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The head of marketing for a UK urban-gardening startup explains how strong brand recognition helps him grow his team

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By Dominick Reuter

  • A startup’s brand can be one of the most valuable assets for growing its team.
  • “People want to work for a cool, exciting company that they’ve heard of,” said Franky Athill, the head of marketing for Patch Plants, a popular urban gardening startup in London.
  • Athill was Patch’s fourth team member, and it has since added more than 40 others.
  • He shared his advice with Business Insider about two key things to remember when it’s time to add talent to your startup.
  • This article is part of a series on growing a small business, called “From 1 to 100.”

The search for talent presents a significant challenge for many startups, and the ability to recruit the best people is one of the most critical factors for success.

Startups with strong brand engagement can have an advantage in this respect by reaching a wider field of potential hires.

Franky Athill does exactly that as the head of marketing for Patch Plants, a popular London urban-gardening startup that he has helped grow from four to 45 team members since 2017.

The idea for Patch came about when founder Freddie Blackett was looking for a better way to keep his houseplants alive on the balcony of his girlfriend’s apartment, and he discovered that many other would-be green thumbs in the city shared the same frustration.

After Blackett spent a few years refining the idea in a startup incubator, Athill joined Patch as the fourth employee.

Up to that point, Athill’s career included stints with several other marketing outfits, most notably with famed fashion photographer Mario Testino, whose digital operation he set up and built to 2.8 million subscribers.

Athill spoke with Business Insider about how he uses his marketing channels as a recruiting tool to grow the Patch team.

Use your brand engagement to reach potential hires

Over the past three years, Athill has overseen the growth of the brand’s social reach to more than 200,000 Londoners. Over the same period, he said, daily sales have gone from just 10 to 1,000.

That pool of social followers is also where he has sourced the 40-plus new members of his team.

While a gardening startup may not have the glitz and glamour of a Testino photo shoot, Athill says Patch’s brand engagement is strong. After all, growing your team isn’t simply about finding more people, it’s about finding the right ones.

“That has helped us a huge amount because it means that we’ve been able to hire really good people through our own networks and through our own marketing channels.”

Generating engagement and excitement for your brand is vital for a startup, Athill says, and not only because it drives sales.

“Without it, it’s very hard to compete in the job space for the very best people,” he said. “They want to work for a cool, exciting company that they’ve heard of.”

It all comes down to a numbers game for Athill, who said that reaching a wider audience improves the odds that he will find a good fit to join the team.

Get help from a pro to filter your prospects

Once you’ve amassed a sizable applicant pool, Athill recommended that early-stage startups outsource the screening process to a recruiter as they grow beyond 10 people or so.

“A good recruiter can pay back their weight in gold,” he said. “Use your digital marketing skills and brand to fill a huge funnel [of applicants], and get [the recruiter] to assess that funnel.”

Having an independent perspective can help you save your energy and attention for the most promising candidates.

“Don’t let yourself get in a position where you’re going into interviews hoping that the person is great, because then you’ve left it too late, and now you’re under a lot of pressure to fill that seat,” Athill said.

And there can be a real cost to making a bad match, especially if one of the core leadership has to find a replacement for a new hire that didn’t work out.

“If one person is focused on hiring for a week, that’s a very big distraction. So I would avoid doing that,” Athill said.

By Dominick Reuter

Sourced from Business Insider

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Earth Day Marketing May Be More Important Than Ever

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By Kaley Roshitsh.

“I can’t think of a better time to have an answer to a very difficult question. Why is my brand essential? That’s the lens upon which all your communications should shine.”

Like two peas in a pod, disease outbreaks and natural disasters occur as a consequence of a changing climate. One could even say the upcoming 50th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22 against the backdrop of a pandemic is perfect illustrative timing.

Mother Nature is clashing her cymbals as a lot of commercial activity in the U.S. and Europe falls silent. Even Earth Day, the world’s largest environmental movement based in Washington, D.C., is being forced to go digital with its conference, called “24 Hours of Action.”

But the noise of green-washing, or the usual sustainable product launches, capsule collections and so on, won’t cease on Earth Day regardless of the pandemic.

But there is a change in tune.

“While these uncertain times have put some of our adventures on hold, our fans still count on us to inspire and uplift them,” Erika Gabrielli, senior director of marketing at Teva, told WWD.

Teva, which this spring converted all of its “iconic” webbings to recycled content, is leaning into custom content and a sustainability sweepstakes to re-educate consumers on how they can help to decrease their impact on the planet.

At the same time, it’s providing a reminder of why they matter to their customers, which for the brand is most palpable in the sales uptick in its sandals, hiking styles and — naturally — house slippers.

Ryan Jordan, executive creative director at marketing and communications firm Imre, who has worked on projects for brands such as Under Armour, L’Oréal and Target, among others, believes the messaging stakes are even higher this Earth Day.

“Listen harder and better than you ever have,” he said. “It’s actually the same advice I would have given to brands three months ago, but it’s now more important than ever.”

Listening right now may be as simple as a company showing its compassion, reminding customers that they stand by their employees and aim to help them weather the hardships of the crisis to the best of their abilities.

While he doesn’t believe brands should outright cancel initiatives, especially if they’re really an “awesome game-changer” (although every brand may be biased to think so), he still calls for a rethink.

“I challenge you to do this; ask your target audience what they think. Get them involved in the execution,” said Jordan, adding “actual proof of empathy is not only the right thing to do, it’s good business.”

For some companies, it may just be that marketing campaigns that focus on the upbeat, humorous and self-aware hit the bull’s-eye with younger generations, especially in matters of sustainability and environmentalism, as opposed to the opposite: doom and gloom.

“Find something that works for you and make sure to have fun with it,” said Topper Luciani, chief executive officer and founder of online thrift start-up Goodfair.

Although luxury consignment, rental and resale businesses are dealing with their own set of challenges amid the coronavirus pandemic, Goodfair is seeing booming sales among its predominantly Millennial and Gen Z audience.

The company pulled in $300,000 in sales on Easter Sunday, according to Luciani. What he attributes it to is not simply a shift in consumer behavior but speaking Internet.

What do you meme?

At least for his company, “meme culture is what wins,” said Luciani, who credits the steep sales day to a viral TikTok from the company’s account. “If a brand is not on TikTok, they’re sleeping,” he added. With more than 1 billion users, TikTok has already seen the entry of heritage brands like Ralph Lauren and the christening of Fenty Beauty’s TikTok creative house in March.

meme, earth day, coronavirus

Bundles offered by Goodfair, with a largely Millennial and Gen Z customer base.  Courtesy

Start-ups like Goodfair may be more willing to front the risk and wrestle with the Internet. It offers various thrift bundles on its web site like the “cure corona bundle” retailing for $48 or the “tree hugger bundle” for $65 compiled of entire outfits including sweatpants and Henley shirts in the former and flannels in the case of the latter.

“But it can’t feel forced,” Luciani reiterated.

Speaking of forced, will sustainable capsule collections — often just a piecemeal sustainability effort and exercise in marketing — continue to pass by consumers’ eyes without them evaluating into the respective supply chains?

It depends, but they’re not always too good to be true in the case that brand values actually match up, according to Brendan Synnott, chief executive officer of organic essentials brand Pact.

