Is Your Marketing Mix Right?
Great ingredients with the wrong mix makes bad cakes. Good ingredients with the right mix can make great cakes.
What is the marketing mix? To me it’s the marketing plan cut by:
- Business goals (revenue, deals, share, satisfaction, etc.)
- 4P goals (awareness, leads, sales tools, in-bound product/partner input)
- Market segments (horizontal and industry) and titles
- Geographies
- Channel (direct, indirect, joint)
- Offering (solution, application, platform)
- Function (AR, PR, website, events, direct, emarketing, social, collateral, etc.)
- Medium and media
- Organizational (marketing, sales, engineering, finance, etc.)
As an example, if we are selling cloud computing middleware into financial services our marketing plan might be:
- 5M in new revenue from 10 deals with 2 competitive displacements and 10 public reference accounts
- 50 articles, 1,000 prospects à 100 qualified leads, value roadmaps and ROI calculator for use cases, product roadmaps for retail and investment banking
- 40% NA, 30% EMEA, 30% APAC…then by country/region
- 85% direct, 15% joint with 4 BigCo partners
- 20% solution (mortgage risk analysis), 20% application (Monte Carlo analysis), 60% platform (private cloud management)
- 30% AR/PR, 30% events/speaking (1/3 custom executive, 1/3 conference, 1/3 tradeshow), 30% lead programs (1/3 syndication, 1/3 webinars, 1/3 direct)
- Partnership with Waters, CIO magazine and HPC in the Cloud media organizations
- 25% of marketing, 10% of engineering for customer advisory, 15% of sales for events, 5% of finance for SaaS pricing modeling
You get the idea.
The point is that the mix should be measurable across multiple dimensions and measured frequently. If the cake is not coming along properly, its important to make adjustments before it gets out of the kitchen and is too late.
Over focus on a few dimensions of the marketing mix tends to result in great looking cakes that are too chewy or great tasting cakes that can’t be presented. By getting the team (not just marketing) to think about plan more completely and concretely, you will improve your execution success rates.
So your mix is right if everyone understands it and executes it. It’s wrong if you can’t first agree what type of cake you’re baking and show people mock ups of what it will look like and taste like when you’re done.