Video Transcript

When Element Three talks about alignment, we’re really talking about trying to answer the question, How does marketing serve your business?

And to answer that question, we really look at three different things. First, we look at your business model. How do you make money? Where are your cost centers? Who are your customer segments and what are the value propositions that you deliver to them? Everything that goes into understanding the business itself.

Then we’re going to ask questions about your strategy. Within that business model, what is your approach to how you’re going to win in the marketplace? What makes you different or unique than your competitors? And then finally, we’re going to assess how mature your marketing and sales operations are. So we’ll look at pipeline metrics and we’ll look at assets and resources, and we’ll talk to your sales and marketing leaders about what their objectives are and what they think is going to be the way to attach performance from their departments into success for the business.

And it’s those three things. Your business model, your strategy for how you’re going to win, and your ability to perform in that strategy that will let us answer the question, How does marketing serve the business?

Giving marketing clear objectives for the work that they should be doing is essential for them to be able to go out and produce for you. But they can’t do it if they don’t understand how their objectives are connected back to your business strategy and how the business makes money in the first place.

Usually when business leaders come to us with questions like I don’t understand why my marketing team are doing the things that they’re doing right now, or the last time I tried to hire an agency, they went and did a bunch of activities and I didn’t see any business outcomes.The way we diagnose that problem is we look back at alignment between business objectives and marketing activities, and usually that’s where the breakdown has happened.

There’s not a clear understanding on the marketing team side about what the business is trying to do and how their activities should relate to those objectives. By bringing understanding and clarity into those two things, we can produce a lot better results from marketing for the business.