Calling on a simple recipe of a few star ingredients, a successful capsule collection should mean: sharing the same long-term values and “working with partners that are 100 percent committed to sustainability in everything that they do. It can’t be just 5 percent of your product line,” Synnott said.

That also means shying away from greenwashing or “fakers,” as Synnott puts it.

Pact is pairing with Brooklyn-based label Zero Waste Daniel to release 100-percent organic Fair Trade-certified hoodies and sweat shorts for spring adorned with handmade, upcycled patches by designer Daniel Silverstein.

As with others, the company is broadening its approach, extending Earth Day festivities into a monthlong celebration and more importantly shifting the focus from product to engaging content — showcasing the brand alongside others in the sustainability space.

Doing so virtually is as simple as inviting like-minded sustainability thought-leaders to a joint Instagram Live broadcast, to the detriment of those with their notifications on. Virtual sustainability forums are another trending pursuit among brands small and large.

“As we are in a time of crisis, it’s important to show some of the more positive moments that we can all cling to for a smile,” reiterated Synnott.

Upbeat messaging is important in any case. U.S. unemployment benefits are sought by some 17 million workers who filed for it over the last few weeks, according to the Labor Department, and Coresight Research’s latest weekly U.S. consumer survey published last Wednesday showed a bleak outlook in discretionary shopping.

So this Earth Day, as they sit in lockdown wondering whether anything will ever be the same and spend time evaluating what is essential in their lives, will consumers be looking at the messaging around the 50th anniversary — or the core values of the brands themselves?

Jordan put it bluntly: “I can’t think of a better time to have an answer to a very difficult question. Why is my brand essential? That’s the lens upon which all your communications should shine.”

Feature Image Credit: Many wonder how Earth Day marketing messages will pivot during the pandemic. Courtesy

By Kaley Roshitsh

Sourced from WWD

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How to Convert Someone to Your Cause in 5 Simple Steps

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By David Meltzer

Phillip Stutts discusses the branding and marketing lessons he’s learned from working in politics for the past two decades.

 

Phillip Stutts, founder of Go Big Media and Win Big Media and author of Fire Them Now, shares his thoughts on why the five-step process for branding a politician is the exact same as branding a person, product or service in any other industry. He also shares why customer data is so essential when putting together an impactful advertising campaign.

Stutts and The Playbook host David Meltzer chat about the importance of testing your advertisements before launching a campaign, why businesses should operate with a giving and abundant approach and why they believe in giving prospective clients a free assessment in order to get alignment.

By David Meltzer

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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How To Improve Marketing Personalization, Even With Crappy Data

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By Bruce McMeekin

When marketing teams are forced to use “crappy” data, they risk sending inaccurate or ineffective messages to customers and prospects. When you consider that personalization is a vital technique for businesses looking to draw customers’ attention, this is especially problematic. In fact, customers tend to respond more favorably to emails tailored to their preferences, and brands with mature personalization strategies see increases in revenue.

After all, most customers appreciate when Amazon emails a useful purchase suggestion or when Netflix understands their viewing preferences better than a spouse. These companies — and other personalization-first brands — use behavioral analytics to scrutinize customer behavior, develop personas and present offers with a high probability of converting into sales or improved user experience.

In working with clients across the board at my marketing agency, I’ve found that the art of personalization isn’t as easy to master. According to Experian, the majority of businesses say inaccurate data will impact their ability to provide a great customer experience.

5 Ways To Improve Personalization

Lacking insightful data is tough for any business trying to keep up in the digital age. According to Salesforce’s “State of the Connected Customer,” 73% of customers “expect companies to understand their needs and expectations,” and 62% “expect companies to adapt based on their actions and behavior.” However, you don’t need stellar data resources to practice personalization.

Personalized marketing is nothing new (after all, it’s nice when your favorite restaurant’s sommelier knows you enjoy Super Tuscans and suggests one to try). However, automated personalization now occurs much earlier in the sales process than it used to. If you have crappy data, there are still valuable best practices you can adopt to personalize your communications:

1. Place your non-crappy data sources in an inventory. 

The best place to find trustworthy contact and behavioral data is perhaps your transactional database (think QuickBooks or another accounting platform). Here, you can likely find email or postal addresses, customer or business names, and products or services purchased.

Make sure you focus on recent transactions, as data from the last year is more likely to be accurate. Besides this, focus on records with complete contact information and see if you can obtain any proxy for profitability (if so, consider also assigning a profitability decile). After all, there’s no point in spending marketing time or dollars to acquire low-profit business.

Look for data fields that show how much you know about customers’ needs. For example, if you run a computer servicing business, note which customers use Macs and which use PCs. If you have email addresses, you can get more information from FullContact, FreshAddress, Datanyze or Clearbit. Google Analytics also offers behavioral data, such as how frequently customers visit your site, webpages of interest and more.

2. Use your intuition to build personas. 

If you still can’t summon much confidence in your data, don’t worry. Create your own data by shaping personas from disparate pieces of accurate information and your intuition. Form a narrative around these scraps by answering some simple questions:

• What is this person’s pain point?

• What makes this person happy?

• What makes this person feel successful?

• How can our company help?

Creative teams love this type of information — it helps them craft offers to persuade and engage audiences. You also don’t need clean data to do this (though it helps).

3. Say ‘thank you.’

You’ll know this right away: Every transaction in your sales database represents a customer. With that simple fact, personalize your communication using an appreciative tone. You can also send communication from the manager of the store that customer visited or the employee whom the customer spoke with. Likewise, you can probably find out where customers like to do business, where they live and which website pages interest them most. All of these factors can help personalize your messaging.

Tie in the benefits of your product in a personal way. This could mean appealing to emotions (perhaps helping your audience feel or look better). And when customers visit your website, use cookies to trigger dynamic content based on the pages they visit. From these seemingly dull instruments, you can scratch out a convincing image of who your customers might be and which offers could interest them.

4. Remember that all you need is a single piece of personal information.

The quest for data wealth can be overwhelming — you want to know everything about your customers all at once. But even a single piece of information can be illuminating.

We recently helped a bank identify which of its personal banking customers owned a business. To do this, we scoured LinkedIn and company websites, verified contact information and assessed suitability for a business banking offer. Because this extra step individualized customer messages, it added much more credibility to the marketing campaign: “You trust us with your personal banking. We can help (insert business name) succeed, too.”

Is this tactic too intrusive? Not necessarily: Salesforce’s study also suggests that 62% of millennials and Generation Zers are okay with companies using relevant personal data in a “transparent and beneficial” way.

5. Don’t be afraid to take risks. 

People are understandably nervous around data. Remember that you can afford to take calculated risks in the quest for better personalization. Simply make sure you act ethically and comply with privacy laws.

For example, if you have more than 50% confidence in the personalized content you use, go with it. Perfection is impossible when dealing with marketing data, so it’s okay to be wrong with a minority of prospects in order to move your revenue and market share needles forward.

With customers increasingly expecting personalized communication, you can’t afford to stay frozen in fear. According to the Salesforce study above, half of millennials and Gen Zers usually ignore messages from brands unless they’re personalized — that’s 50% of connected young people shut out of your business before they get a chance to learn more. Don’t let your data insecurities stand in the way.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Bruce McMeekin

Bruce McMeekin is CEO and Founder of BKM Marketing, an integrated marketing agency based in the Boston area.

