The business world has changed. The digitization of our society has sped up by 5 years, physical events are out for the foreseeable future, and outbound sales effectiveness is going flat or declining. This is putting a lot of pressure on your current marketing system to build pipeline while adapting to the new marketplace. The disruption in the marketplace has created a huge opportunity, but, to capture this opportunity, flawless digital execution is no longer an option.
As a company that specializes in creating digital demand, OM benefits from the ability to look under the hood of hundreds of companies every year. What we continue to see is that most marketing systems often operate as a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Every quarter teams set unrealistic goals, spend weeks planning, then almost instantly go back to scattered execution. Throwing ad-dollars at poorly executed search and social campaigns, writing content with no strategy, and endlessly chasing data and attribution reports for their leadership. Then, hopefully somewhere in there, they can launch a planned webinar or case-study before the quarter ends.
With a great product and a good team, this may have been enough to sustain business progress. But, in a world where competition is speeding up and legacy business development strategies are fading, this will no longer work. Marketing needs to be taken seriously and your execution must be better.
What is flawless digital execution:
It feels like digital growth is a mature industry, but the truth is that we’re only into about 20 years of digital marketing and 10 years of advanced practices as the platforms developed. This often means that advanced skill sets are rare. Have you heard of the coveted unicorn marketer? Due to this, it’s extremely important that companies step back, take a look at their digital execution, and deeply understand if it’s healthy and effective. Are you doing marketing or just continually problem solving? Are your strategies influencing your key metrics and KPI’s? Are you reporting on true growth metrics (pipeline/revenue) or vanity marketing KPIs?
Here is a basic yet important approach to better execution:
- Foundation: Before chasing another campaign, flawless execution begins with a healthy digital foundation. Marketers often spend more of our weeks solving integration issues, CRM issues, and chasing down data that does not exist. Slow down and check your core basics. Is your site indexed properly? Are your key conversion events tracked? Do you have a strategy or are you just executing? Does your team have demand generation experts or are they “figuring it out”? And most importantly, are you clear on the core KPIs that will move the needle? You must work intentionally to set a good foundation and baseline for growth marketing.
- Demand Generation: As your foundation becomes healthy, slowly relaunch your demand channel. One-by-one understand the data, annotate your tactics, and work to define what you’re good at and what works for your unique business. This will set a precedent for your growth stage.
- Growth: This is the true marketing stage. Instead of “marketing whack-a-mole” in the growth stage your foundation is healthy, your demand generation channels are understood, and you and your team are able to slow down, create campaigns and strategies, and intentionally launch, learn, and grow.
The key word here is intentional. We need to not do digital because it’s something we’re supposed to do, we need to understand our actions and create a plan for real strategic marketing.
The steps you need now:
The changing world is requiring you and your competitor to audit and optimize how you operate. It’s time to hit the reset button, create a plan, and be better. Don’t be overwhelmed, the steps below are the simple steps your business needs to take. Today.
- Audit and optimize your existing execution.
- Set a Marketing vision.
- Set ambitious and realistic tangible goals.
- Create a tactical plan that ties directly to your goals.
- Execute.
