How To Document the Entire Marketing Process In 6 Simple Steps

Documenting your marketing process gives you the steps you need to complete every project you take on. It's a vital part of executing any strategy. Perhaps you’re looking to revamp an outdated workflow or maybe you're looking to make your team more efficient and collaborate better. This post will walk you through how to build a marketing process from start to finish. Once your process is developed, it will help you maximize your time and get things done as efficiently as possible.

Download Your Marketing Process Template

Marketers who document their process are 538% more successful. Be like them. Document your own process with this easy-to-use template.

What is a Marketing Process?

A marketing process is:

“A series of steps that allow organizations to identify customer problems, analyze market opportunities, and create marketing materials to reach the desired audience.”

Step One: What Does Your Company Do?

The first step in creating your marketing process is to highlight the mission statement of your company. All of your marketing efforts will revolve around fulfilling that statement for your customers. Take a look at some of the mission statements of these brands:

• Starbucks: To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.
• Discovery Benefits: Discovery Benefits is transforming the complexity of employee benefits administration with innovative solutions and extraordinary customer service delivered by empowered and knowledgeable employees.
• CoSchedule: A family of Agile marketing products that will help you stay focused, deliver projects on time, and make your team happy.
• Patagonia: Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.
• Tesla: To accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy.

Each one of these companies creates materials, campaigns, and more to help foster those mission statements. Take CoSchedule for example. Every feature we build helps marketing teams get organized and save time. All of your marketing efforts should relate back to fulfilling this mission or the goals that have been set. Define the goal behind your marketing process. Follow this template to get started:

{My company} exists to {provide benefit} through {product or service}.

Step Two: Conduct a SWOT, 5C’s or PEST Analysis

The next step in creating your marketing process is running an analysis for your marketers. You have three options to choose from:

• A SWOT analysis. These analyses run through the internal and external strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that your organization faces.
• The 5C’s analysis. The 5C’s analyses focus on the company, collaborators, customers, competitors, and climate of your marketing.
• A PEST Analysis. The PEST analysis focuses on more environmental factors like politics, the environment, social climate, and technology.

Conducting a SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis a relatively straightforward process. As a team, you will need to identify the internal strengths and weaknesses of your organization. To find your strengths answer questions like:

• What does our organization do well?
• What processes do we have in place that help us stay efficient?
• What do we currently do that is a unique strength of our organization?

To find your weaknesses answer questions like:

• What could we improve in our organization?
• What is causing a constant roadblock to our progress?
• What are we currently doing in our marketing process that could use improvement?

Each of these questions should address the internal factors that are helping or hindering the success of your marketing. The second part of the SWOT analysis is going to focus on the opportunities and threats that affect your marketing outside of your organization. To analyze the opportunities outside your organization answer the following:

• What are we currently doing in our marketing that is fulfilling our mission statement or goals that have been set for our team?
• What is going on in the current market that we can use as an opportunity?
• What is changing in our industry that we could take advantage of right now?

Once you’ve found opportunities to expand your marketing, analysis the threats that may impede your success. Answer the following questions:

• What are our competitors doing better than us?
• Are there changes in our industry that could threaten our efforts?
• Is there anything going on politically, economically, or socially that could hinder our marketing efforts?

If running a SWOT analysis is something your marketing team wants, use the analysis template that you downloaded earlier in your marketing process strategy bundle.

How To Run A 5C’s Analysis

Another analysis that your marketing team can choose to run is a 5C’s analysis that focuses on your:

• Company.
• Collaborators.
• Competitors.
• Climate.
• Customers.

For this analysis, answer the following questions and record them in the 5C analysis template. Company Question Examples:

• What marketing strategies are we employing that are making a positive impact?
• What strategies are we using that aren’t making an impact on our audience?
• What roadblocks are continually recurring that hinder our marketing process?

Collaborator Question Examples:

• Who are we working with that is having a positive impact on our marketing efforts?
• Who is up and coming in our industry that we could partner with?
• What relationships aren’t having the same effect that they used to?

Competitors Question Examples:

• Who are our most significant competitors?
• What are they doing that we currently aren’t?
• What tactics seems to resonant with their audience?

Climate Question Examples:

• Is there anything happening in our industry that would affect our marketing tactics?
• Are their new best practices in our industry?
• Is our industry growing or shrinking?