Sourced from Forbes

 

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Stephan Loerke, Tamara Rogers, Nigel Vaz and more on the next digital disruptions

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By The Drum Reporters

From The Trade Desk to Condé Nast and Puma to PepsiCo, we ask some of the world’s best digital marketers where they think the next big industry shift will come from?

Nigel Vaz, global chief executive officer, Publicis Sapient

If you’re riding (or getting hit by) waves then you’re probably still swimming in the shallows. By which I mean it would be easy to answer that the next big wave is the ability to reach new possibilities in personalization at scale, across touchpoints, through data and machine learning. It’s true, but tells only part of the story. What we are all here to do is not to help clients create a deliverable, but a way to operate and exist so they don’t end up on the receiving end of another company’s disruptive breakthrough. The most compelling conversations I have are with business leaders who aren’t looking for waves, but horizons: people such as Novartis chief executive Vas Narasimhan, whose vision is to move beyond being a pharmaceutical company and to create value for patients and support them through their entire lifecycle. That’s an incredibly powerful and purposeful ambition that requires reimagining that business on a number of fronts, from strategy to experience to the application of data.

Oliver Deane, director of commercial digital, Global

Voice will start to have a huge impact on our daily lives. We will begin to do much more than ask Alexa to play the radio. As we embrace voice to be more productive, we will use our devices to order groceries while we make dinner, have a long-form feature read to us while we exercise and book our train travel while shopping. Much of this technology is already accessible – the wave of disruption in the coming years will be how much voice is used and how regular it becomes within our lives.

Ray Soto, director of emerging tech, Gannett

The digital signs of the next big wave are all around us, but you can’t focus on one without considering the others. I foresee the next big wave will be a convergence of several technologies that solves a problem and delivers an experience worth being a part of. I see it as something that helps us navigate our digital space differently, but provides a more immersive experience and efficiency without a lack of connection we may feel today.

Adam Harris, director of custom solutions, Twitch

I believe live sport is surfing the first wave of digital disruption. Sports often look to expand their reach into different audiences or look for different ways to communicate with existing fans. On top of that you have a host of traditional sports, such as golf and Formula 1, with aging fan bases, contrasted with the eSports scene, which is thriving among younger demographics – just look at the success of the recent Fortnite World Cup.

With eSports’ success as a purely digital-first experience, traditional sports have a huge opportunity. Interactive live environments such as Twitch are made for the kind of communal, passionate tribal experiences live sport delivers. We are already seeing strong engagement in this area with the likes of the NFL, Champions and Europa Leagues, MLS, Rugby League and National Women’s Hockey League all broadcasting live on Twitch.

Luke Davies, senior manager of global yield, Reuters

Data privacy law, again. GDPR is a slow burner and unfortunately our industry’s attempts of adoption have reduced the general user experience quality across the web. For GDPR, and now CCPA in 2020, with the potential for wider uptake across the US market, we can expect to experience changing tides across the next few years.

Simon Gresham Jones, chief digital officer, Condé Nast

On our mobile devices, again. 5G will open up a new frontier of business and creative possibilities for brands. For media and entertainment in particular, there’s an opportunity to re-imagine how we inspire our audiences at scale.

Morten Grubak, executive creative director for northern Europe, Virtue

The intellectual properties of brands. Brands need to be innovative in the products, services and solutions they bring to the world (this is where adding value really gets to live), not just in their communication.

Creative agencies should have as much contact with product development and innovation, not just marketing. We need to prove our value by solving real problems – and not just that, but doing it in surprising and interesting ways to capture the world’s increasingly scarce attention. It’s harder than it sounds. But don’t fret: the world is young.

Alexandra Willis, head of communications, content and digital, AELTC

A continuation of the ability of AI, machine learning and automation to drive personalization: it will just get better and more sophisticated and therefore true choice for the consumer over experience, rather than just customization within rules.

Voice: not being wedded to keyboards will rapidly increase the speed at which things are expected to happen, both in terms of the way we work and how consumers engage.

5G penetration: if it does what it says, it could transform the cost and flexibility of content production in such a way that we move completely away from linear and digital, and have a truly integrated model.

Alysia Borsa, chief marketing and data officer, Meredith

It’s hard to pick just one thing. From a consumer perspective, behaviors continue to evolve and expand to multiple platforms, with voice being a major shift in engagement. From a business perspective, providing personalization and relevancy in a cookieless world is going to be disruptive, and players who have direct relationships with consumers will be best set up to succeed.

Julie Clark, global head of automation revenue and podcast monetization, Spotify

How we leverage and utilize data is going to be a massive disruptor to our industry; we all need to plan for it now rather than allowing it to happen to us. There is also a reimagining happening right now as we start to connect digital back to real-world engagement of consumers. While direct to consumer brands have fundamentally changed purchase behaviors, I do believe human tactile experiences will continue to be fundamental now and into the future. From pop-up store trends to retailers becoming more skilled in connecting their on and offline worlds, I think we are going to have an interesting few years seeing these worlds merge.

Victor Knaap, chief executive officer, MediaMonks

In my opinion the word ‘digital’ needs to be killed soon – everything is digital. Besides that, my prediction is media companies that don’t master programmatic will have a real hard time in the next 12 months. To be frank, I am afraid we all generally expect too much from the near future. Old models die slowly, while we are overlooking the real change that will happen in the long-term. The media, agency and consultancy industry will look completely different in 10 years’ time.

Tamara Rogers, global chief marketing officer, GSK Consumer Healthcare

A truly intelligent internet of things. A world where the devices around you no longer just respond to your instructions, but predict your needs based on the behavioral data patterns they have tracked. For example, your vehicle self-adjusting the seat and heat pads to the optimum position and temperature to ease your back pain, identified as an issue from the way you have been moving during sleep the previous night and your range of mobility since rising. How are brands part of a dynamic system to improve the quality of life?

Aaron Cho, head of digital, IPG Mediabrands Hong Kong

There are growing privacy concerns around the usage of data, while digital properties continue to tighten their data policies. I think these forces might bring about the next big shift in digital marketing for two main reasons. Firstly, the privacy landscape is still changing and the dust has yet to settle – there’s no clear indication about which digital linkages will break and which ones marketers will need to bridge, which affects practices around identity resolution and data-driven audience planning. Secondly, while there are numerous data and tech companies on the market right now, their solutions are mostly still in development in the APAC region and there’s also a very real shortage of talent that understands how to manage their implementation.

Josh Peters, director of data partnerships, BuzzFeed

First-party audience collection and data privacy. They’re intrinsically linked together – as they should be – and companies and brands who handle this well will be big winners. We’re already seeing apps like BigToken helping consumers not just take control of their data but also helping them monetize it themselves. That’s a huge shift in the market – users making money off their own data instead of just companies. This, in turn, makes the data the app holds even more valuable in the market.

For brands and publishers, the ways in which they collect and use audiences is going to be imperative to future success, especially in an industry whose regulatory structure is exponentially increasing in complexity. Tech that makes it easy to collect in areas third-party pixels can’t, that seamlessly connects to privacy compliance frameworks and even the privacy frameworks themselves, will change the way marketers do business. The ones who make it both easy and effective will help change the course of digital marketing soon.

