Marketing, Interrupted

by Dave Sutton

  To help you along the way, here are fourteen transformational tips to help you bring simplicity, clarity, and alignment to your Marketing Systems:

  1. Use dashboards for visibility into capacity and workflows.

  2. Understand your KPIs. Do they align with your strategy? Be upfront with the metrics that are going to matter and hold your team accountable to hit those.

  3. Measure for ROI on everything, including processes.

  4. Establish both a database that provides visibility into marketing perfor- mance as well as processes that make it easy to capture the data needed to measure ROI accurately.

  5. Be ruthlessly consistent that everything in your budget aligns with your strategic marketing plan.

  6. Show your finance team the research that’s led to your budgetary requests and then prove that they can trust you.

  7. Be visible with your spending. Hold your team and others accountable for what they spend and always have a solid answer for “How, where, and when did you allocate your budget?”

  8. Set up processes that enable visibility.

  9. Measure the impact of marketing throughout the customer’s lifecycle.

  10. Generate executive-level performance reports in the “language of the busi- ness” (ROI) to reinforce accountability in action.

  11. Manage your assets with a “single version of the truth.” Consider a digital asset management (DAM) tool that allows you to easily store, organize, track and repurpose your branded assets (such as photography, videos, rich graphics, 3D imagery, text documents, PowerPoint presentations) resulting in greater brand and licensing compliance and increased team productivity and efficiency.

  12. Communication between partners is key. Metrics, processes, opportuni- ties should all be communicated constantly.

  13. For your distribution partners, get in the habit of sharing data. Meet regu- larly to review important data points so that you can leverage your collec- tive knowledge to understand customers better.

  14. Enable a “learn-act-learn” culture where risk-taking in the marketplace is not only tolerated but encouraged.

  All of your marketing, all employee communications, all sales collateral, all enabling technologies, all of your people at every customer touchpoint must be fully aligned to bring your brand to life. Alignment equates to the “how.” How do your people communicate your story? How do you want your customers to experience your brand? And how do you specifically deliver value?

  This is often where companies and organizations struggle the most.

  Your ultimate goal is to align your marketing systems to execute your strategy with ruthless consistency. Of course, managing your marketing team’s capacity is only going to get more difficult as customer demands and marketing channels increase.

  If you have internal visibility into capacity and processes, you can manage your marketing team more easily. With clear visibility, you can start to find the pain points in your processes, and you can address them appropriately.

  With the right marketing systems in place you can identify the impediments that are hamstringing your sales and marketing talent, obscuring your brand story or damaging the customer experience.

  Chapter 15

  Selecting the Right Partner Not the Next Bright Shiny Object

  arketers love chasing the latest and greatest “bright shiny object” [BSO] and there are plenty of them out there. Almost every day, we’re

  inundated with new cloud-based marketing automation platforms, social media networks, or mobile messaging apps with the promise to skyrocket brand share, influence, and sales. As a transformative marketer, it’s always important to keep up with the latest new thing, right?

  Not necessarily.

  Before grabbing onto the latest BSO or “disruptive technology”, it’s important to remember that business results come first. The first point of consideration is whether this new tool or trend will enable you to achieve those business results, closely followed by how it will achieve those results.

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  After all, the value is in what the BSO delivers, not the BSO itself.

  The opportunity cost of perpetually chasing the next BSO disrupts and dis- tracts from other important priorities, which are pushed aside to make room for the next new thing.

  There’s no doubt that marketing needs to take risks. The distinction here is that the most successful brands and companies are more deliberate and intentional when it comes to assessing new marketing opportunities and new technologies as they emerge.

  If I told you how many new marketing technology products and services were released this past year, it would shock you. Literally thousands of new offer- ings were launched in the US alone. Most of these products and services will go nowhere, even if they start out going somewhere. Consider this example.

  In early 2016, the co-founder of Vine launched a new iPhone social media app called Peach. Peach offers a mash-up of functionality from many familiar apps like Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Snapchat and Instagram all rolled into one. The Peach brand story is pretty simple: “Life is filled with words, pictures, places, and songs worth sharing and when you put these things together, expressing yourself is faster, easier, and more fun.”

  But their strategy is pretty unclear. Who is the target audience and what’s the compelling reason for them to roll all of their social interactions into one place? And the competition in this space is fierce. Twitter, SnapChat and Instagram are so culturally entrenched that they’ve entered our vocabulary as concepts in and of themselves—we think in tweets, snaps, and instagrams.

  The launch of Peach triggered a huge response as it debuted near the top of Apple’s iPhone download list. Then, four days after its meteoric launch, the tech pundits declared that the “Peach is rotten” as downloads plummeted. If you had

  invested time and money in engaging with Peach, you would be left today with nothing but a pit in your stomach.

