A B2B marketing plan is a detailed roadmap of your marketing tactics, costs, and projected results over a defined period, built against your business goals, product roadmap, budget, and KPIs.
On this page you’ll find what a good plan contains, how we measure it, and how we think about budget.
For what a full SAGE engagement covers day to day, see our Scope of Work.
A good marketing plan includes:
- Detailed goals by product, distribution channel and customer segment
- Sales enablement plan and tools
- Positioning tactics
- Major marketing campaigns
- Detailed budget and timeline
The plan should clearly state the criteria for success by time period
(3 months, 6 months, 1 year).
The KPIs are divided into categories:
Quantitative KPIs (mainly when lead generation is the primary marketing objective) can be the number of leads, number of MQLs (marketing qualified leads), number of SQLs (sales qualified leads), and various breakdowns of such by product or channel.
Today we also track a newer set of signals: AI-referral traffic, how often your company appears in AI answers for category questions, and above all pipeline contribution, because qualified opportunities tell you more about marketing’s impact than raw lead counts ever will.
Qualitative KPIs (mainly when brand awareness is the primary marketing objective) measure quality. For example, which media publications mentioned the organization, website traffic (direct and referral) versus paid traffic (sponsored, awards and recognition), etc.
KPIs and goals can also be strategic, and it helps to simplify growth targets into visitor volume, quality, and value. For example, expansion into a new market with a new distribution channel or repositioning of the brand to reflect a change in the market or in a company.
The marketing plan we create contains:
- The structure for an effective campaign to generate leads, nurture prospects, market to existing customers, and empower sales.
- A complete range of integrated marketing activities across multiple channels including email marketing, social media, print, events & trade shows, content, PR, and more.
- Budget – founders ask us about the budget in every first meeting:
The honest answer is that the right number depends on your stage. We plan across three buckets: people and retained services, media and out-of-pocket campaign costs, and tools. Before product-market fit, we weight the mix toward positioning and discovery, where mistakes are cheapest to fix. After it, the weight shifts to demand generation and events. And we always keep a slice experimental, because the tactic that wins next year rarely appears in last year’s plan.