Sean Lyons, global chief executive officer, R/GA

Data privacy. There are a lot of new technologies currently in development that rely on almost unlimited access to people’s behavioral and personal data. What happens when people, and legislators, decide that privacy is more important than personalized messages and services? What happens when these technologies fall into the wrong hands? There is a big opportunity to solve this problem in fair and novel ways.

Mike Scafidi, head of martech, adtech and consumer data, PepsiCo

The next digital disruption will be through establishing trust. This will protect the interests of the consumer and improve the marketer’s ability to have an accurate understanding of the consumer. This will fundamentally disrupt everything we see in the data ecosystem today.

Sujatha Kumar, senior director of marketing, Visa India

I think we are seeing it as we speak. It’s no longer a fragmented market or media, but it’s a fragmented consumer who has a myriad of choices and a short attention span – hence the rise of programmatic ad platforms for dynamic creative optimization. There’s still a long way to go on how these platforms really evolve to serve their purpose – not just to us marketers, but also the end consumer.

The other big disruption will be voice – how it will become the key enabler and how tools such as facial and voice recognition will become the norm for security encryptions.

Stephan Loerke, chief executive officer, World Federation of Advertisers

The next big wave of digital disruption will be voice. We see penetration of voice assistants growing exponentially, and hurdles to voice commerce are comparatively low – once the technology is fully there. From a brand marketer’s perspective, voice will change the equation fundamentally – in terms of consumer trust, role of platforms and brand presence.

Chris Curtin, chief brand and innovation marketing officer, Visa

Augmented reality will hit in a big way. I think we’ll see it primarily through virtual shopping experiences, with consumers being able to trigger supplemental experiences through AR and brands. With AR, companies can manifest much more engaging experiences with their consumers than what we generally see today.

Adam Petrick, global director of brand and marketing, Puma

I think many brands have been successful in making the jump from advertising-based messaging to storytelling, story creation and content-focused messaging. Now we must find ways to actually leverage the power of the technology at our fingertips to leverage content and story creation in a targeted way, at scale. That’s the issue at the heart of the current moment of stress and tension in the industry. Once we overcome the hurdle of getting promising dots to line up, then we can all start to focus on the ‘next’ wave, which I have to assume will be linked to end customers beginning to exert ownership of their personally owned marketing space and opting in to virtually all messaging that we want to deliver.

Jeff Green, chief executive officer, The Trade Desk

As I have said before, we will likely never see a bigger industry shift than what’s happening right now in connected TV. We are at the very beginning of the digitization of TV advertising. For the first time, advertisers can apply real data to their large TV ad campaigns. Much of what we’ve done over the past decade has simply been a dress rehearsal for the digital shift happening in TV right now. Every top advertiser wants to know how they can best access CTV inventory at scale and how they can apply programmatic to it.

Nicolas Bidon, global chief executive officer, Xaxis

To use a famous quote: “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” I believe the next big wave of digital disruption will be when some of the forces that have been at play in China for a couple of years already – such as mobile-first experiences powered by AI, social commerce at scale and frictionless mobile financial payments, to name just a few – will make their way to the US and Europe.

Lisa Utzschneider, chief executive officer, IAS

At IAS we are placing big bets on connected TV and OTT as the next digital disruption. We are already seeing major broadcasters start the shift to CTV/OTT content and that trend is expected to continue and grow. We’re leaders in creating solutions for advertisers and publishers to ensure that every ad impression is viewable, brand-safe and fraud-free, and we’re bringing our 10 years of experience in digital verification to the CTV space with our open beta in the US.

By The Drum Reporters

Sourced from The Drum

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Making Customer Engagement The Common Scorecard For Growth

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By Stephen Diorio

Using big data and analytics to create better incentives for sales, marketing and service teams

Steve Lucas, the new CEO of iCIMS, a business that makes software that helps companies recruit talent, is set on doubling sales over the next 18-24 months. He’s done it before as the CEO of Marketo, where he doubled the revenue and tripled the value of the firm to $4.75B in 24 months.

One of the reasons he’s very likely to succeed is he understands how to lead sales and marketing transformation in an engagement economy where customers are channel agnostic and non-linear buyer behavior has blurred the lines between sales, marketing, and customer success functions.

In his book, Engage to Win: A Blueprint for Success in the Engagement Economy, Lucas explains how to grow a business in a market where changing customer buying behavior defies traditional notions of a linear “lock-step” customer journey and makes CRM based on customer, lead, and account ownership an outdated management concept. A key lesson from the book is that growing a business in the engagement economy will require teamwork, customer stewardship, and a highly orchestrated stream of never-ending customer engagement.

“I view my role as CEO as being the firm’s Chief Engagement Officer,” reports Steve Lucas. “My job is orchestrating the customer experience across many touchpoints and functions. This means developing a real-world strategy for customer engagement, which is something they don’t teach in business schools yet because it is different from a traditional marketing or sales approach. Executing a customer engagement strategy involves creating a vocabulary, culture, measurement system and model for orchestrating the engagement of sales, marketing and services with all the key customer stakeholders in ways that resonate and deliver a superior customer experience.”

Many organizations are putting a single leader in charge of marketing, sales, and service to gain more coordinated control over the entire customer journey. To succeed, this new breed of “CXO” will need a better set of financial incentives for these disparate groups to work together. A key success factor in this new growth equation is to create a common scorecard for customer success based on unified customer engagement metrics that provide go-to-market teams more incentives to work together. The holy grail is to create a common set of financially valid and data-driven incentives where the ultimate scorecard for marketing and sales is firm value, future profits and revenue growth.

Growth oriented investors like Vista Equity Partners  (which owns iCIMS) and the Rock Ventures Family of Companies understand and exploit this new buying reality. These market leaders are generating outsized returns on the companies in their investment portfolios because they are mastering the science of growth by actively working with their leadership teams to help them apply advanced analytics to transform their go-to-market culture, processes, and incentives.

“One key to winning in the engagement economy is to develop a universal customer engagement quality score that defines engagement excellence to all the stakeholders in your organization,” according to Lucas. “That means defining as an organization what a 10 out of 10 looks like in terms of customer advocacy, quality of interaction, content sharing, and other relationship health metrics. And then using advanced analytics to build composite metrics that quantify and track customer engagement quality on a customer and account level”

Putting this scorecard for success into operation involves deriving customer engagement quality metrics from the customer data that exists in CRM, exchange servers, marketing automation, and content management systems. The secret is to develop a set of Key Performance Indicators using advanced analytics that track the behaviors and activities that define team success but ladder up to a common scorecard for winning.

Sports teams have embraced analytics in this regard in recent years and provide a model for sales organizations to follow. Like selling teams – sports teams have many different players that play many different roles in order to win the game. There are nine different positions on a baseball team. 11 in Soccer. And over 25 in the NFL. But there is only one scorecard for success – winning. And everyone on the team works together towards that goal.

For example, winning soccer teams can get all 11 players to work as a team because they all understand what it takes to win – score more goals than the opponent. A revolution in advanced analytics has allowed these teams to break down the performance expectations of each player on the team into discrete KPIs – goals saved, passes made, possessions won, and clean tackles – that help each player understand and measure their contribution to that overall goal. In baseball, advanced analytics have allowed GM’s to structure player contracts with financial incentives based on a coherent set of individual performance metrics – runs created, runs saved, errors avoided, hitting efficiency – that all add up in ways that increase the “win probability” of a team and “wins above a replacement player” for an individual.

