what it takes to create a successful marketing plan, and you will see how attribution will be a thread throughout your strategy – before, during and after marketing campaigns are set in motion.

Marketing Plan 101

Attribution is an important factor for implementing any winning marketing plan – and keeping it razor sharp once launched – but you have to have a few business truths in place before moving forward and putting the power of attribution to work to support them. Key components to a marketing plan include:

• Company analysis:
  • Goals – What’s the goal behind your new business offering, or new product launch? This could be: filling a market need and building a strong brand to support it; educating the market on what you offer; upselling existing customers; and generating new leads. Here are some companies that got the jump on competition and disrupted their industries.
  • Focus – Determine how your product or service fits into an existing industry but, better yet, how it differentiates itself. This ties to your goals.
  • Culture – Does your business have a marketing-driven culture, one in which everyone buys into the same purpose, servicing customers in the best way possible and over-exceeding expectations?
  • Strengths and weaknesses – Identify internally what your business is good at, and where you need to improve.
  • Market share – What percentage of an existing or new market do you hope to garner? What about your product/service, price, distribution, and promotion will help you increase market share?
• Customer analysis:
  • Identify your customers – You need to define characteristics about the customers you want and those you already have, if applicable. For new customers, determine the demographics and geographic locations of your targeted audience, their interests, and how best to communicate with them (where do they get most of their information)? For existing customers, you can perform customer surveys, analyze customer data (attribution will be a huge help here), see what your customer-facing staff have to say, and listen to what customers are saying on social channels and via feedback on your website.
  • Define the needs of your customers – What motivates your customers to buy from you (your unique offering, price, other), do you fill a need they can’t get from another solution, and what do they say you could do better? Here’s a related article on why customers care about being properly attributed.
  • Identify how you fill the needs of your customers – How is your offering transforming the lives of your customers? Identify the specific benefits they receive from your product/service features and the positive outcomes that result.
• Competitor analysis:
  • Know your competition – This should be fairly straightforward, but you must compile a list of competitors in your space; learn about them and write a quick overview of each; identify their target audience; see how much their offerings cost; determine how your marketing message can differentiate you from them; be honest about what advantage they might have over you; and, like your own company analysis, define what the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors are.
• Environmental analysis:
  • Political and legal environment – Determine if any new or pending regulations, or an upcoming election that could shift the political landscape, could affect your marketing plan, business, or industry overall.
  • Economic environment – Is anything affecting the economy, like the current pandemic, or tariffs that, in turn, could affect your business?
  • Social and cultural environment – Have an ear to the ground and be socially aware of trends and current attitudes.
  • Technical environment – Is there a new technology furthering digital transformation or acting as a disruptor that could upset or affect your efforts?
• SWOT analysis:
  • Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) – All of the above contribute to your SWOT analysis. Simply capture, in the simplest of terms, what are affecting the four elements of SWOT:
    • Strengths – Use this as an opportunity to pat yourself on the back and determine why your business has value and the tangible and intangible positive attributes that you can control internally.
    • Weaknesses – Turn the microscope on your internal shortcomings and work to correct them. It could be a lack of resources, a lack of expertise or technical skills of existing staff, inadequate technology, poor product distribution or service delivery options, or any factor you can control.
    • Opportunities – Look outside your office doors for these. It’s basically why your business exists, and why your product/service provides value. Where can you expand in the market? What about the external environment presents a great opportunity?
    • Threats – Again, these are factors outside your office walls – ones you cannot control. Did your competition shift its strategy and put your approach at risk? Is there a trend in the marketplace, a new regulation, negative press, a new technology that could affect revenue?

The analysis that goes into the marketing plan and all of its components should contribute to determining your market segmentation. Take the baseline information you’ve collected and see what sets you apart. How can you tailor your marketing mix and target your desired markets? This is where attribution can really shine, and it’s our specialty at LeadsRx.

Impartial Multi-Touch Attribution – Lean on the Expertise of LeadsRx

LeadsRx Attribution™ uses advanced attribution techniques to help you increase top-line revenue and reduce wasted ad spend, ultimately maximizing your return on ad spend (ROAS). Just like you put your marketing plan and go-to-market strategy together for your business, we have done the same for our business. Our goal is arm you with the insights, technology, and confidence you need to deepen your customer relationships and spark improved marketing performance.

The LeadsRx platform provides impartial performance comparisons of all marketing channels, both online and offline, so you can clearly see what is working and, more importantly, what is not. Marketing teams that use LeadsRx improve conversion rates, reduce customer-acquisition costs, and decrease time to convert, thus improving ROAS and the bottom line.

By examining impartial and transparent attribution data, you can adjust and adapt your mix of marketing activities knowing you have a complete, unified view of your customers’ buying journeys. This way your marketing plan can adapt and always be on point.