Context for the Template

This section describes how I generally think about a marketing model. Feel free to skip this section if you’d like to plunge directly into the marketing plan template. In this model, there are five elements. They  are:

• Make the Market: Understand the pains, needs, and future needs of your ideal customer and the people within that customer. 
• Own the Narrative: Build a story based on these present and future needs that paint you and your customer as the heroes. 
• Net More Clients: Create a funnel process that uses urgency to propel prospects to become customers. 
• Expand Your Customers: Develop customers into raving enthusiasts that want to help others get the value they’re experiencing. 
• Your Team: Support your people with clear goals, effective work, and a radical focus on their development. 

Let’s talk through each of these elements in a bit more detail.

The MONEY Marketing Framework

Make the Market

Everything starts with your customer. A deep, thorough knowing of their needs and pains. An understanding not just of today’s problems. You need to know where the market is heading and what customers’ future needs and pains are likely to be – or can be made to be. 

You must identify the attributes of businesses that most feel the pain or need. Or, are likely to feel these challenges. You need to then go deeper within your target businesses to understand the roles and titles of people within these businesses that will champion and buy your offer. Understanding your buyers is the foundation on which the rest of your strategy is built. 

You will also need to understand the context of your market. That includes evaluating competitive offers that are direct or adjacent alternatives. Competitors could be other businesses, internal options, or, most deadly, inertia. 

The context of your market includes other attributes like government or industry regulation. It could include macro-shifts like population or demographic changes, legal shifts, and technological leaps. All of these elements will adjust how you market. 

Ultimately, these macro-shifts are a powerful force for you. Connecting your strategy to a major movement gives you a force-multiplier. Buyers are more likely to be compelled by large market forces or trends. You also have to do less to motivate buyers to change. And, as we’ll see in the next section, it helps you weave a compelling narrative.

As we’ll discuss in more detail in other posts, when you are working through this section, you’ll be establishing the bedrock of your strategy. You will have in place the offer you want to make to the market, the ideal customer and who is your buyer, and the context in which you operate.

Own the Narrative 

Once you have established the foundation of your marketing plan in the Make the Market section, you’ll move on to owning the narrative. We’re social creatures, us humans. We want to tell and hear stories. They excite and engage us. And they connect us all to something bigger. 

You’ve likely seen other companies successfully own the narrative by transcending the tired, rational, feature / benefit paradigm. Features and benefits are useful in the right context. But they are rarely going to motivate people to stand up for your offer when budgets are getting cut. 

Some narratives are about the offer itself. Like Apple’s ‘it just works’ narrative. The idea that user manuals should be largely unnecessary is woven into every product. A story could be about a company’s founding or founders, the way you often hear companies like Drift leveraging the past success and continuing vision of David Cancel. 

A story could be about the macro-trends mentioned in the prior section. Linking a company to a macro-trend allows you to take advantage of press and other influencers’ work in promoting a challenge or opportunity. Like, say, the rise of artificial intelligence. You then link your solution as the on-ramp to that opportunity, as we’ll see.

Choosing a niche story that is of interest to a small number of people can be effective, particularly if your product itself is niche. But often picking a broader story and bending it to suit your niche is more effective. 

Coming up with your narrative is only the first part of the process. You’ll then want to know how to communicate that narrative back to the ideal customer that you’ve already identified. You’ll want to bake that narrative into every communication, consistently and frequently. So, buyers will come to associate your brand with the trend. 

Net More Clients

You might be thinking to yourself, ‘when are we going to talk about lead generation?’. That’s the core of marketing, isn’t it? Well, traditional approaches do tend to concentrate heavily on lead or demand generation. And there’s a good reason for that – it’s where sales come from. But without the prior steps in your strategy, you will be blocked from building a sustainable model for netting more clients. You’re likely going to be locked into desperate tactics like buying leads or gimmicky approaches.

Luckily, by following the Money framework you have the basis for a more effective lead generation. Why? Consider outbound approaches for a minute. What’s a more effective way to spend the time of your sales and sales development people: randomly choosing distributors to pursue based on account lists or ill-defined ideas about chasing hot accounts? Or, prioritizing distributors that have the attributes you’ve defined as being the right kinds of customers? Of course, when you complete the first step of making the market, you get a radical focus for your teams.