Sales and marketing leaders need to push their analytics teams to do the same. They need to use advanced analytics and AI to turn their sales engagement data into a common set of measurements and financial incentives that get sales, marketing and services working as a team towards the goals of growing firm value, customer lifetime value, and profits.

For example, Steve Lucas pushed his team at Marketo to clearly define and quantify what a good client relationship looks like empirically on a scale of one to ten. He kept the bar high on engagement quality. Any account team with a customer engagement score less than 9 had to take a series of actions to improve customer health. In parallel, he created a tightly defined customer persona called an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). He created a vocabulary, criteria, reporting, and most importantly financial incentives for his go to market teams to develop relationships with these “ideal customers”. To enforce this discipline of delivering high quality customer engagement to the highest potential customers, his teams were paid 20% higher commissions when they engaged and developed “ideal” customers. They were paid 20% lower commissions when they spent their energies on less than ideal prospects.

Lucas plans to put the same formula to work at iCIMS once his team defines a vocabulary and metrics that best describe customer engagement quality and the ideal customer profile within their unique business model. “The scorecard for successful customer engagement is different for different business models. What worked at Marketo will be different from what works at iCIMS because it’s a different business. But the principles will be the same”, according to Lucas. “The key is to develop a universal customer engagement quality score that defines engagement excellence for all customer facing employees.”

Unfortunately, advanced engagement-based incentives like this are the exception rather than the rule, even though most go to market leaders have the customer engagement data they need to build them. This is a missed opportunity because traditional measures of marketing and sales performance based on a linear sales process are becoming outdated and dysfunctional. These measurement systems fail to reflect the complex variety of touchpoints, stakeholders, and hand-offs involved in the modern customer buying journey. This creates leakage, friction and conflicting agendas when sales and marketing spend too much energy negotiating credit for lead handoffs and not enough time engaging with customers as a team.

Sales leaders are missing a big opportunity by not using the customer engagement data available to them to create advanced measurement systems.  Most organizations are sitting on top of large amounts of customer engagement data in a variety of Revenue Enablement systems – including CRM, exchange (email and calendar), content management, marketing automation, web sites, social media, customer engagement management systems. And that’s not counting data third party partners (like LinkedIn or D&B).  This information needs to be used to track and inform the right sales behaviors, actions and performance incentives.

“Organizations are going to need to rewire their commercial engines to better reflect the new buying reality where customers are channel agnostic and buyer behavior is non-linear,’ reports Brent Adamson, distinguished Vice President in Gartner’s Sales practice. “It’s a big job. It’s going to be painful because it involves reworking the legacy commercial infrastructure, and creating new roles, processes and metrics. So, getting it right in the next several years is probably a reach. But companies that even start to make progress creating metrics, dashboards and incentives that are a more accurate proxy of the current buying reality are going to have a significant advantage over the competition.” According to Adamson, companies that align their metrics and incentives with customer buying behavior will give them a much more accurate picture of the cost of sales, the opportunity cost of selling time, and how different resources contribute to their commercial organizations in terms of commercial outcomes. This will allow them to make much better decisions about how to allocate people, technology, data and content resources based on what they are contributing to the top line, bottom line and value of the company.

Sales and marketing leaders like Marketo and DHL are taking the first steps to align their metrics and incentives with the activities and behaviors that lead to commercial outcomes, customer lifetime value, and account health. They are using advanced customer engagement analytics and sales AI to create customer engagement metrics to serve as the foundation for performance measurements based on real-time information about sales engagement, deal attractiveness, content usage, and persona-level interactions to provide management a more accurate proxy of the current buying reality.

For example, using advanced customer engagement analytics and sales AI to create measures of customer engagement quality were fundamental to helping DHL transform the way they sell, according to Ton Verleg, the VP Global Sales Development at DHL. “We changed the way we sell and for that you need to be armed with relevant data and insights,” relates Mr. Verleg. “The analytics and AI give us unprecedented visibility into the opportunities and provides actionable next steps for our sales executives to sell with the buyers perspective, helping customers be more successful.”

To help organizations develop more financially valid ways to manage their growth resources, I will be studying how leading organizations are creating a common scorecard for growth and presenting the findings at a Revenue Enablement Forum this summer. Reach out to me to participate in the research, and the forum.

Feature Image Credit: Customer Engagement Metrics, Getty

By Stephen Diorio

Sourced from Forbes

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Food for Thought: Is the return to analogue marketing a thing?

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Do consumers have digital advertising and marketing fatigue? Recently there has been talk of a return to ‘analogue’ marketing, such as snail mail, brochures and face-to-face engagement, and away from digital marketing.

CMO asks marketing experts to discuss their views on the subject, and how they’re striving to strike a balance.

Nikki Clarkson

Chief marketing and communications officer, Southern Cross Austereo

It’s challenging to find evidence consumers have digital fatigue. However, it has been proven many times over that the two single most impactful drivers of campaign effectiveness are reach and highly engaging creative.

Credit: Austereo

Nielsen data proves that getting the creative right and delivering this with maximum reach, can account for over 65 per cent of sales attribution. And reach is everything when it comes to the campaign resonating with as many new and existing audiences as possible.

It’s an incredibly important factor for brand growth and market share. This would point marketers towards high reaching, accredited channels such as TV, radio, video and audio streaming and out-of-home, with independently measured online used alongside these more traditional mass media.

A final consideration on reach and campaign effectiveness is targeting, which is becoming more accessible in all media. In stream addressable advertising in audio for example, delivers hyper targeted mass campaigns. These increasingly sophisticated main media targeting capabilities ensure wastage is minimised and frequency is capped.

Therefore, ‘cut through’ is delivered by impact from great work on a targeted, mass scale. It this approach that will set campaigns up to deliver business results.

Martin Wilkins

Marketing manager, The Tax Institute 

One common mistake many marketers make in a digital-first environment is forgetting to listen to what their customers really want when it comes to authentic, personalised engagement.

Credit: The Tax Institute

We’ve listened to our members and stakeholders and understand digital marketing tactics, such as emails, ads and retargeting aren’t enough, in isolation, to build trust, create an emotional connection, and deliver the experience they expect from an institution such as ours.

For instance, events are a very big part of what we do to enhance engagement and offer our members more relevant and interactive experiences, where they can gain knowledge, insights and feel part of a broader community of like-minded people.

And while we do have a robust digital marketing engine that supports our marketing function, we’ll still invest in printed collateral such as brochures and booklets, and these have an educational look and feel which our audience base expects.

For example, at our upcoming Tax Summit in March, while we have invested heavily in digital marketing and inbound strategy, we also have prepared a traditional, printable brochure, as well as a comprehensive, printed prospectus.

In essence, we believe a strategic ‘hybrid model’ of traditional and digital marketing is appropriate for our particular audience segment. The challenge of course is finding a healthy balance between the two. This means our marketing team is constantly collaborating with internal and external stakeholders, to ensure our marketing mix remains agile, responsive, effective and relevant.

Zane Sabré

Co-founder and managing director, Maison de Sabré

When running a business, it’s important you’re reaching your customers via the channels they already use. Considering more than 73 per cent of households shopped online in 2018, it’s essential for businesses to be online as well.

