I wanted to launch our website 6 months ago, but it's still sitting unpublished...
We were on a roll with social media, but now our feed has dried up. It’s tough to keep up with.
Our sales team still needs deliverables to reach our target audiences.
I see my competition saying and doing the things I wish we were saying and doing...
Getting your marketing affairs back in order all starts with being intentional. It isn't just a buzzword—being intentional can mean all the difference for your business. It's the difference between having a year's worth of marketing material that builds consistently and cohesively toward meeting your business goals, versus a couple of flyers and a few social media posts that lack direction and fizzle out after a few months.
But what does being intentional with your marketing look like in practice? Cue the roadmap.
A marketing roadmap is a detailed plan of your business goals for the next 6-12 months and how you plan to achieve those goals through your marketing initiatives. Use the guide below as a starting point to create your roadmap:
Take time to reflect on how the last 6-12 months went for your business. What worked and how can you replicate it? What didn't work and how can you avoid those same mistakes going forward? Identify successes, failures, and opportunities for improvement.
You need to know what your destination is to know how to get there! Get clear on your business goals for the coming months, year, and 2-3 year timeframe. What specific marketing levers will be most impactful to get you there? (Resist the urge to say you will do it all in 3 months.) How will you measure success?
We all fall victim to letting our own preferences drive decision-making. Take time to get clear on your core audience before you start creating marketing materials. If you don't know who you're marketing to, any marketing initiative you launch won't be as effective as it could be.
As you build your roadmap, connect your strategies and tactics to the specific POV of your target audience(s).
Make a list of all the upcoming meetings you have that will need branded collateral, tradeshow graphics, and other materials to support your investment in those activities. The time to promote that event on social media, by the way, is not the week or day of. Get the word out at least a month in advance.
This is a common step I see people skip, particularly in medtech marketing. Because our customers are often highly educated clinical or industry experts, it can be tempting to assume the problem you can solve is top of mind. But if you don’t recreate (or address) the key pain points, you are missing out on a chance to engage your audience, establish empathy, and build an emotional connection with your audience. Remind your audience why the problem is real. This may mean creating disease awareness tools such as landing pages, white papers, and social media posts leveraging research or data to support.
Marketing isn’t free, whether you keep it in-house or outsource it. Spend time outlining the resources it will take to accomplish the work. Who will drive and monitor the plan? Who will execute the plan? What funds need to be allocated? What needs to be done internally and what can you afford to outsource?
Planning a trip without setting departure dates means you will never get there. The same goes for setting goals. To reach your goals you need to set deadlines for them on a calendar or in a project management tool, with a responsible party designated for each one. Schedule regular touchpoints either in your own calendar or with your team to monitor your progress.
If I had to choose one failure point in most marketing projects, it is the lack of a clear decision-maker in finalizing and approving deliverables. Consider using the RACI model to balance the need for diverse perspectives with the need to make decisions. Remember that marketing is an art and science. There can be more than one right answer.
Once you have your roadmap completed and you begin creating marketing deliverables, check your material against your roadmap to make sure it aligns with your intentions. If it doesn't help you achieve your end goal, then tweak it until it does, or meet with key stakeholders to determine if the company’s goals have shifted.
It’s not easy, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. While the goal is to plan for 6-12 months at a time, it's never too late to get started. If you have a key meeting or conference coming up next month, hunker down and apply this methodology to that one event and once you're through it, start on your long-term roadmap.
A marketing roadmap, along with branding, messaging, and design, are foundational aspects of your business. If you're a newly funded MedTech company ready to capture the attention of your ideal customers with your marketing, we'd love to connect with you. Book a 15-minute introductory call!
__
At Alluvia Studio, we partner with medtech executives and companies to produce compelling marketing strategies, stories, and visuals that clearly define the immense value of their patient care innovations. Our experience and knowledge in healthcare and medtech allow us to deliver critical and timely marketing solutions that free our clients up to relentlessly pursue their goals.
Copyright
2023 Alluvia Studio
