Tocquigny Advertising and Design

Copyright©2007. Reprinted with permission of the Institute of Industrial Engineers from November/December 2007, Industrial Management. All rights reserved.

In light of the recent advancements in engaging customers through technology, many organizations are struggling to understand how well their marketing function is performing. And more than that, they want to know how well they could be performing if they just knew what to do differently. Staying abreast of new marketing opportunities is almost as much work as performing the marketing function itself. Therefore, most marketers are still poorly informed about the new strategies available to make the most efficient use of a marketing budget. Additionally, the role of marketing has changed profoundly in the past five years to include the use of sophisticated analytics tools and techniques. Many marketing organizations today lack these tools and the knowledge to provide valuable insights that can be derived from analytics. Without these insights, marketing strategies are based on intuition. This is no way to win in today’s competitive business arena. Following are 10 big questions to ask yourself when looking at your marketing function. These will help you examine how you might raise the level of competitiveness and understand your organization’s position within the new marketing landscape. This is by no means a comprehensive evaluation template, but some of the tools that today’s marketers should be using to create more alignment between the management of your company and the marketing function.

1. Does marketing have an annual strategic plan that is aligned with overall company goals?
   A plan composed of specific strategies and tactics that add up to meet company goals not only helps C-level executives understand the value of marketing, but it demonstrates how marketing is actively engaged in supporting organizational goals. This action is also important in gaining an overall understanding of what the marketing team believes can be accomplished and what those accomplishments mean in terms of reaching company goals. An annual marketing plan with budgets assigned to individual strategies and tactics should be the top priority for a well-run marketing function. Plans such as these are best communicated in a simple diagram (Figure 1) accompanied by detailed individual follow-up plans that outline the budgets and timelines for each strategy, initiative, and tactic. Budgets should be based on intentional prioritization of the strategies and how they support company goals. Alignment of the annual plan and marketing budget is the first step toward tuning up your marketing organization.

Additional questions to ask yourself:

• Does my C-suite communicate company goals to the marketing organization?
• Does marketing respond with yearly and quarterly plans formulated to support those goals?
• Does marketing provide measurement and progress reports with metrics that show how marketing performance is meeting company goals?
• Is there a shared vision regarding the allocation of marketing funds and what those funds are expected to return?
• Do other parts of my organization such as sales and customer service understand what marketing plans to do and how they can support those efforts?


2. What data is used to create our annual strategic plan?
   A solid plan is backed by insights gleaned from various data sources, from customer and lead databases to online and moderated focus groups. Marketers must determine what types of insights are most valuable and where to acquire them. Most companies want detailed insights about their customers, both existing and prospective. This understanding will help in the development of messaging maps that detail the most compelling messaging for each customer target (Figure 2).

Additional questions to ask yourself:
• What constitutes our best customer, and is that information in the customer profile we use to target and score incoming leads?
• Are we mining for data points that can be used in retargeting, such as age, gender, race, geography?
• How are customers segmented?
• Do we understand our different customer types, how they think, and how they make decisions?
• Are messaging maps in place to standardize and refine the best possible messaging for each customer?
• Is marketing in place to message to each customer type differently, in the most compelling way possible?
• What is the lifetime value of our customers, and how much should we spend to get new ones?


3. Do we control our brand or does it control us?
   An understanding of your brand’s relative position in the market is a basic data benchmark that should provide direction for many of your marketing activities. Every company has a brand. Some choose to control their brand and use it to enhance the overall value of the company, while others do nothing to nurture their brand. The resulting “accidental brand” tends to rely on a never-ending string of short-sighted efforts to generate short-term revenue to meet goals. I have seen this vicious cycle create a belief in many companies that they cannot afford branding efforts. In the long run, this is a far more costly approach than controlling the impression a brand makes. Brand control can generate long-term demand by increasing the perceived value of the company’s products and services.

Additional questions to ask yourself:
• Does marketing provide brand studies on a regular basis that show how our overall brand is perceived relative to competitors?
• Are there insights attached to our studies that direct marketing efforts so that improvement will be tracked over time?
• What is our brand equity or valuation?

4. Are we hearing the buzz of our company’s reputation?
   In addition to understanding what customers tell you about their experience of your products, services, and brand, it is increasingly important to understand what they are telling others. As customers engage with your brand through your Web site and other online experiences such as blogs, social networks, wikis, and tagging, they take the initiative to extend their impressions to other potential and existing customers. These engaged customers are leading important conversations online that are creating your reputation. Bloggers may be posting complaints about your products or about any poor performance they experience with regard to your company. In light of the fact that many blogs have greater readerships than significant daily newspapers in large cities, understanding the messages that are being circulated about your company is extremely important. Marketing organizations must understand and monitor this buzz. They must measure and act on this customer engagement as well as understand customers’ intentions. Traditional online measures such as number of visitors to a Web site, number of pages viewed, and time spent on each page don’t indicate how people are engaging with your brand and how they feel about your brand. Measures such as content forwarded to a friend and comments posted on blogs can be much more relevant than the traditional activity measures we looked at five years ago.

Additional questions to ask yourself:
Is marketing using new tools such as Technorati, Digg, and Nielsen BuzzMetrics to monitor what people are saying about our company online?
• Are they finding ways to participate in the conversations?
• Do we have a blogging strategy?
• How much online conversation is there about our company compared to competitors?
• What is our net promoter score? (Derive the net promoter score by taking the percentage of customers who are promoters and subtracting the percentage who are detractors.)