As online shopping tools and platforms continue to grow more technically sophisticated, the way consumers make online purchases is continuously evolving, meaning the opportunities to reach specific audiences, at the right time, is also increasing.

Credit: Maison de sabre

Offline marketing, such as snail mail, brochures and street hawkers have become dated marketing strategies purely due to their limited reach in today’s digital age. They also limit the opportunity for accurate performance tracking, meaning it can be difficult to know if the time and money spent has paid off.

Credit: Red Havas

However, just as they had largely been deserted, it became apparent that it had left a significant amount of white space for many to capitalise on, representing a full cycle in generating cut-through. Analogue marketing transformed from the disrupted channel to the disruptor.

And it is all based on a simple truth: Physical marketing represents the ability to reflect a multi-sensory experience. Consumers crave the touch and even the smell of a fresh catalogue, with the buzz of rifling through to see the hottest new items to buy. Letters – which once had ‘bad PR’ around their speed of delivery – have had a resurgence. The emotional and nostalgic connection people receive from letters make this innately more personal than an e-mail.

So what was once seen as a one-way channel is now leveraging that very notion to maximise its effectiveness and create one-to-one, somewhat intimate, experiences with consumers to get messaging across. Analogue from its previous definition has now become a ‘progressive’ channel in some ways.

And in a world of personalisation and marketers’ constant quest for uniqueness, it is time to embrace the physical world once more. Except this time, with the helping hand of new technologies, they can explore how they maximise their available real estate in a different – and importantly, far more sustainable way than before to deliver an all-round win-win for marketer and consumer.

Follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO conversation on LinkedIn: CMO ANZ, follow our regular updates via CMO Australia’s Linkedin company page, or join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CMOAustralia. 

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I’m running an agency at 24. Here’s what I do differently

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By MJ Widomska.

I founded my content marketing studio when I was 22. I’d already been a full-time social media freelancer for about three years, and I thought I’d been through it all – highs and lows with clients big and small, stints at advertising agencies, meetings and tedious admin.

In early 2018 projects just kept coming, and I decided it’s time to expand. I thought it wouldn’t be any different, really (big misconception), and I can handle it no matter what (debatable).

As I’m writing this, I’m 24 and my agency is nearing its second birthday. We’re now a team of five residing in a small office in East London – not the biggest enterprise the world has seen, but I wouldn’t have thought it possible two years ago.

I’d always preferred to stay quiet about my age. I believe we should be judged by the quality of our work, and I suspect many people would equate my age with a lack of experience. Or, worse, take it as a sign I could be taken advantage of, offered unpaid – or underpaid – gigs.

Beyond ageism

Ageism in the marketing industry is alive and well. It tends to hit those on the other side of the spectrum than me the most, though. It is an industry where fresh ideas are valued above all, and fresh ideas are often unfairly associated with youth. I don’t want to participate in spreading that mindset.

So, I kept my age to myself, considering it nothing but a liability. But we all grow up in different times and circumstances, and as a result, end up with different worldviews. They are all equally valuable.

One day, as I was talking to a friend, I noticed how surprised he was to find out I supplemented my income in the early days of my career by building websites, designing flyers and creating illustrations.

Indeed, I spent so much time on my laptop in my teens that by the time I was 19, I was a junior social media manager, junior copywriter, junior web developer, junior graphic designer and a junior illustrator rolled into one. That’s because I grew up in precarious times, in a bad economy, with pretty bleak prospects. I knew I had to diversify my skillset from a very young age.

Turns out, growing up in the 2000s and early 2010s brought a lot of valuable lessons.

Seeing the potential in others

I was still a teen when I landed my first freelance gig.

I wouldn’t be where I am now without the clients who took a chance on me (just like Abba). My first client, who had a 19-year-old Eastern European me running all his socials, and who recommended me to other clients. A PR consultant who taught me to stop using emojis in emails (yes, I needed to be told). An agency that kept giving me more responsibilities because they believed I could handle it. Another agency which had me sit in on all the big scary meetings, so I had an opportunity to learn. A client who thought I had potential and allowed me to spread my wings — the same client who believed in me even if I messed up.

I like to extend all of the kindness I received to marketing juniors. When I need help on a project, I’m not overlooking people with little to no relevant experience, no matter their age — I’m looking for someone I could believe in.

Flexible working

The marketing industry is no stranger to flexible working. I don’t believe the future of creative work relies on a rigid eight hour working day.

Therefore, if a 9 to 5 isn’t your thing, I trust you’re able to deliver what’s asked of you within a reasonable timeline. I work with adults, I’m not running a daycare — I don’t need to know where you are as long as the work is done.

Be prepared for everything

Would you like to know how to set Gen Z and millennials apart? Since no one agrees what the exact cut-off year between the two is, follow this handy guide instead:

Have they grown up in the era of economic prosperity, and entered the workforce just before, or during the financial collapse of the late 2000s? Have they been surprised to realise they will most likely be financially worse off than their parents? They’re a millennial.

Has the 2008 crisis marked their childhood or teenage years? Have they grown up in a precarious economy and entered the workforce fully aware that they may never buy a house or expect a traditional career path? They’re Gen Z.

I was 12/13 when the market collapsed. Even though it didn’t affect me directly back then, I was aware something has changed for good. I was a teen when the political upheaval in Europe started, and I was in my late teens when environmental issues became a mainstream issue. Any illusions of a safe world I had as a kid were quickly dispersed. It became apparent that if I follow my mum’s (literature teacher) or my dad’s (radio journalist turned writer) paths, I will never buy a house. Hell, I will probably never buy a house anyway. And I may not be able to retire for a very, very, very long time.

If I live long enough for retirement, that is – given that most climate emergency projections paint a catastrophic view of the 2050s. My earliest retirement year is 2063.

So, my constant need for self-improvement is pretty much fueled by existential anxiety. Can’t think of a better motivation!

Everyone’s time is valuable

I coded websites for a living, so when the time came to let someone else code mine, I wasn’t cutting costs. I know how much of your time and heart goes into building a website.

I used to create illustrations for clients, so I wouldn’t offer the illustrators I commission an unfair deal. I remember how soul-crushing it was to receive negative feedback on your art.

My early freelance experiences in various roles helped me empathise with how valuable everyone’s time is. I’ve met freelancers-turned-agency-owners who charged the clients double the day rate they paid the freelancer. I’ve met people who never freelanced and charged the client triple the day rate while cutting the costs as much as they could.

If I believe a freelancer’s work is worth £500 a day and the client agrees, I’m not going to pay them £250 and pocket the rest. They get the whole thing.

The power of belief

Which brings me to my next point – I have opinions I feel strongly about. I don’t just talk about ethics because I heard that’s what the kids like now: I am the kids in question. If I don’t run my business ethically, I won’t be able to look at myself in the mirror. I genuinely believe that we can all do our part in making the world a better place.

This translates itself to the work I do as well. I want it to be meaningful. I want it to be inclusive.

By MJ Widomska.

MJ Widomska, founder and creative director, YRS TRULY

Sourced from The Drum

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3 Simple Digital Marketing Strategies to Transform Your Business

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By AJ Cassata.

