Increased digitization and the rise of social media’s popularity has transformed the face of marketing. Traditional marketing methods that worked before are not as effective anymore.
If a business wants to stay relevant and compete, meet their customers where they are, and grow profitably in their moment of interest, marketing will need to transform from an activity-based cost center to a profitable revenue engine.
A key enabler of the broader transformation of marketing is the ability to digitally transform. Given that many marketing leaders are not technologists, there’s a tendency to avoid or prolong the transformational work because they are intimidated by technology and fear failure.
With the explosion of system implementers and the advancement of technologies to be more user friendly, digitally transforming your marketing does not need to be as difficult as it seems. You can easily bring your marketing strategy into the new age – you just need to be clear about what you’re trying to accomplish, the types of strategies you want to execute, and how you want your team to work.
Here are 5 quick tips for a successful marketing transformation:
Assess & Analyze Current State
A famous saying goes, “You don’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been.” You can’t move forward without analyzing your current processes and how they can improve. The first step is looking at how your organization does marketing today.
Rapidly changing market dynamics today push you to both question and focus on your overall marketing goals, current challenges, and how to best overcome those challenges. This could mean utilizing tools of self-assessment and industry benchmarks, which will help you measure your marketing and sales process maturity and diagnose your current conversion rates to determine what changes and investments need to be made.
Doing a complete analysis might show you that there’s too much of a focus on traditional methods and that you need to move toward digital strategies. Please note that this doesn’t mean completely turning away from your old ways – rather, incorporating new and effective methods to elevate your marketing.
An important part of the marketing transformation process is having a clear vision and aligned goals. As much as it’s essential to reflect on what might need improvement, it’s just as important to have a clear overall vision for a desired future state – a north star.
Set trackable goals early on in the process. Setting encouraging goals will motivate you to keep going, and it will make you feel better once you achieve them. Writing the goals down and putting them in a visible place where everyone can see them will also encourage the creative team.
The north star and aligned goals will make it easy to keep your organization focused on doing the right things, in the right order, and in the right way to successfully transform marketing into a high performing revenue engine.
Gain Organizational Support for Change
Marketers cannot attempt to transform without the support and buy-in from their peers in Sales. You can’t go it alone. It’s time to share a little secret with you that has worked well for me, more than once.
This secret helped me not only change sales perception of these activities, but also gave my allies a rallying cry for changing or treating marketing and/or marketing investments differently.
Did you know that one poor experience can lead to one quarter of your prospects walking away? When organizations are under pressure, they tend to value quantity over quality and start delivering horrible experiences to customers.
You’re going to look for the worst possible examples in your database of where your orga- nization has emailed the prospect/customer so often that you’re shocked they haven’t unsubscribed, blacklisted, or reported you for violation of CAN-SPAM or GDPR regulations. Then you’re going to take that example and shine a big light on it for all to see.
This example is going to become your organization’s wall of shame: the reason why your organization can’t continue marketing the way it has.
Build and Support a Great Team
Having a goal is important, but finding the right team is just as important. That’s because your marketing team is responsible for enacting that goal and vision.
That being said, you need to create a marketing team that aligns with your overall goals. In most cases, digital marketing transformation requires those in the team to be data-driven and have an analytical mindset, as well as technical capabilities.
Now that we’ve briefly introduced the importance of building a good team, it’s time that we emphasize just how important it is to set them up for success with a clear set of priorities, the right working environment, effective communication, and enabling tools. If you don’t, you risk failure.
Employees that have experienced failed transformations often describe an anxious working environment where there are constant disruptions, uncertainty, a lack of role clarity, and immense stress on employees to complete projects despite conflicting priorities and an overwhelming workload.
As you can probably assume, this creates a decrease in employee engagement and a high employee turnover rate.
On the other hand, employees that have managed a successful transformation described working environments that were inspired by a clear north star, encouraged cooperation and collaboration, and embraced thinking outside the box. It’s not rocket science that this kind of environment leads to a more successful hiring process and high employee engagement.
A great team is key to executing your vision. You’re likely to perform better if you attract, hire, and retain the right talent. This requires everyone to understand the vision and their role in making it happen.
Use Technology to Collect, Analyze & Take Action on Data
A big part of digital marketing transformation is moving toward data-driven marketing. As a result, the marketing technology landscape has grown by a whopping 5233% over the last 9 years, according to website Chiefmartec.com.
The fastest growing segment of marketing technology? Data and analytics. Smart marketing leaders invest in technology that makes it easy to aggregate, analyze, and then take action on your data.
Nowadays, there are numerous marketing apps and software platforms to help make that job easier for you. These platforms can help you understand the health of your database, performance of your marketing campaigns, the source of your inbound traffic, reveal the buying intent of your engaged audience, and tell a story about marketing’s impact.
For example, mobile & web analytics platforms include Google Analytics, MOZ, Surfer SEO, Cision and HotJar. Dashboards and data visualization platforms include Tableau, DOMO, Qlik, and SAP.
Data enhancement platforms include InsideView, Reachforce, Bombora, DiscoverOrg, and ZoomInfo. Marketing analytics, performance and revenue attribution platforms include Hive 9, Bizible, Allocadia, Full Circle Insights, and Proof.
Business, customer intelligence and data science platforms include Birst, Salient, Tibco, Anaplan, IBM and Snowflake.
Not investing in data & analytics technologies could lead to blindspots in a rapidly evolving market, limited capability to execute advanced marketing strategies, poor marketing performance, inefficiencies, increased costs, and an inability to prove business impact. Data fuels your marketing and analytics help you prove how well your marketing is performing.
Just remember that data is useless if you don’t properly analyze it to gain important insights. Then, once you have actionable insights, make the necessary changes. We know that relying on data over what your gut tells you can be challenging at first. However, trust the tools to provide customer analytics and trust where the data leads. This will give you a distinct advantage over your competition.
Collaborate with IT to Grow Your Revenue
You should now have a clear vision and roadmap for a marketing transformation that will better support your business goals and objectives. To successfully deliver on that vision, Marketing must collaborate with Information Technology (IT) to develop the needed infrastructure.
When marketers and tech people work together, the organization wins. Global management consulting firm McKinsey found that companies whose marketing leaders work with their counterparts in IT to achieve company goals grow their revenues at 10 percent per year – twice as quickly as the average S&P 500 firm.
When marketers fail to provide enough details, make technology decisions without the involvement of IT, or attempt to re-engineer cross-functional workflows without including IT in the process, they are doomed for failure. Therefore, we recommend including your IT partners from the start, as you cannot successfully drive this type of transformational change without IT’s support.
Make sure to effectively translate your transformation roadmap into clear business and technical requirements documentation for your IT partners. We also recommend including them in your evaluation and selection of technology providers and system implementers.
Conclusion
While digital marketing transformation can sound intimidating, there are agencies and technologies that can accelerate your work – the real challenge is changing the company culture and marketing workflows.
Real change only happens when people are willing to change. Don’t wait until your company’s senior executives or customers demand you to transform marketing. If you wait until your company’s revenue performance stalls or declines, it’ll be too late.
Digital transformations can take time and will be impossible to do if you’re standing on a burning platform. So, will you stand by and be disrupted by market forces, or disrupt yourself before it’s too late?