Similarly, when you work on owning the narrative out of the gate, you set yourself up for more effective outbound. You know yourself that you’re much less likely to take a prospecting call from an unknown company. But one that is respected and known by you? Yes, you’re much more open to taking that call.

That applies to inbound too. But wait. Isn’t inbound just about producing content and waiting for people to arrive? Yes and no. When you complete the Make the Market stage first, you understand the pains and needs of your prospective customers and the people within. That lets you build targeted content that is valuable to your audience. 

And, as you probably guessed, owning the narrative helps you for inbound as well. A well-crafted narrative allows you to produce content and get into channels that your prospects care about. That means more prospective distributors or buyers are likely to inbound to you.

This section of the marketing plan is more than inbound and outbound to generate prospects. It’s also about reducing frictions in the buyer’s journey. After all, it’s not enough for marketing to generate leads and then throw them over the wall to sales. A great marketing plan is built on netting more customers, so marketing has to be a strong partner for sales.

That partnership comes through many deliverables. High quality, well-qualified leads that don’t waste sales’ time are important. That might come from effective qualification by marketing engines, sales development, or even trialing or usage of your product. 

The partnership can be further strengthened through resources and tools that help, or enable, sales teams to be more effective. From smart pricing to competitive tear-sheets, to compelling presentations. 

Expand Your Customers

Once you’ve landed new clients, are you done? Of course not! Existing customers are too valuable of an asset to be underused. Marketing is, at its core, about increasing the value of your business. That value comes from increasing ownership of the market in terms of visibility, impact, and revenue. 

When you consider ownership of the market, start with the obvious metric of revenue-based market share. That is, how much of the total addressable market do you serve on an annual basis. There is a certain safety that buyers gain from going with the dominant player in the market. You don’t get fired for buying IBM, as they used to say, back when IBM was a market leader. 

Your customers are also a recurring source of revenue through repeat purchases, subscriptions, upsells, and expansions. These add up but they don’t do so magically. They require an offer that fulfills a key need that you effectively communicate to your customers. 

Marketing plays a vital role in this process. Creating great offers and products that existing customers need and see value in. Communicating the offers to your prospects and ensuring that they know that they are with a winner. 

Beyond revenue there is an additional value that comes to you from your customers: visibility and awareness. Highlighting your ownership of the market through customer testimonials and other approaches give your prospects comfort via social proof of your value. 

Consider how much prominence is gained from leveraging customer logos, evangelism, and more. Prospects see the social validation that comes from your existing customers and fear missing out on being themselves a leader.

Your Team

How does all of this thinking, planning, and executing get done? It’s not going to be you on your own – at least not in the long term. It’s you and your team. I’m sure you’ve heard the management mantra of ‘hire smart people and then get out of their way’. That’s well-intentioned, but wrong-headed. You need to hire smart people and support them in critical ways.

Hiring is one of the most important decisions you can make. Great hires can have a massive impact on your business’ effectiveness. And poor hires will distract you, drain you and your team, and ultimately need to be corrected. Choose your new hires very wisely.

When hiring, as we’ll explore in more detail, you need clear job descriptions and clear expectations. You need a strong hiring process that looks beyond high profile schools and the shiny names of previous employers. You need to look past how well people interview to look for intangibles about their ability to operate in complex, shifting environments. 

Now that you’ve hired a great team, just get out of their way, right? Not so fast. Your primary function as a team leader is to provide the mission, goals, work expectations, processes, and resources that enable your team to be effective. 

This is a constant effort. You should be constantly engaged in helping your team to be more effective. This isn’t micro-managing your colleagues. This is creating an environment where they themselves can make smart decisions quickly. You need to hire smart people and then get the complexities out of their way.

The Marketing Plan Template

The plan template is structured as a series of questions. By answering each question, you can build out a prioritized set of programs and initiatives that are your marketing plan. To do that, we’ll walk through each step in the MONEY framework.

Make the Market by Understanding the Customer

To start the plan, it’s vital to understand who your customer is. Often there are multiple levels of customers, and they may have differing needs. 

Brand Level

What is your brand experience?

