The first thing to do in a new job running a marketing department as well as every year you are there, is to run a systems audit.
A what? Yup, marketing has systems. Every time you adopt a campaign into business as usual, every time you implement a customer service program, every time you add something to a library program, you are building up your marketing systems.
They’re not overt, they aren’t necessarily measured regularly and sometimes they just get done so well you forget about them. But wrapped around that are normally suppliers, IT, some history for doing it, and most importantly, money. The business moves on, things get redesigned, the brand repositions, a better solution appears, a better supplier comes along, money is needed elsewhere, the reason for doing it no longer exists or priorities change.
They key point is that as you embed things that help you achieve your marketing plan so it becomes part of a system that acquires, activates and retains customers. The audit asks the question ‘Are they important now!’
So how to do it
1. Suppliers
Having a good supplier isn’t everything, you need to understand if they are still relevant. Is what they are doing achieving where you want to get to.
When I started in my current job we had the best SEO agency in the country and they were the first supplier I ended the relationship with. Not because of the quality of their output but because the business had bigger wins in other areas that we needed to concentrate on.
The tweaking that SEO requires meant the business wasn’t placing enough time on more important objectives. For the strategy to work we needed to spend more time on bigger hitting projects. The audit found this out. Sometimes you don’t have the resources to do all the right things you’re supposed to do.
What were the effects? We continue to increase our page rank anyway and search as a lead generator has quadrupled. It could have grown faster but wouldn’t have generated the revenues that we have now from other initiatives.
2. Customer communications
Email is our customer communications killer app so we shopped around to ensure we had an email system to meet our objectives; as well as looking at our objectives for email. We kept our supplier but changed the user experience it generates. Email needs to engage but where to engage? On the website or in the email itself.
It was used as a product promotional tool but the audit of what it did allowed us to realise that maintaining customer engagement was more important to drive revenue growth. We moved from sending ‘buy this’ to ‘new information for you’. We also moved from a deep content email to a deeper content website with the email generating traffic for new content. This allowed us to remove costs on campaign creation while generating greater engagement with the website.
3. Collateral
We manage 103 pieces of collateral in the form of application materials, account maintenance, legal obligations, creative and client information. This is unfortunately growing largely due to regulation but an audit allowed is to identify the drivers of each, collect a register and manage changes to shed through each piece. More importantly it showed where we were doubling up and manage the purpose of each rather than manage purely the content of each.
We are now more nimble, can control print costs, provide better access to operational staff for documents and have reduced print costs through a greater understanding of the volumes we need for each.
4. Media
Traditionally media buyers manage most of the refinement of the properties you use to generate leads and reduce the cost per lead. It’s a free service and they make their money from the publishers every time you pay for an advert. They also get better prices as they buy in bulk.
The audit found this wasn’t happening and many partner websites that were providing leads were either expensive or needed more time than they were worth for the business they generated.
Some of them had moved shifted their demographic appeal and were no longer relevant to our offer. While we maintain space on the free properties we don’t spend time on them if its not worth it. If they churn c’est la vie. And now we have money to develop other media channels to increase our reach.
5. Customer Relationship Management
There are few CRM systems that are flexible enough to work well, but the audit showed ours is and it was vastly under-utilised. We can collect customer information then control our sales pipeline through automatic triggered communications. Unfortunately it wasn’t being used much and the triggers we had hadn’t changed since the website was developed.
The CRM works off a thin content layer of customer contact information backed up by behavioural triggers to send information to customers as they progress through the buying cycle. This was only done for existing signed up customers so we developed the goal to work back through the pipeline to when people first visit the website.
We’re now collecting contact customer information at early stage interest with the DIY brochure. This helps us build the relationship at its earliest point so we can follow and cajole them right through the buying cycle.
6. Staff
Are they delivering the strategy? Marketing departments are beset with traditional roles – product manager, communications manager, direct marketing manager, brand manager to deliver function in an operational capacity. However, marketing is not operational, it is the strategic and tactical delivery of the revenue line.
Reshape roles. In our case someone looks after the user experience. It doesn’t matter if it’s a website or a product or service; you need to understand how people buy and consume your product. Get someone that manages the publications not just the brand and image. Concentrate on function as well as form so identity is consistent with reducing friction with customers.
Have someone who manages the conversations with customers not just someone who briefs a single minded proposition within an agency or responds to press enquiries. And as the boss, ensure you manage the vision, the market change and understand the drivers. Your head shouldn’t be in today it should be about broadening and growing the business.
7. Partnerships
You don’t need them. If you can’t make your business hum by yourself you really need to look at the value you are providing prospective customers. Partnerships are expensive, time consuming and compromise your brand.
8. Reporting
Are you still measuring the right things? You need to understand forward, backward and current metrics but unless what you are using is measuring your progress towards your goals, they may be pointless.
We had 3 measurement packages for our web stats. We needed to understand how we were doing relative to others and dive deep when something interesting came along to understand the drivers. Only one could be used comparatively and had demographic and behavioural information. The other two were good for live information and campaign assessment.
I’m a traditionalist, so if a campaign delivers leads and revenues I don’t want to look too closely and measure every bit of the campaign. I don’t want to second guess because data doesn’t tell us much about how the user experienced the composition of the campaign. So I didn’t need that.
I manage; I don’t watch. I need to know whether the tactics are delivering the overall strategy. So I didn’t need live data, I needed an assessment that we were trending correctly. Daily volatility doesn’t interest me at all. So I didn’t need live data.
The audit showed two of the measurement packages were no longer relevant.
9. Money
Make sure your suppliers are not padding. You buy a core service from them and then they try to wrap around a bunch of things you can generally do without. Ask yourself whether you really need them and look at where you use it in the business. If it is a nice to have, you probably don’t need it.
10. Yourself
Are you and your vision and strategy still relevant to the business. Do you have the skills and drive that will deliver that revenue line and customer growth. I know when I need to step out and look for another job. I know what I’m good at.
My goal is to ensure the business employs a marketing director to take it to the next level once we have achieved the systems, appeal and market share to make the business hum. Someone with better skills and a new vision to take it beyond what I can achieve.
Remember to include yourself in that audit each year.
