The One Thing Every Marketing Team Needs to Succeed

Ever get the sense your marketing team has great ideas but they never seem to turn into engagement? Great ideas are just that…great. But they don’t really mean anything if your audiences don’t experience them.

We’ve seen this time and time again and have come to the realization that there’s one thing your marketing team really needs in order to stand apart from the competition and see more impact with your marketing efforts.

“That’s how we’ve always done it...”

It's easily one of our least favorite adages. It’s simply an excuse that holds us back from advancing our work. And in an increasingly fast-paced and complex business environment, “how we’ve always done it” isn’t going to fly anymore. So, let’s start by banishing that excuse from our vocabulary, OK?

What we really need are comprehensive marketing systems.

That means rethinking how we conceive, execute and learn from our marketing programs from start to finish. Marketing is increasingly complex, so we must find ways to simplify our processes, which allows us to focus on servicing customer needs and less on just trying to get things done. At the same time, these systems allow us to better capture and learn from the data our marketing efforts generate, which is critical because marketing systems thrive on trustworthy data.

Begin with the Basics

While deploying an entirely new marketing system sounds daunting, a great place to start is by implementing best practices across your digital channels to ensure they run efficiently, generate optimal results and deliver meaningful feedback.

A few basics include defining core and target customers, establishing KPIs, prioritizing channels, and optimizing ad spend. These can go a long way in delivering results from your marketing programs.

Intelligence Exchange

With the basics in place, we can then work on a more integrated approach to strategy. We view strategy in three distinct layers - Brand, Content and Channel - with each of equal importance when it comes to successful marketing.

The most crucial aspect of an effective marketing system is the exchange of intelligence across each of these layers. As such, we discuss and strategize around what’s happening within brand, content and channels in the following ways:

• What’s working
• What’s unusual
• What’s broken

More than simply reporting results, these discussions help us get to the heart of how best to optimize and test new ideas in the short-term while allowing us to make informed adjustments to long-term strategic plans and customer personas. Continuous refinement is key, particularly when it comes to the dynamics of digital marketing.

Meetings that Matter

Yes, we all have an instant, sometimes visceral, reaction to the thought of more meetings - but what we’re really afraid of is unproductive meetings. The Intelligence Exchange is meant to replace reporting presentations and status updates with useful information exchange, problem solving and ideas for improvements and tests. This allows for short-term optimizations coupled with long-term strategic thinking.

The next time you find yourself falling back on “That’s how we’ve always done it,” take a step back and think about whether that process truly supports your efforts or if you might need to rethink your approach. In future blogs, we’ll get into more detail on how we implement marketing systems to achieve the most value from our clients’ marketing investment, so stay tuned.