I love working with product-based companies because of the amount of data that they have on their customers. They know so much about their shopping behavior, platform preferences, product selections, and timing. When creating a marketing roadmap for a product-based company, the steps are slightly different than for a service-based business.

Product-based businesses often use Shopify for transactions and customer data as well as an e-mail service provider such as Klaviyo or Mailchimp. Focusing on their retail clients will typically take a couple of weeks as we build out a marketing roadmap. Here are the primary steps we use when creating this type of plan.

Export Shopify Sales by Week

When it comes to planning, many business owners will focus on the marketing side only. But diving into sales from a product category, an SKU level, and from a customer level is crucial when understanding your audience and their needs. I love when clients are using Shopify because it offers such a valuable way to export data and look at it in a meaningful way based on the time frame you’re focused on.

Merge With Email & Social Data

Once sales are exported we will merge multiple weeks months and even quarters into a master document, then layer in e-mail marketing and social data. This is where the magic happens. By layering in various platforms into specific weeks we can really turn the dial on what we will share going forward. What I like to do is look at not only what happened during the time frame we are focused on, but also the prior year and current trends that have happened over the past 30 to 60 days.

Create A Heat Map

Once we have this information in a document, we’re able to create a heat map of products and content topics, segmented by week. This will really hone in on what our audience preferences have been in the past as well as any new product launches or evergreen topics we need to introduce going forward.

Research & Build the Roadmap

Looking at our own data is really important when understanding what has worked for us in the past and what we need to change going forward. It is also important to understand what is happening within your industry and the marketing landscape. Looking at trending topics, tools, and techniques will help form the future and build out a more cohesive roadmap going forward

Input into Airtable

Once we have the plan laid out and a draft penciled in, we will then put pen to paper and get into the nitty-gritty. I am a huge fan of Airtable as it single-handedly has helped me manage not only my own business and all the moving content parts but specifically all of the clients that we service. In an average month, we are managing 10 to 15 road maps, each with its own unique details. Airtable is a great tool to help you lay out things like editorial calendars, content calendars, content pillars, hashtag buckets, reel ideas, and more.

Execute Your Plan

Now the fun part happens. Once we’ve pulled all the data, done our research, mapped out the plan, and put it into a table that is easy to understand it’s time to execute. This will require logging into different platforms such as the website for blogs, the e-mail service provider for emails, Canva, and other social tools we use to help create the social content. It can be easy to jump right into execution mode but it’s important that you dive into the data before you get started

Watch Sales Grow, Refine and Repeat

Clients that have the most success are ones that are continually executing their plans but not always on autopilot. It’s important to refine what’s working and what’s not and give yourself permission to repeat strategies and tactics that have proven successful in the past. I’ve always loved the quote that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.” If you want your sales to grow, if you want your e-mail list to grow, if you want your transactions to thrive, it’s important that you are measuring and understanding all the moving parts.

We would love to help you get started with a marketing roadmap of your own! Contact us here or send us a message on Facebook to get in touch!