Question	Response
Think of no more than three words that describe the feeling your end customer should think of when seeing your brand?
What should the end customer expect from a product when they see it is from your brand?
What should the buyer of your product expect when they see it is from your brand?
If there is a distributor or reseller, what should they expect of a product when they see your brand?

What is your brand engagement?

Question	Response
What element of your brand would an end-consumer, buyer, or reseller recognize?
Would an end-consumer, buyer, or reseller select your product because of your brand?

What is your brand competition?

Question	Response
What are your primary brand competitors?
Why are your brand experiences different from an experience with an alternative brand?

Product Level

Who is the end customer?

Question	Response
Describe the person that ultimately uses / consumes your product? This is the end consumer.
Who actually pays for the products just prior to the end consumer obtaining it?

Is there an intermediary between you and the end customer?

Question	Response
Is there a distributor, reseller, or chain of resellers between you and the end consumer?
Is there a third-party that may add value by repackaging or bundling your product?
Is there a third-party that may add value through a service that uses your product?
Why would these intermediaries choose your product and brand over others?

What is the pain or need of the end customer?

Question	Response
What does the end customer want to do / solve with the product?
Why is the current way of doing things less effective at achieving that?
How do you want the end customer to feel after they’ve used your product?
If the buyer and end customer are different, how should the buyer feel about the end customer after they’ve used the product?
What “big picture” trend is this product related to?

How does the end customer use the product?

Question	Response
How does the end customer use the product?
Does the end consumer use the product independently or as part of a group?
If so, can the group reinforce use of the product as a group?
If the end customer uses the product as part of a group, what does the customer want the group to think about the user?
If the end customer uses the product to create something that is publicly viewable, what does the end customer want others to think about themselves?

Owning the Narrative via a Compelling Story

People fall in love with and convince others to buy brands and products that they have a connection to. The most effective way for people to connect with a brand or product is through a narrative. Use this section to consider your brand and product stories. 

Brand Level

What is your brand story?

Question	Response
What was your market like before your brand came along?
How should an end customer feel when they see your brand?
What is a quick anecdote about an end customer using one of your products?
If you met someone at a cocktail party, how would you describe your brand?
Which celebrity or fictional character best fits your brand?
Every product that our brand offers makes our customers feel…

Is there a brand mythos?

Question	Response
Do you want to position your founders as being uniquely capable of understanding the needs of the end customer?
If so, how do they do that?
If so, what are the attributes of the founder that you want to convey?
If so, why is their vision uniquely able to deliver on the brand promise?

Product Level

What is your brand story?

Question	Response
How would an end customer describe the value they get from the product?
How would an end customer describe the product to a peer?
If a buyer met a peer and the peer saw the end customer using the product, how would the buyer describe the product?
If a buyer met a peer and the peer saw the end customer using the product, how would the buyer justify the purchase of the product?

How does your brand story connect to a trend?

Question	Response
What is the market trend story that your product connects to?
How would an end customer describe the product to a peer?
If a buyer met a peer and the peer saw the end customer using the product, how would the buyer describe the product?
If a buyer met a peer and the peer saw the end customer using the product, how would the buyer justify the purchase of the product?

Net More Clients by Attracting the Right Customers

Now that you have thought through the ideal customer and their needs, as well as what stories you want them to tell, it’s time to land more of the right customers. Let’s talk through the process of landing additional customers. 

Here it is important to recognize that there may be many levels of customers for your business. Some consumer products might have a single buyer. While others may have multiple buyers because of a split between who distributes, buys, and uses the product.

Distributor, Reseller, or Retailer Level

Why would a third-party choose your brand or product?

Question	Response
How would you describe what a third-party is looking for when adding a new product?
Why would a third-party consider adding another brand or product?
What gets in the way of a third-party adding another brand or product?

Consider the Marketing “P’s”. Why would a third-party prefer your brand or product?

Question	Response
How does your pricing compare with alternatives?
How does your packaging compare with alternatives?
What kinds of promotional tools can you offer to the third-party? Content, samples, etc.
How does working with your company differ from working with alternatives?
What are the placement considerations for the brand or product within the store or ecommerce store?

What channels does a third-party look at when selecting new products?

Question	Response
Where do third-parties physically go to find new brands or products?
If there was only one search term that a third-party could enter into Google, what would it be?
Which influencers matter for a third-party to select a product? Is your founder an influencer?
What media outlets matter for distributors to select new products? Which are realistically attainable for placements?