  You don’t have to treat trends like a day at the horse races. Transformative marketers should not be so quick to move with the trends. Successful marketing requires focus, sustained energy and commitment. The opportunity cost of per- petually chasing the next BSO disrupts and distracts from other important pri- orities. Transformative marketers must be extremely intentional when it comes to assessing new marketing opportunities and new technologies as they emerge. Here is a directed approach for picking the right horse in a crowded field.

  Question the need for that BSO. Don’t just take off after the new trend because everyone else is. Instead, take a deep look at why this trend has appeal and whether it’s absolutely necessary for your success.

  You must be sure to articulate your Brand Destination, which specifies how you want the customer to think, feel and act about your brand. More importantly it quantifies the results you expect your company to generate in the marketplace. A clear brand destination provides a lens through which you evaluate BSO’s and make the right marketing decisions to achieve success—giving marketing leaders a constructive way to say “no” to chasing the next shiny object.

  Define metrics for success. Before following any trend and implement- ing any approach, it’s crucial to know how success will be measured. Use CLEAR (Collaborative, Limited, Emotional, Appreciable, and Refinable) goals as a means of tracking marketing performance and navigating the brand to its desti- nation. It’s extremely important to not only specify what success looks like when you arrive at the Destination, but also what it looks like at milestones along the way. Any BSO must be assessed in the context of your Brand Destination and the CLEAR goals you are committed to achieving--otherwise they are nothing more than distractions and resource drains.”

  Consider the Hype Cycle. The general pattern of trends is predictably unpre- dictable pattern. The premise of the hype cycle is that people tend to get over- excited about new shiny objects, and then they are disappointed when the shiny objects don’t change the world in the blink of an eye. That said, some of the shiny

&
nbsp; objects do actually change the world, given the right market conditions and some patience. For marketers, this is where things actually get interesting. If the BSO promises to get you to your Brand Destination faster and achieve your CLEAR goals, it may be worthy of further investigation and experimentation.

  Re-calibrate marketing priorities. You shouldn’t spend resources you don’t have or commit to more than you can afford to risk. Marketing budgets and resources aren’t unlimited. Therefore, if you do decide that a BSO is worth chasing, then something has to drop off your marketing plate to take on something new. Marketing priorities will have to be re-calibrated, CLEAR goals realigned and any dependencies or conflicts with other marketing programs must be reconciled.

  Investigate and experiment. If your marketing team is truly serious about pur- suing a new trend, then you must commit sufficient resources to evaluate the situation. Establish a small team and test the ideas that show the most promise for building your brand and growing your business with the trend. If something shows potential, then you can expand it and incorporate it into your overall mar- keting mix and adjust your CLEAR goals accordingly.

  Learn from failure. Sometimes companies invest resources in following the trend, only to find that despite their best efforts, it was nothing but a red herring. Sadly, failure will happen, but it also provides valuable learning if those lessons are applied during the next go-round.

  You can’t underestimate the importance of building a learning culture with all of your employees to improve the process along the way. Build a culture that rewards learning fast and failing fast. Hire people who exhibit intellectual curios- ity and recognize them for it. Ultimately that’s always the best trend to follow.

  One of my bosses early in my career used to publicly proclaim, “Stop com- plaining—all marketers are resource constrained—you just need to learn how to do more with less!”

  At the time, I took issue with this sweeping generalization. However, since the most recent recession, I have found a great deal of truth in that statement.

  Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the field of Marketing Automation (MA) has become white-hot in the past five years. MA is a category of technology that

  allows companies to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and work- flows, so marketers can increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster.

  These days it seems that every major software company is staking their claim and proclaiming their leadership position in MA. Unfortunately for the market- ers tasked with finding the right solution, there appears to be widespread confu- sion on which vendors lead the pack, even among industry analyst firms (e.g. Forrester, Gartner, etc.)

  So, here are ten critical considerations for selecting the right Marketing Systems partner:

  1. Ensure you receive phone support—you will need it. Find out what other forms of support are available and the hours of operation.

  2. Find out if training on the software is included with your purchase. If not, how much does it cost?

  3. Be sure the software integrates with your current CRM solution and data can flow freely between the two platforms. See if it integrates with other platforms you use-a single view of all contact information is valuable.

  4. If you are changing MA vendors, make sure the vendor has successfully migrated data from your current platform to their software. Find out how difficult this is and what it entails. Is technical expertise needed?

  5. Find out how pricing scales, especially regarding database size. Are there add-on features available or do you have to upgrade for more features or additional contacts? You need to know the true cost of the platform before purchasing. Are there hidden fees? Limits of messages sent a month? Charges to add users?