Customer Question Examples:

• What tactics are resonating with our audience?
• What have they come to expect from us?
• Is there anything we can be doing to increase the loyalty to our brand?

Fill in your analysis in the marketing process template.

Running a PEST Analysis

No, this isn’t about potential bugs in the office. A PEST analysis involves looking at the political, economic, social, and technological factors that may affect your organization. To run a PEST analysis, record answers to the following questions. Political Climate Questions:

• Are there any upcoming elections that could affect the way our product is used or made?
• Could any upcoming legislation affect the way our organization conducts its business?
• If there is an upcoming legislation change that affects your organization, how quickly will that take effect?

Economic Climate Questions:

• What is the current outlook for the economy?
• If you do business with foreign countries, what does the current exchange rate look like?
• How much are our target audience members spending on products or services we sell?

Social Climate Questions:

• Are there any social movements that our company should be addressing?
• How does the upcoming generation of buyers feel about our product?
• Is there any social faux-pas arising that could affect how people view our business?

Technological Climate Questions:

• Are there any new tech tools that could help us do our jobs better?
• Are there any new tech advancements in our industry that we could bring to our customers?
• If new technology is coming to our industry, how quickly will it make an appearance?

Record your answers in the PEST analysis template you downloaded earlier.

Step Three: Creating Your Marketing Strategy

Now that you have a full analysis of your organization and your industry, you can begin to shape your marketing strategy.

Define Your Target Audience

To start creating your strategy, you need to define who your target audience is.  Your target audience is:

“The ideal customer you want to attract to your product or service through your marketing efforts.”

To start finding your target audience ask your marketers the following:

• Who is already a part of our existing audience?
• Who responds best to our efforts?
• Why do people use our product or service?
• What type of problem do they experience?

As you begin to format the answers to those questions, you’ll create a target audience statement which could look something like:

“[Target Demographic] experiences [problem] which is leading them to interact with our organization and use our services.”

Read more about how to develop your target audience and marketing persona.

Creating Marketing Goals

The next step in formatting your marketing strategy is to develop a series of marketing goals that connect back to the business goals that were mentioned earlier. Your marketing goals should be S.M.A.R.T. This means they should be:

• Specific. You should know exactly what you'd like to accomplish.
• Measureable. If you can't measure it, it's not useful.
• Attainable. Stretch yourself, but avoid setting yourself up for failure.
• Relevant. Your marketing goals should be connected to clear business outcomes.
• Time-based. Give yourself a deadline by which you'll achieve your goal.

For example, if we were to go back to the overarching goal for the mattress company which was to sell mattress your marketing goals would want to help contribute to that goal. A possible marketing goal for this example would be:

“Increase the website referral traffic coming from social media channels by 25% in the next quarter.”

You can set as many goals as you need to complete each marketing project. Learn how to set your goals. Remember, the most important thing with your marketing goals is that they are tied to wider business objectives.

Ensuring Your Marketing Goals Contribute to the Bottomline

Let's say your overarching business goal is to have 20 million in revenue by 2020. In order to increase revenue, you have to increase sales. In order to increase sales, you've got to increase leads coming into the marketing funnel. This is where you come in. You've identified that you need to bring in 1,000 leads per month. Working back from there helps you identify the one lead metric to focus on. Your website is the largest lead generator, so to increase the number of leads, you've got to increase traffic. Say you get 5,000 website visitors each month; is it possible to convert 20 percent of them? Likely not. In reality, a 2-5 percent conversion rate is more accurate. To hit your goal of 1,000 leads, you need between 20,000 and 50,000 website visitors. Now you've found the one metric to focus on. Every activity you do should focus on increasing the volume of website visitors from 5,000 to 20,000 (to hit a 5 percent conversion rate).

Set A Budget

The last step in your marketing strategy is setting a budget up. Your budget will determine what resources and strategies you use throughout the year. There are four ways you can set a budget for the year:

1. Percent of Revenue. This is where the revenue that your organization brings in determines what your budget will be.
2. Top-Down. This is where your CMO or boss decides what your marketing team will spend.
3. Competition Matching. This type of budget is based on trying to reverse engineer what your competitors are doing.
4. Goal Driven. This type of budget is based on the goals that you have set for the year. The amount you spend on each project will depend on the kind of goal you need to reach.