Buyer Level

Why would a buyer choose your brand or product?

Question	Response
Why would a buyer choose your product over an alternative for their end customer?
What is a buyer searching for when they are considering their options for their end customer?
Does the end customer need to convince the buyer to purchase the product? How?
Where is the buyer likely to discover the product?

Consider the Marketing “P’s”. Why would a third-party prefer your brand or product?

Question	Response
How does your pricing compare with alternatives in the eyes of a buyer?
How does your packaging compare with alternatives in the eyes of a buyer?
What kinds of promotional tools can you offer to the buyer? Content, samples, etc.

What channels does a buyer look at when selecting new products?

Question	Response
Where do third-parties physically go to find new brands or products?
If there was only one search term that a third-party could enter into Google, what would it be?
Which influencers matter for a third-party to select a product? Is your founder an influencer?
What media outlets matter for distributors to select new products? Which are realistically attainable for placements?

End Customer Level

Why would an end customer choose your brand or product?

Question	Response
Why would an end customer choose your product over an alternative?
What is an end customer considering as options?
Where is the end customer likely to discover the product?

Consider the Marketing “P’s”. Why would a third-party prefer your brand or product?

Question	Response
How does your pricing compare with alternatives in the eyes of a buyer?
How does your packaging compare with alternatives in the eyes of a buyer?
What kinds of promotional tools can you offer to the buyer? Content, samples, etc.

What channels does a buyer look at when selecting new products?

Question	Response
Where do third-parties physically go to find new brands or products?
If there was only one search term that a third-party could enter into Google, what would it be?
Which influencers matter for a third-party to select a product? Is your founder an influencer?
What media outlets matter for distributors to select new products? Which are realistically attainable for placements?
How can you build a community of user-generated content that supports the product or brand?

Expand Your Customers via Upsell and Retention

A classic marketing trope is that it’s easier to sell to an existing customer than to a new one. That’s true in more ways than one. If the customer feels an attachment to a brand or product due to the quality and utility, or intangibles like what it says about the owner, there is a greater likelihood that the user will continue to purchase products or subscriptions, and will be a promoter of the product to peers and others. 

How can existing customers act as evangelists for new customers?

Question	Response
How would an end-customer describe the brand or product to a peer? How would a buyer?
Is there a network effect that comes from more end-customers using the product or brand?
If there is a network effect, how do you enable that effect to increase?
Is there a way for the end-customer to share usage of the product?
Is there a community opportunity for your product or brand that encourages participation by end customers and buyers?

How can existing customers be upsold or cross-sold additional brand or products?

Question	Response
How can the buyer and end-customer be made aware of additional related products or brands?
Are there natural extensions to the brand or product?
If the product has extensions or related products, is there a ‘completeness’ advantage for the end customer to have a total set of the product?
How do you communicate with existing customers about new or extended offers?
Why would a customer want to be in a communication loop with you?
What communication channels can you use?
Are there ways to incorporate community sourced usage into your communications?

Are there recurring revenue options?

Question	Response
Are there subscription options for your product for additional products?
Are there value-adds that supplement the product that can be subscribed to?

Build Your Team to be Effectively Independent 

An effective marketing team is built on a few key ingredients. It must have clear goals and metrics that are tightly aligned with corporate and revenue goals. There must be clarity on how to achieve those goals so that the team can improvise as needed. There needs to be a clear job description and path for growth within that role. And it must be fun and open to creativity. 

What is the goal of marketing?

Question	Response
Can you define the primary aims of marketing in your organization? E.g. increase the valuation of the company by X.
What measurements that marketing can directly influence stem from these aims?
How does the marketing plan connect to the business plan?
Are there financial incentives for hitting these goals?

What is the career plan for the marketing team?

Question	Response
Does each marketing team member know what their role is? Is there a job description?
Does each marketing team member know how they can stretch to support their colleagues in marketing?
Is there a clear career path for the marketing team members?

What is the career plan for the marketing team?

Question	Response
Does each marketing team member know what their role is? Is there a job description?
Does each marketing team member know how they can stretch to support their colleagues in marketing?
Is there a clear career path for the marketing team members?