  6. Find out if the software is designed for use by both sales and marketing. How it will better align sales and marketing teams? Ask for examples of how each team can use it.

  7. Does the platform manage full customer life cycles, or only leads and prospects? You want to be able to engage and nurture contacts through- out the entire life cycle. After all, the best customer you can get is the one you already have.

  8. Ask about email deliverability, specifically the vendor’s inbox and deliver- ability rate. This is an oft-overlooked but incredibly important aspect to a successful MA platform.

  9. Metrics and reporting vary greatly between vendors. What metrics are available to track campaign performance? Also, be sure to find out how the software measures/defines success. What metrics does the dashboard emphasize? Are reports customizable?

  10.Ensure the software offers mobile optimized landing pages and forms, as well as responsive email templates. Do you have additional mobile technology needs? It is essential that the software can meet your mobile requirements.

  In order to be successful with marketing systems (and long before you select a vendor technology), you have to create your go-to-market strategy and empower the people who will actually own the success of not just the marketing platforms, but also of the entire demand generation process. Someone must be accountable to deliver on the metrics (number of qualified leads, conversion rates, cost per lead, etc.), as well as someone who will own the process and enabling technology platform. In many small companies, it’s the same person. In larger companies, it’s not.

  As Michael Hammer so wisely said in his now famous HBR Article (“Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate”, HBR, July-August 1990), “It is time to stop paving the cow paths. Instead of embedding outdated processes in silicon and software, we should obliterate them and start over. We should reen- gineer our businesses: use the power of modern information technology to radi- cally redesign our business processes in order to achieve dramatic improvements in their performance.”

  So, if you’re a marketer struggling to do more with less and you want to move to the TopRight corner of the markets where you compete, don’t just chase after the next BSO. Refer back to your brand destination statement and then select the right partner who will help align your people, processes and platforms to execute your strategy and tell your brand story in the most efficient and effective way to drive growth.

  Chapter 16

  Exposing the Little White Lies About Marketing Automation

  o you remember the story about a happy customer named Jeaneth Manzaniita Tavares who posted a raving review about her pizza on the

  Domino’s Facebook page?

  “Best Pizza Ever! Pan Pizza :) Keep up the good work guys!”

  Customer

  Mistakenly, an automated bot programmed by the company to deal with com- plaints replied:

  “So sorry about that! Please share some additional information with us at [link] and please mention reference #1409193 so we can have this addressed.” Domino’s Pizza

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  Oops! Attempting to use a little sarcastic humor to patch things up, Domino’s tried to cover its tracks:

  “No, we meant we were sorry it took Jeaneth so long to enjoy the best pizza ever. Think of all the pizza she’s likely had that wasn’t the best ever!” Domino’s Pizza

  Social media lit up. Agitated customers lashed out at Domino’s and chastised them for the use of impersonal, inauthentic, automated bots for handling their social media interactions. It turns out that the social media savvy possess no patience for dishonesty. If you find your brand in this situation, it is always best to just apologize, own the problem and fix it as quickly as possible. Afterall, mar- keters are humans. We make mistakes. And so do the marketing systems that we rely on to tell our brand stories and execute our strategies! So, you can’t just “set it and forget it!”

  The Dangers of “Going Viral”

  Transformational marketers know that if you want to accelerate sales, putting the right digital marketing systems in place is crucial to executing and scaling your strategy.

  Crafting an automated marketing campaign with compelling content and powerful imagery is one of the most effective ways to attract
new customers, but social media doesn’t come without a fair degree of risk. In fact, you can just as easily put yourself out of business by forgetting how quickly news can spread via social media.

  Sounds like a good problem, right?

  Timothy’s Coffees of the World did what many brands have done to increase sales—they setup an automated marketing campaign that offered a free sample to customers for following them on social.

  Unfortunately, Timothy’s offered more than they could deliver. For “liking” Timothy’s on Facebook, the company offered to send fans four free 24-pack boxes of Keurig single cup coffees.

  Unsurprisingly, customers were ecstatic and snapped up the offer—depleting the company’s supply of free K-cup packs after only three days. Two weeks later, the company’s marketing team sent out a message to customers saying the offer was “first come first serve.” Talk about too little too late.

  Despite an apology video and distribution of free coupons in the mail, Timothy’s is still trying to recover from the fan backlash on social media. When it comes to social media, companies often focus on quantity (how many likes/ followers/retweets) without thinking about why and how they plan to engage the customer after.

  Your marketing systems not only should help you scale and execute your Strategy, but they must also be true to your Brand Story and align the inherent promises that it makes to customers.