It seems an all too frequent way of doing business, especially in the B2B world of marketing communications, that the client asks their agency to come in to discuss the latest project. And of course the agency dutifully arrives and is told of or sometimes gets given there and then the latest brief for the latest project.
A good brief will, of course, contain all the important information like who the target audience is, what we want to say to them, what we want them to do as a result and how we are going to contact them. And often it will tell us what we are allowed to spend and what results are expected. Often this information has been assembled by the client with no discussions with their agency. Of course, the client knows its markets better than the agency, and diligent ones will take seriously the need to keep the agency abreast of all the important things they need to understand to do a good job.
The problem with this approach is that it can be a result of a top down way of planning. The company has been given a marketing budget and allocated some funds to this ad campaign or that DM mailer, and has started from the point of view of knowing what they want to do and how much they have to spend before thinking about who they are contacting, and what they want to say to them. They will then call the agency in to brief them on these decisions. It is how companies work, especially in a B2B context where budgets are smaller and marketing communications is frequently more tactical than strategic.
So this is a plea for two changes to this way of planning projects. ABBA would like to offer the following two pieces of advice:
- The agency may not know the markets as well as the companies, but they will be able to bring to the table their knowledge and experience across a number of markets and sectors, which can influence the outcomes of the project.
- Planning in the right sequence increases the chances of success of any project hugely. Where companies start with a budget, a set of objectives and media selection, before they have addressed other more fundamental issues, they are condemning the project to a mediocre chance of success.
Before you get to the stage of briefing on the creative execution, you should define the business issue you are addressing and be clear about how marketing can help. For example, you might have opened a new office and need business opportunities in the area, or you might have a new product that you want to launch and need marketing to support awareness of its benefits.
You then also need to critically examine who you are targeting and why they would be interested in your product or service. If what you are offering addresses a particular need, make sure you have identified those who are most likely to have that need. If what you are offering confers a particular benefit, then likewise profile your targets to find out who would benefit most. A critical look at your database or prospect lists should also enable you to pick the prospects with the biggest potential value. It will also enable you to look at your prospects by job title or function and what role they play in the decision making unit because all of this will enable you to tailor your message to the right audience. So define your audience before you decide what to say to them.
Only then do you define what you want them to do, how many of them you need to do it and by when in other words a set of smart objectives for the project. And only when you have done this can you start to look at what media you want to choose. In other words don’t decide you are doing a mailer first and then look at your audience second: look at who you are speaking to and what you are asking of them before you choose how to get to them.
And don’t start the process with a predefined budget. You are only able to calculate how much budget you should allow for the project once you have defined what results you are aiming for. In a typical DM example, your budget for the project is a function of the value of the response/target action times the number of contacts times the expected response rate.
So, although some of this sounds a bit of a utopian idea and difficult for any B2B marketing department to achieve in the real world of company budgets, it does make sense to establish this kind of critical path to project planning to enhance its success.
Try to start with your aims, your targets, and your objectives before you choose your media or before you decide how much to spend.