By Teresa Caro
It’s your first month on the job and you have been asked to turn around a floundering marketing team. As you meet with your team, your peers and your boss, you hear questions such as: Did this campaign work or not? Why are we spending all this money on XYZ martech? Does social media/content marketing even work? The head of customer service claims marketing’s email campaigns are driving more phone calls to customer service, nullifying any return on investment, is this true? Do we really need this additional resource? Will there be a return on investment to this person? Why does it take so long to connect campaign data with results data? What does it mean to have a single view of the consumer (SVC)? And my favorite, marketing says it worked, yet the product owner says it didn’t. What is the definition of worked? In the words of Homer Simpson, “Aw, you can come up with statistics to prove anything…forty percent of all people know that.”
So… where to begin?
1. Align the business strategy (different from marketing strategy). Identify the 3-4 agreed-upon business objectives and then confirm everyone is measuring these objectives the same way as this will confirm they are the correct ones. For example, three typical business objectives include Brand, Sales, and Retention/Loyalty. Is it brand awareness or brand perception? Sales may seem clear (acquiring new consumers always takes priority), yet ticket size may be a key challenge. Retention may also be obvious as typically it is measured by LTV (lifetime value), yet does everyone agree on the calculation? Do you even know how it is calculated or is it a mysterious number provided to you by the CFO? Read more…
2. Agree upon success measures. Once the business objectives are in place, different strategies, such as improving cross-channel consumer experience and optimizing campaign conversions, are developed. Traditionally, these have been marketing’s responsibility, yet, in today’s world, aspects of these strategies could be owned by IT, by customer service, and, in the financial space, the risk team. It’s one thing to tell someone how their success will be measured, it’s another making sure their actions don’t conflict with another department. So, in addition to success measures, RACI comes into play (responsible, accountable, consulted and informed). Read more…
3. Create a single view of the consumer. This is the buzzword used to talk about how you need to have all consumer data in one place, tracked in a way that rolls back up to metrics and KPIs. It is important to understand the data warehouse may not offer what everyone needs. Marketing has their marketing automation tool, customer service has their call center tool, modeling team has their favorite. Try as we might to agree on one tool, it’s just not realistic. Instead, agree upon data feeding back to a centralized location so it can be shared across departments. Read more…
4. Evaluate (and potentially replace) martech. Track down the person (if this is not you) who speaks both “marketing” and “IT” languages before you start this effort. It’s easy for marketing to select a solution that works for them. Yet, that’s not where it ends… Marketing’s choice for a CMS may be .net and the IT employs Java developers. Or, a simple choice, like WordPress, is also the #1 most hacked CMS, so IT will need to help you keep it secure – are they ready? Google Analytics may be free, yet IT may use a single page application (a SPA) and in some cases need to pass a token… again requiring a data layer… and IT support. And the list goes on. Considering what is the best martech cannot be decided in silos.
5. Generate actionable insights. It’s one thing to have data, reports, and maybe even have the ability to draw a conclusion, yet how easy is it to drive those insights back into your tactics? How long does it take? As you work through 1-4 above, ensure you keep #5 in mind. Read more…
This list can feel daunting… and in many ways it is… Yet, if you start at the top, work your way down, you will gain alignment across the organization and create a high-performing, fast-moving, insight-driving analytics team.
About the Author
As Senior Vice President of Marketing for Fortiva, Teresa Caro brings over 20 years of strategic marketing experience in the digital and traditional space, including email, social, and analytics. Teresa plays an instrumental role in defining how Fortiva and its B2B2C and B2C brands can improve sales and customer retention, strengthen loyalty, and increase advocacy through the use of digital marketing and technology. Prior to joining Fortiva, Teresa held leadership roles at leading agencies: Senior Vice President of Social and Content Marketing for Engauge (acquired by Publicis and merged with Moxie), as well as the head of strategy for the southeast region of Razorfish. @teresacaro