Learn more about creating a marketing budget, with our marketing strategy guide.

Step Four: Building Your Marketing Mix

The next step in your marketing process is going to be building your marketing mix. According to The Economic Times:

“The marketing mix refers to the set of actions, or tactics, that a company uses to promote its brand or product in the market.”

This is usually broken down into the four P’s: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place.

• Product. The product of your marketing mix is going to refer to how the thing that your company is selling is produced. It includes things like branding, packaging, quality of the product, features and more.
• Price. Price in a marketing mix refers to how much your product or service costs. It also includes things like the discounts your company may offer, and it’s perceived value.
• Promotion. Promotion is how your organization sells the product to your target audience. This includes things like advertising channels, public relations, sales and publicity efforts that sell your product.
• Place. Place refers to where your product or service is produced. This could involve distribution channels, outlet locations, how your product is transported and stored.

Check out this SlideShare on how to build a marketing mix: As you continue to develop your mix, record it in the 4P’s spreadsheet that was in your downloaded strategy kit.

Step Five: Execution

The next part of your marketing process is determining how to use it when you execute your projects. Here is how each part of your marketing execution can be used.

Target Marketing Process

Target marketing involves breaking down your target audience into smaller segments and sending those segments messages to move them further down the marketing funnel. Here are some ways you can segment your audience:

• By demographic.
• By location.
• By lifestyle or income level.
• By behavior (hobbies, interests, shopping habits, etc).

After you have your segments drawn up your marketing process should look something like this:

Content Marketing Process

Another part of your marketing process that will play into your execution strategy is your content marketing. Your content marketing process should involve four different steps which will then play into your overall content marketing process:

• Planning. What will you create?
• Publishing. How will you execute content creation?
• Promotion. How will you promote your content?
• Measurement. How will you know if your content is effective?

This will eventually fall into a workflow like this:

Product Marketing Process

How you market your product will make or break it in the eyes of your audience. After all we’re hearing thousands of messages every single day. You need to find a way to stand out. Product marketing is:

“Product marketing is about conveying the message or the benefits of a feature to its users.”

Listen to the podcast or read the blog to learn more about how we handle product marketing here at CoSchedule. Once you have an idea of what you’d like to do, format it into a flowchart like this:

Inbound Marketing Process

The inbound marketing process is the strategy that revolves around bringing awareness of your product or service to your target audience by providing them with information they may be searching for. This type of marketing doesn’t necessarily promote your product outright. Instead, you provide them with a service in hopes that when they begin to look for your product they will turn to you. Inbound marketing can revolve around a series of online content, videos, emails and so much more. Learn how the inbound marketing process works. Eventually, your inbound marketing process should look something like this:

Email Marketing Process

Email marketing is another important part of your marketing strategy and execution process. Everyone gets a ton of email sent to their inboxes every single day. So how do you ensure that your audience reads your emails? By sending it at the right time. Learn more about the best times for sending emails (it’s even backed by 10 different studies). Then see how to use your email to encourage lead conversion. Once you’re ready, a developed email marketing process should look something like this:

Marketing Automation Process

The final step in creating the execution phase of your marketing process is to set up your marketing automation. Marketing automation is an easy way to guide your audience through your marketing funnel and lead them to a point where they are ready to purchase a product automatically. This can include things like emails, popups, live chats and even ad retargeting. If you’re a little hesitant about integrating marketing automation tools into your process, read this introductory post from Hubspot. Here’s an example of what a potential marketing automation process can look like:

Step Six: Measure and Record Your Efforts

The last step in your marketing process is to measure and record the efforts of your marketing projects. This is the data that you will gather and show upper management to prove that your work is making a positive impact. Some possible metrics that you may want to track are:

• Social shares.
• Link clicks.
• Email opens.
• Conversions.
• Engagement rate.

All of this data should come together into one easy-to-read report.

Now That You Have The Information You Need, Get Your Marketing Process Started

You have all the information you need to work with your fellow marketers to create or update your marketing process. With all your steps strategically planned out, your team will be able to work faster and more efficiently than ever before. This post was most recently updated on Aug. 20, 2019.