Monetizing your marketing assets is an excellent way to generate additional revenue for your business. However, it is essential to ensure that your monetization strategy aligns with your overall marketing strategy. One of the key benefits of monetization is transforming your marketing division from a cost center to a profit center and drive sales in alignment with your business strategy. A well-planned monetization strategy can help you create sustainable revenue streams while building your brand and engaging your audience. Alternatively, a misaligned monetization strategy can lead to poor results and damage your brand’s reputation. For example, if your monetization efforts aren’t aligned with your marketing strategy, you may end up promoting products or services that aren’t relevant to your target audience at that time which can lead to a decrease in trust of your brand.  We will review the importance of aligning your monetization efforts with your marketing strategy and provide a framework on how this is done effectively with marketing planning software simplifying the management and reporting of this profit generating program.

Framework for building a monetization plan in alignment with your marketing strategy:

1.     Define Your Marketing Strategy & Plan

Your marketing strategy should define your goals or objectives based on the overall business strategy and focus on outlining a plan to achieve it through your target audience, value proposition, messaging, campaigns, offers and promotions. Using a marketing calendar platform define your marketing campaigns and identify your KPIs and goals. Additionally, define any offers or promotions, holidays or events that align with your business strategy. You have now defined your macro level plan and can begin to identify your marketing assets and the monetization opportunities that are most in alignment to support your strategy.

2.     Identify Your Monetizable Marketing Assets

The key to a successful media sales or a marketing plan is the ability to reach your customers or target audience through different marketing channels. As each marketing channel is considered an asset, you’re now offering a portfolio of assets to your partners to leverage and market their products. This is a diversified approach for your partner to invest in marketing their products or services through your marketing channels. Developing standardized media packages enhance your offering and provide your partners with an increased probability of their product or service to be more visible to your customer and target audience.  

3.     Select Partners That Align With Your Strategy

As you develop a full year of your marketing plan, you will early visibility of the campaigns, holidays, events, offers and promotions. Your partners will also share their product launch strategy allowing you to identify where your goals align. Now you have a clear perspective of which partners your media sales team can target with packages. This will allow your media sales team to focus on monetization opportunities that are relevant to your customers or target audience and are also consistent with your brand message and values.

4.     Capitalize On Events

Utilize your traffic and sales KPIs to set your pricing. Very much like buying a TV spot during the Superbowl, if you’re a hardware retailer and your highest traffic and sales is during spring events, you should capitalize on that opportunity and offer your partners packages at a higher price-point during that season compared to winter. You can also setup a variable pricing model based on views or conversions however that requires complex infrastructure, tracking and is not guaranteed.

5.     Build Your Multi-Channel Allocation Plan

A multi-channel media sales plan allows you to allocate your marketing assets for a period of time to certain partner initiatives. It is atypical to have an asset allocation plan that is 100% dedicated to your partners. There is a certain percentage that you will need to dedicate to your own branding or corporate initiatives. The key is to develop a multi-channel plan and ensure all your non-corporate marketing asset inventory is sold and assigned to your partner with their product or service offered aligning with your objectives.

6.     Focus On Your Inventory

A marketing planning platform, will provide you a holistic view of all your marketing channels and identify inventory available to generate additional revenue. Weekly meetings dedicated to analyzing inventory and strategizing sales activities along with partners that would be interested in participating is key to a successful media sales program. Ideally media sales teams should be planning and selling inventory two to three quarters in the future. Leverage previous years’ plans to determine historical participation provided your businesses objectives are in alignment with your partner’s product or service offering.

7.     Analyze Forecasts & Performance

In your weekly meetings, ensure you incorporate forecast reviews and compare with previous year or previous event performances. Roll-up your forecasts to understand weekly, monthly, quarterly, seasonal and annual forecasts. Also immediately analyze performance post-event allowing the team to understand what worked. This data is extremely important to help prove the benefits of the program and participation.

8.     Change Controls & Mitigation Plans

Always have a backup plan, circumstances can cause partners to back out of commitments or if there is a shift in strategy, you will need to quickly adapt. Maintain a backup plan at 20% of your inventory level to ensure you’re not exposed in such situations and can easily tap into partners that would benefit.

9.     Adjust Your Media Packages Based On Performance

Performance data is key to understanding the effectiveness of your multi-channel programs for an event. Understand which packages or combination of channels are yielding the best performance for a certain type of partner during a certain event or period of time.

10.  Develop & Present ROI In Your Media Sales Kits

Your best sales tool will be the ROI for your media kits allowing you to demonstrate to your partners the historical performance of your program. The ROI for the media kits will vary based on event timing and the type of partner, therefore you may want to tailor them to the partner and event. Effective and customized media programs will ensure your partners yield the best return on their investment at the same time your partners will become your customer evangelists.

This framework is a guideline to assist enterprises with developing highly effective growth-oriented monetization programs that align with their marketing strategy. Regardless of the type of business whether you’re a brick and mortar, online retailer, marketplace or an affiliate website, the framework will assist you with establishing a program that will generate revenue and transform your marketing department into a profit center.

To understand more about how CrossCap’s marketing planning software is used to help brands monetize their marketing assets, request a demo.