A great product isn’t enough to create a successful business – what turns a business into an empire requires an excellent product combined with exceptional marketing.

Thanks to the Internet, it’s easier now more than ever to get a brand or startup in front of target customers.

With all of the free distribution tools like social media platforms, the playing field is equal now! You don’t need significant media connections or large upfront investment to advertise your brand like you would 40 years ago.

Although marketing & communicating with potential customers has never been easier, most businesses still struggle with this. They never seem to get the traction they want online, while some companies see amazing results from online marketing efforts.

What makes a difference is having the right strategy & approach.

The tools to help your business grow are out there, but you need to know how to use them. You need to understand how these platforms work and how to make them work for your business – and if you don’t, hire someone who does!

Digital marketing strategy development can be a bit overwhelming due to the abundance of options you have. Sometimes it seems like a new social media platform or revolutionary software pops up every day!

For the past five years, I’ve been helping other entrepreneurs scale their business, and I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t across dozens of industries. I’ve created & managed campaigns on tons of different platforms & social media channels. Through all of my experimentation, I’ve learned a lot.

In hopes of simplifying digital marketing while giving some actionable steps you can execute on, I want to layout 3 strategies that work across the board in any industry. These strategies will work regardless of if you’re a brand new startup or a 7-8 figure company.

The 3 Strategies That Work Across The Board

Google Ads
Facebook Advertising
Automation In The Sales Process

To help you understand how these strategies work in a real-world setting, I’ll walk you through how we applied them for one of our clients, a naturopathic medicine clinic in Arizona.

We helped the clinic max out its sales capacity. After implementing the three strategies just mentioned and nothing else, the clinic became so busy to the point where the soonest patients could book an appointment was three weeks. That’s an excellent problem to have, isn’t it?

On average, our online marketing campaigns had resulted in an additional 60-80 new client consultations per month for a Stem Cell Therapy service that’s worth $6000-8000 in revenue to the clinic – and that’s just upfront revenue, that’s not including the life-time value of the client.

Digital marketing can also do more for a business than make money – aside from helping to skyrocket sales of this business, we also lowered costs and helped to streamline operations & patient communications.

Our digital marketing campaigns had become such a stable source of new client acquisition that the clinic was able to stop spending on TV & radio advertising, which saved about $5000 a month in advertising expenses.

Like many companies, the clinic also had an inefficient & unorganized sales process, which cost the staff and the business owner extra time & expense.

By introducing automation to the business & its operations, we were able to organize their client communication process, reduce the work-load for the front-office staff, and alleviate pressure on the whole team. As a result, they could focus more on taking care of the patients, and less time on follow-up and scheduling.

So, let’s dive into these strategies so you can replicate the same success into your business!

Google Pay Per Click Ads

Placing ads on Google is extremely useful, as you can get in front of users with a high intent to purchase your product/service.

You pay to advertise on certain search-terms & phrases that your target customer enters into Google – this means that you get in front of the people that are already searching for the solution your business provides.

This is the low-hanging fruit, and where you should start. When my agency is onboarding a new client, nine times out of 10, we begin by rolling out campaigns on Google. The prospects you’ll find from Google ads are the farthest down the buyers’ journey and the closest to making a decision.

These people are already aware of the problem they have and the solution they need.

In the medical clinic’s case, we bid on terms like “Stem Cell Therapy In Scottsdale.”

Somebody who’s performing that search already knows what Stem Cell Therapy is, and they are likely familiar with what it costs, and they are just looking for the best provider.

A big part of marketing is about being in the right place at the right time, and that’s exactly what Google can do for you.

The beautiful thing about Google Ads is that you only pay when someone clicks – so your marketing dollars are only being spent towards people that are interested in your service or product.

However, you have to watch your costs to remain profitable. Before we were hired, the clinic ran campaigns on Google and was paying about $5 for each click. After we audited the account and performed optimizations, we were able to get the Cost-Per-Click down to between $1.50-$2.00, roughly a 70% decrease in cost!

A few tweaks to your campaigns can make a huge difference, which is why you must know what you are doing before you put your credit card in and start launching ads.

Facebook Pay Per Click Ads

With over 3 billion active users, Facebook is an excellent option for just about any business. Similar to Google, due to the sheer size, you’ll be sure that your target market is on Facebook.

Coming from a marketer’s perspective, I can say that Facebook has the most advanced advertising platform & AI, and when you learn the ins and outs of the ads manager, you can make magic happen to your business.

The benefit of Facebook is the hyper-targeting. Great marketing requires substantial targeting. Think about this – you wouldn’t be able to sell meat to a vegetarian, no matter how good your meat is. Getting your ads placed in front of the right people is arguably an essential part of any marketing campaign.

With Facebook, you can create your hyper-specific audience and hone in on your ideal customer. Facebook allows you to select parameters of who you want to see your ads. For example, you can choose based on demographics like income, age, gender, location, and psychographics like interests & personality.

For our medical clinic client, we were promoting a very niche service – Stem Cell Therapy & Bio-Identical Hormone Therapy. The doctor we worked with did not want us to promote everything his clinic offers; he wanted us to help promote those two services so that he could stand out in his local market as a specialist in those areas.

We were able to run particular ad campaigns to different market segments to promote Stem Cell Therapy, such as athletes, golfers, 60+-year-old men & women, even people who are considering getting a knee replacement. Regenerative Medicine is expensive as well, and to prevent people that couldn’t afford the service from booking consultations, we limited the ads to only show to people in the top 25% of income based on zip codes. This level of targeting just isn’t available with other forms of advertising!

Automation In The Sales Process

Facebook & Google are excellent platforms that help to drive traffic & leads for your business or startup, no matter the industry. However, gaining attention is just the first step! Once you have campaigns running & generating leads, now you have to convert those leads into customers! Leads don’t grow a business, sales do.

The medical clinic we worked with, like most businesses, had a sales process that needed much improvement. Lots of leads were coming in, but the clinic didn’t have enough staff to follow up with new inquires and leads consistently.

So, we implemented two new technologies into the business to solve this problem – email follow up, & an online scheduling system.

Before this client had hired my agency, he was having his front office staff call any leads that came in, to schedule appointments. We decided to eliminate this step – when it comes to your sales process, the more steps you have, the more opportunities there are for your leads to drop-off and lose contact.

We found that most of the leads the clinic was paying to generate, were never even getting in contact to schedule a consultation. The front office staff was too busy to follow up with every single lead coming in, which means the business was wasting money on all of the leads that didn’t convert.

To fix this, we created a funnel that directed all of the incoming leads to an online scheduling system, where the prospects could directly book an appointment with the doctor, instead of waiting for the front office to call and schedule them.

Not only did this take a load off of the staff and help the lead conversion flow, but it also made for better customer experience.

We also implemented automated email follow up, which would email the leads every day for three days after signing up for a consultation, to remind them to schedule online, and remind them to show up on time for their appointment.

As you can see, digital marketing can help your business with more than the front-end process of getting awareness, traffic, & leads. These technologies available to us can help convert your leads into customers, make your entire sales process more efficient, free up-staff time, and improve your customer experience.

In conclusion, digital marketing can seem a little daunting with all of the different strategies we hear experts preach, and with all of the different platforms, it’s hard to know where to even begin. So – keep it simple! For getting traffic, stick to the big two – Google & Facebook. From there, use tools like email marketing, SMS marketing & automated scheduling to help convert the leads into customers!

