Portfolio planning for the new age of brand marketing

Portfolio Planning for the New Age of Brand Marketing 1

Portfolio planning for the new age of brand marketing–

Gone are the days of “do as they do” in the world of brand marketing. Today companies do not just want to have events or digital campaigns to meet sales goals or educate and motivate staff. They want to build long-term relationships, utilizing these different tactics to contribute to their overall goals.

It’s time to go back to the drawing board and rethink how you’re executing tactics to reach your company’s marketing, sales, and brand goals.

This whitepaper addresses these external programs and explain how proper portfolio planning can help accelerate your pipeline, increase effectiveness & efficiency, improve ROI, drive accountability and achieve your business objectives.

Ian McGonnigalSVP, Client Strategy and Brand Performance

Enter portfolio planning

a strategic approach that allows companies to make informed decisions on the right number, type, frequency, and cadence of tactics needed to generate an optimal experiential marketing mix. In essence, “brand experience media planning”.


People do business with people they know, like, and trust

Good relationships are built upon mutual attraction, common or complementary goals and a mutually beneficial exchange of value. People do business with people they know, like, and trust.

Building them takes time, and building an optimal relationship-building platform is the Holy Grail. As a result, companies invest millions in building different marketing and sales touch points to move audiences from awareness to consideration, preference, and conversion.

Additionally, they invest in developing sales and marketing activities to build loyalty and advocacy with their customers.


It’s all about relationships

Too often portfolios of live, digital, social, and mobile marketing programs are organic creations. Million dollar investments are made for all the wrong reasons: ‘everyone else is doing it’, ‘our competition is present’, ‘we must support the industry’ or ‘we’ve always done it in the past.’ Copycats. Boring!

Touch points outside of traditional media plans are powerful opportunities to touch a brand’s audiences and participate in meaningful dialogue, but too often the objectives of participation are unclear, experiences are not designed with objectives in mind, and the opportunity is missed.

Each investment should be met with scrutiny and aligned to brand, business, marketing, and sales objectives to ensure investments are made in the right places and the brand reaches its intended audiences with a series of viable and valuable experiences.

Choose the right approach

Strategic vs. organic

Tactics are strategic assets and should be treated as such

70% of agency respondents believe the number one catalyst in driving client value is viewing tactics more strategically

55% allocating more budget

54% providing more planning time

53% becoming better informed on the strategic value of events

53% evaluation and measurement of tactics ¹


Driving success


Marketing investments are often made using budget levels as the primary factor, influenced by emotion. These decisions lack performance intelligence and data support, and can contribute to a weak platform for driving long-term business success without mitigating any risk.

Marketers are already seeing budgets for live tactics migrate toward more immediately measurable activities, like email and web—not because live is any less effective, but because their performance simply hasn’t been validated through measurement.

19% of agency respondents believe a portion of their tradeshow budget may be reallocated to other marketing activities

Only 37% of marketers are able to measure the ROI for their social media activities ²

93% of consumers feel events are more effective than TV commercials at allowing them to better understand products and services

Marketers are already seeing budgets for live tactics migrate toward more immediately measureable activities

19%

37%

93%

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principles of portfolio planning

Addressing the target – Does each tactic allow you to interact with a viable number of participants who meet your criteria?

Accomplishing objectives – Each tactic should play a fundamental role; from awareness and familiarity, to consideration and preference, conversion, and ultimately loyalty and advocacy.

Evaluating filters – Location and timing of activities are viable filters by which to evaluate its contribution to the program. This includes both geographic and digital parameters.

Tactic consideration – Portfolio planning enables you to evaluate and act against any tactic. Tactics can be added or removed and changes can be made to optimize their role in the marketing mix.

Measurement – Data is used as the primary basis for which portfolio planning decisions are made. Data trumps emotion and gut instincts. Always.

Content consideration – Sharing your content mix the right way, at the right time, has an impact on its effectiveness. Is the entire story repeated? Or, are there chapters of the story revealed at different touch points?


Portfolio planning...is a way to is not

• Accelerate your pipeline

• Achieve brand, business, marketing, and sales objectives

• Increase marketing effectiveness & efficiency

• Improve ROI

• Drive accountability

• A comprehensive strategy, but merely a channel exploration. It helps determine where you will address your audiences, tell your story and express your content.

• An audience generation program. It does not determine target audiences or create promotions to attract them.

• A brand experience—but the right platform sets the stage to build share of voice and accomplish your objectives.

• A measurement platform. Although a strong metrics and measurement system is required for portfolio planning.


So, what can it do for your business

Beyond optimizing your marketing spend, portfolio planning can...

