How to Bring Simplicity, Clarity, Alignment to Marketing Systems

You’ve got a remarkable brand story – simple, yet compelling.  

You’ve formulated your go-to-market strategy – a clear path to reaching your target customers with the right message, through the right channel, at just the right time to get them to act.

Now, all that’s missing to truly transform your marketing is the alignment of the Systems you need to scale and deliver measurable business results. Marketing Systems enable you to flawlessly execute your strategy and measure the return on your marketing investment. 

To be clear here, when we say “Systems” it means much more than just technology. Systems include the business processes, measurement systems, and organizational capabilities required to deliver, track, and manage the customer experience across every customer touchpoint: from the earliest stages of the Customer BuyWay through to the empowerment of advocates and brand evangelists.

“In order to create a profitable customer experience that is truly remarkable, you need a framework for understanding the customer’s journey, how different segments of customers transit that journey, what their preferences are along the way, and how to adjust your tactics in real-time based on insights derived from actual customer behavior.”  – When Story Meets Strategy: The Customer BuyWay

Success with Marketing Systems requires putting the right people, processes, and technology in place to execute effectively. After all, the best strategies are only as effective as their tactical execution.

Here are 14 transformational tips to help you bring simplicity, clarity, and alignment to your Marketing Systems.

1. Use dashboards for visibility into capacity and workflows.
2. Understand your KPIs. Do they align with your strategy? Be upfront with the metrics that are going to matter and hold your team accountable to hit those.
3. Measure for ROI on everything, including processes.
4. Establish both a database that provides visibility into marketing performance as well as processes that make it easy to capture the data needed to measure ROI accurately.
5. Be ruthlessly consistent that everything you budget for aligns with your strategic marketing plan.
6. Show your finance team the research that’s led you to request budget and then prove that they can trust you.
7. Be visible with your spending. Hold your team and others accountable for what they spend and always have a solid answer for “How, where, and when did you allocate your budget?”
8. Set up processes that enable visibility.
9. Measure the impact of marketing throughout the customer’s lifecycle.
10. Generate executive-level performance reports in the “language of the business” (ROI) to reinforce accountability in action.
11. Manage your assets with a “single version of the truth.” Consider a digital asset management (DAM) tool that allows you to easily store, organize, track and repurpose your branded assets (such as photography, videos, rich graphics, 3D imagery, text documents, PowerPoint presentations) resulting in greater brand and licensing compliance and increased team productivity and efficiency.
12. Communication between partners is key – metrics, processes, opportunities should all be communicated constantly.
13. For your distribution partners, get in the habit of sharing data. Meet regularly to review important data points so that you can leverage your collective knowledge to understand customers better.
14. Enable a “learn-act-learn” culture where risk-taking in the marketplace is not only tolerated but encouraged.

Managing your marketing team’s capacity is only going to get more difficult as customer demands and marketing channels increase. If you have internal visibility into capacity and processes, you can manage your marketing team more easily. With clear visibility, you can start to find the pain points in your processes, and you can address them appropriately. It’s important to understand how to identify the common challenges that are crushing marketing operations teams and to take proactive measures to prevent the mayhem from wreaking havoc in your organization. In our recent whitepaper, you’ll learn how to diagnose and treat the 5 triggers of marketing mayhem. Download it now!

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