5. Is marketing in step with product development and sales to manage and track customer relationships?
   Data on existing customers must be regularly examined to fuel the improvement of customer relationships and boost retention rates over time. Today’s marketing organization should work with tools such as customer satisfaction surveys and loyalty assessments to contribute ongoing data to your customer satisfaction scorecards. These scorecards will tell a graphical story about your customer relationships over time. Product managers, product developers, and sales teams should be included in a collaborative effort to focus on adding value to customer relationships. The insights gleaned from a customer satisfaction scorecard should be used to shape messaging as well as influence new product development and relationship management techniques. Marketers often prefer to distance themselves from this type of collaboration with sales and product development. Watch for this. It is a sign of a siloed organization that is missing out on important opportunities to be successful.

Additional questions to ask yourself:
• Do we have a communication vehicle recording satisfaction of critical-to-quality characteristics that is regularly updated and reviewed with clients?
• Is there a commitment to action in place and an annual plan showing customer satisfaction activities and how these elate to marketing?

6. How well do we know our enemy?
   Understanding your competition, their strengths, weaknesses, and plans for the future is critical to the development of an effective strategy. Understanding your competition will help provide clarity about where to focus marketing efforts. Are you getting regular data about what your competitors are doing in the marketplace? It is important to understand what your competitors are spending on marketing and how their marketing is performing compared to yours. Quarterly brand lift is just one example of how companies monitor their marketing effectiveness in relation to their competition. You should be receiving competitive sales growth and media exposure on a regular basis. The dinosaur marketer thinks this is something he cannot afford so he relies on his gut because that has always worked for him in the past. Today, it is better to spend a bit less on media to acquire the insights that are needed and then spend whatever is left in the smartest possible way to learn what performs best.

7. Are customers beating a path to our new door?
   Everyone has one: a new front door. It’s called search. Your success with Internet search can bring an exciting new customer stream and a source of customer interaction to your company or it can hurt your company’s performance. If your competitors have a significant advantage over you in their search rankings, then you could soon feel a shift in the ground that you once thought was solid. I recently visited a large communications company that sells technology equipment to businesses. They have always sold their products and services to office managers in mid-size firms, and they reached them through the Yellow Pages. However, their target customer has shifted over the past few years, becoming the IT manager rather than the office manager in firms. IT managers search online when they need new vendors. Therefore, this company is experiencing a steady decline in business. They must bring their marketing up to date by establishing a robust listing at the top of search engines so that when potential customers are looking for what they sell, they are visible and have an opportunity to vie for the sale.

Additional questions to ask yourself:
• Do we have a strategy for paid and organic searches?
• Are we targeting different customers with customized strategies?
• Am I getting monthly reports that provide an idea of engagement we are attaining from our search engine efforts?
• Do we have landing pages that take our customers to content that is specific to their interest?
• Is our Web site optimized for search?

8. Is our Web site doing all that it can to support marketing?
   A successful Web site offers users a variety of ways to interact with your company, receive the information they want, and forward that information on to others. A Web site that simply describes your company from an egotistical perspective is not pulling its weight.

   Tracking the types of interactions users have with your site and the influence your site is exerting in the marketplace are helpful in determining the potential of your Web site as a component of your overall marketing plan. For instance, you may find that you can replace an e-mail marketing effort with a combined strategy of search engine marketing, blogging, and an enhanced Web site and landing pages. Your Web site should have a meaningful role to play in almost every strategy in your marketing plan. If it is not robust enough to plug in to your overall plan with significant contributions, then it may be time for a series of enhancements.

9. Which tactics are working?
   Understanding which of your marketing efforts are working to produce the results you want may be the most important part of your overall strategy. A testing strategy will, over time, allow you to learn which adjustments or tweaks push the needle in the desired direction. Today’s marketing tool box should be equipped with a testing strategy that pits different media against each other to determine the proper media mix, find out whether your messaging is doing the very best job, whether you are using the most compelling offers, and whether changing the creative executions of your marketing can improve results. Learning over time through a systematic analytic approach will allow for intelligent optimization and the control of the direction your marketing is going.

10. What’s the big picture?
    To understand the performance of your marketing activities and glean insights from the results, a simple, easy-to-read dashboard is essential. Executives need to understand how their marketing spending is helping the company meet its goals. Marketers must collaborate with the chief financial officer and other executives to identify the most critical and informative performance metrics for the company. No more than five metrics should be on a company’s dashboard, and these are different for every company. Once key measures are identified, the creation of a simple dashboard and the regular distribution of this to those who want it will be a businesstransforming addition to any company. Almost all of the metrics can be automatically populated onto the dashboard, and it can be made available online so that executives can view it any time from anywhere in the word. Some marketing professionals shy away from this degree of accountability. They may not know how to identify the measures that matter, how to get the data, how to construct the dashboard, or how to create insights from the information.

Additional questions to ask yourself:
• Have we identified key marketing performance metrics, and do those metrics track back to our annual company goals?
• Do we look at these measures at least once a month?
• Is marketing presenting comprehensive insights on the overall performance so that optimization is taking place?

Sanity check

I’ve seen many marketing organizations chasing the classic definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. I’ve addressed just a few of the questions that keep executives awake at night. Too many times, marketers simply do not know if one tactic would work better than another. They have no idea if they were to spend more on marketing whether their results would improve. To make matters worse, there is no simple window to view marketing results that provide answers. Today, it’s more important than ever to have an integrated marketing approach rather than a patched together solution. Offline marketing has its place in most marketing mixes, so you need skills in this area; however, a team with experience in digital marketing along with the tools and expertise to measure performance is essential for success in today’s market.