By automating the marketing and sales process, you free up time to focus on other essential and high-level tasks that your business depends on, such as business development, strategic partnerships & developing your team.

By AJ Cassata

Sourced from TechDay

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How to Determine Your Team’s Marketing Objectives

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By DP Taylor.

Clear and actionable marketing objectives are vital for an organization seeking to improve their sales. This guide will help you understand how to craft a strategy with effective marketing goals.

One of the chief principles of marketing is that you have to understand your target market. But even if you understand your niche, it won’t do much good if you don’t have an effective marketing campaign — and you can’t put one together without first defining your marketing objectives.

But doing so can be intimidating because it requires a fundamental review of your company’s mission and your resources to figure out what are the clear, actionable steps you should be making to market your brand. This is especially important for small business marketing when the company doesn’t already have a strong foothold in the market.

Once you’ve done that, you will find your integrated marketing efforts will be far more effective.

There are a few things to understand about marketing objectives before you get started.

Overview: What is a marketing objective?

A marketing objective is a goal that an organization sets to achieve a competitive advantage in the marketplace and build a brand.

While there are many types of marketing strategies and varied approaches to creating a marketing plan, a marketing objective in general focuses on laying out a clearly articulated accomplishment that an organization could achieve, such as brand recognition in 10% of target customers or 250 qualified leads per month.

What to consider when determining marketing objectives

While ultimately your marketing objectives are up to you and will be highly dependent on your business, there are four things you must consider when choosing your marketing objectives.

Have a strong company vision in place

To lay out good objectives, you first need a comprehensive company vision that lays out what you’re trying to accomplish as an organization.

Determine what your niche is as a business, and then figure out what you’d have to do to communicate that message to your target audience.

For example, GoPro has successfully built a customer base from young, active customers by putting together an ad campaign spanning many marketing channels that focuses on daring and adventurous feats by people using their equipment. Some of their marketing objectives could be to sponsor a certain number of extreme sports competitions around the globe, or to make deals with X number of social media influencers.

Track the data

Business metrics are vital to your marketing team’s success. You should be able to identify how many leads you are creating, how many influencers you’ve signed up to promote your product, and any other metric that is important to determining whether you met that marketing objective.

Use email marketing software, social media software, or CMS software to track your team’s activities.

In the GoPro example, they likely track views of their many YouTube videos or mentions on social media.

Make objectives specific

A lot of organizations make the mistake of not properly defining objectives. They leave those objectives, like “become more relevant in the IT security sphere” when they should create a more specific, numbers-based goal of “get 20% more leads in the next quarter.”

Going back to the GoPro example, total views of YouTube videos and mentions on social media is something quantifiable, as opposed to “make lots of quality videos on YouTube” or “get involved in the social media conversation.”

Screenshot of GoPro's landing page promoting the Hero8 and Max.

GoPro’s marketing message of adventure is unmistakable the moment you go to their website. Source: GoPro.

How do you set marketing objectives?

Creating a marketing proposal is relatively straightforward, but this is a step that is not to be rushed: you need to involve everyone and craft measurable marketing objectives that fit with your organization’s mission.

Step 1: Review your organizational goals

Every objective, marketing or otherwise, must build toward your overall organizational goals.

Read through your company’s vision and strategy and come up with ideas on what steps you could take that would get you one step closer to realizing the dream that your strategy lays out. If the objective doesn’t move you in that direction, it’s just a distraction and should be discarded.

Tip: If you’re having trouble finding organizational goals, that could be a sign you need to go back a step further and put together a firm and clear vision for the company.

Step 2: Brainstorm with the team

It’s important to not try to do all of this on your own. Set up a meeting with your marketing team to hash these out. They can tell you what is possible and what is not.

Ask everyone to prepare for the meeting by coming up with some of their own objectives, and then go around the room to talk them out and determine what marketing collateral will be necessary to do the job.

Tip: You should also involve your sales team, because they can tell you what kind of output from the marketing team would help them close more deals.

Step 3: Define the objectives

With everyone having weighed in, you should put together an initial list of objectives and then set up a follow-up meeting to go over them. Here you can talk in more granular detail about these objectives, such as whether the time frame is realistic, or whether the right people are assigned to the right tasks.

Tip: Remember, these objectives need to be clear and measurable, nothing vague. Ask yourself, how would I prove that we achieved this objective? If you aren’t able to articulate what success looks like, you need to do more work to define the objective.

Step 4: Create a marketing strategy

Now that you have marketing objectives laid out, it’s time to build a marketing strategy around them. Create a step-by-step process that describes how you will achieve each objective, and in what time frame. It should also identify the stakeholders, and who will be responsible for what.

Tip: Being specific when defining marketing objectives should help you identify clear next steps. Break down the steps as much as possible to create easy actions the team can take to increase the likelihood of achieving the objective.

Step 5: Measure the results and then regroup

Think of the objectives as a cycle rather than a journey to an end goal. Once you’ve completed steps 1-4, you need to measure how you performed on a regular basis, perhaps quarterly, and then get together to talk it through.

What went right? What didn’t? Did we achieve marketing goals? What should we do differently in the next quarter?

Tip: Use software to track important marketing metrics, such as leads and website traffic. Many software options can create detailed reports that can help you spot trends or weaknesses.

Spotify has exploded in popularity by positioning itself as a brand that helps people find new music. Source: Spotify.

Examples of common marketing objectives and KPIs

But what should your objectives look like? Again, that will vary widely based on factors such as your industry, what your overall goals are, and what your target market looks like. However, here are a few common marketing objectives that might help you come up with your own.

Increasing brand recognition

A common goal of marketing campaigns is to increase people’s awareness of your brand. If people don’t know who you are, they will not buy your product or service, so it’s important to know just how many customers in your target market have heard of you.

Improving brand trust/reputation

A corollary to brand recognition is brand trust or reputation. You want customers to not just know who you are, but think of your brand as one they can trust to provide a good experience.

Increasing incoming leads

When it comes to making sales, incoming leads can make or break your organization. It is important for most companies to increase the number of qualified leads coming into their sales funnels.

Increasing website traffic

An increasing percentage of websites these days rely on Internet sales, so increasing website traffic is a common goal for companies hoping to put their products in front of more people. You might focus on digital marketing terms like click-through rate (CTR), cost-per click, and impressions.

Identifying new lead sources

Having all of your eggs in one basket when it comes to marketing is a risky strategy, so it’s important for organizations to identify new sources of qualified leads.

Improving customer service

Customer service is vital to customer retention, and it raises the prospect that those customers will buy other products from you in the future or spread the word about how great you are to other potential customers. As a result, companies often seek to improve their customer service as a marketing strategy.

Defining marketing objectives now will help marketing efforts later

Determining your marketing objectives will help you determine what steps you should be making, such as whether to spend more time on website marketing, account-based marketing, or other types of marketing efforts.

When you properly lay out marketing objectives after spending a sufficient amount of time researching them, you make your marketing more focused and therefore more effective across the board.

That’s why it’s important to schedule time now to, even if it’s just a couple of hours, to get the ball rolling. The sooner you do it, the sooner you’ll see positive results in your company.

By DP Taylor.

Sourced from the blueprint

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