• Provide a structured process to assess and prioritize tactics, turning a typically qualitative evaluation into a more quantitative assessment.

• Allow for a thorough exploration of activities currently in the portfolio, as well as potential new ones for consideration.

• Create a set of criteria and metrics to evaluate existing and new tactics.

• Build a prioritized set of activities, including those to remove, adjust, and add.

• Standardize sets of objectives, mapping to brand, business, marketing and sales objectives.

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Who is our single most important target?

What would happen if the company did not participate in any tactics?

What is the best way to reach our audience?

What would the tactic’s objective be?

What would the experience be?

If the company only had X amount of funding, what would be the best investment?

If the company participated in just one tactic, what would it be and why?

What level of investment would it require?

While many larger companies have built large multi-faceted portfolios over time, unraveling the complexity of legacy programs can often seem daunting. In many cases, the desired results are never achieved because there are too many ‘immovables” in the portfolio. For some companies, adopting a “Zero-based” planning approach can provide a fresh, unique perspective from which to launch an analysis or validate an approach.

Zero-based planning assumes one is building a portfolio plan from scratch, with no legacy tactics to consider. To initiate a Zero-based portfolio planning exercise, consider asking the following line of questions.

This approach allows you to start from nothing and build a portfolio based on minimal need. It’s an excellent tool for driving prioritization of “must-have” tactics against “nice-to-have” activities.

Sounds good? Then let’s get started!

based planning

Zero


AlignEvaluateConsiderCreate

A simple process

There are several versions of portfolio planning a.k.a. “Brand Experience Media Planning” in the marketplace. These range from one-off consulting projects to more comprehensive, multi-year commitments. The most effective programs are simple, understandable, and scalable based on needs of any business.

As a starting point, a simple four-step process can provide tremendous insight into legacy programs as well as provide a platform for starting from scratch.



Step one

Complete this exercise by using each audience’s experience journey as a filter. For each target audience consider which tactic addresses each stage in the pipeline—awareness, consideration, preference, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy. Multiple tactics at each stage will help ensure coverage against greater target audience populations.

This includes:

• Aligning tactics to objectives

• Reviewing of audience coverage

• Investigating key industry plays

• Plotting geographic coverage

• Understanding digital coverage

• Exploring timing of activities

• Developing high-level content plans



Step two

Evaluate performance. It’s important to understand the contribution each tactic has made (or will make) to the marketing mix. Use this data to prioritize the potential of each tactic.

This includes:

• Reviewing performance against Measureable Objectives (MOs)

• Recording Success Metrics (KPIs) were you successful or not?

• Evaluating Diagnostic Metrics— why or why not?



Step three

Portfolio planning is not just for filling gaps. At this stage, evaluate both paid and owned media opportunities, and compare these to legacy tactics to decide the best tool for the job. If a new tactic has a better chance of achieving measureable objectives on any existing tactic in the portfolio, consider replacing the legacy tactic, or at the very least, augmenting the tactic.

This includes:

• New (paid) tactics

• Proprietary (owned) tactics

• Co-branded tactics



Step four

Create a tactic plan. Leverage research, information, and data to develop the initial portfolio.

This includes:

• Consolidating based on set parameters

• Removing underperformers and those with no ability of improving

• Bolstering high performers by investing more in areas of success and leveraging these best practices across the program

• Changing participation in tactics that have the opportunity to perform at expected levels with a shift in investment or experience

Happy planning!

A long-term approach is recommended to take advantage of the full benefits of portfolio planning. Collaboration is key!

Integrate portfolio planning into annual strategic planning with internal stakeholders, and continue to monitor progress throughout the year. Building rigor into the process will help ensure the enterprise recognizes both continuous improvement and long-term business value.

Creating appropriate tools to gauge data points from audience to timing, investment levels to content and beyond will support these efforts.


Making it real


Talk to us—

Contact Melinda LindlandSVP, New Business and Group Account [email protected]

Read our blog at blog.jackmorton.com

Follow us on twitter @jackmorton

Visit us online at jackmorton.com

¹ 2014 EMI/Mosaic EventTrack Study

² Social Media Marketing Industry Report, 2014 by Social Media Examiner.

About Jack Morton

We’re a global brand experience agency. We generate breakthrough ideas, connecting brands and people through experiences that transform business. Our portfolio of award-winning work spans 75 years across event marketing, sponsorship marketing, promotion and activation, experience strategy, employee engagement, digital, social, and mobile. Ranked at the top of our field, Jack Morton is part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, Inc. (NYSE: IPG).

More information is available at: www.jackmorton.com or @jackmorton

© Jack Morton Worldwide 2014

Portfolio planning for the new age of brand marketing

Marketing

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