Video Transcript

So in times of economic uncertainty, you go through your personal finances and decide what is important and where there are areas where you can trim. For example, you might cut streaming services, you might cancel the gym membership you ‘re not getting a lot of use out of. You might defer your student loans because there’s no interest on them and refinance your house.

The same thing is happening in business, be it a recession, inflation, global pandemic, supply chain issues. During these times, there’s more scrutiny on departments and the outcomes that they’re generating for the business. And so it’s really important to be able to say marketing is helping drive business results versus marketing is doing marketing. It’s really important to be able to clearly articulate that to whoever your stakeholders are.

So how do you do that? I’ve got a couple of steps that you can take in order to figure out what activities are worth your time when you’re getting scrutinized and maybe a little bit more attention on your activities. The first is to gain alignment on how your business makes money, and that might seem really dumb and rudimentary, but it’s important to understand what your goal is and how you’re going to get there in the timeframe by which you need to meet that goal.

So some examples are you going to grow through driving that new logos to your business? Do you want to grow through M&A, in which case, brand strategy is probably of critical importance to the marketing department. Understanding that allows you to look at all of your marketing efforts, really clear a lens to say, yes, this is helping drive those goals forward or no, this is actually distracting me from those.

So once you figure out what the goal is, what you’re being held accountable to, and how long you’ve got to meet that goal, you can start looking at your department specifically and understand, are you set up for success? Do you have the right budget to be able to have these goals? Are you staffed appropriately? If you’re a marketing department of one, you will probably run into some issues.

You probably have other activities that you’re helping with that are critical to the business culture, helping other departments. That’s going to take your time and focus away from this KPI you’re running towards. Do you have the right technology investments? Do you have too many technology investments? You know, the digital department at Element Three, about once a year we’ll go through all of our subscriptions and understand we’re paying for a couple of things that are kind of duplicative. And all of the team prefers this one tool.

This allows you to understand, do you need to hire another role internally. Do you need some temporary support through a freelance or a contractor? Do you need an agency partner to help kind of accelerate what your marketing department is able to do and be a capacity relief valve? Once you get kind of that baseline established understanding again against that KPI, we’re going to take an inventory of all of the activities that you’re doing.

Is are you spending a lot of time on blogs or trade shows or website updates? Are there things you wish you could do, like research or specific campaigns? And against that KPI that we established early on, we’re going to determine what activities are helping this KPI and what are distracting your resources. So some tangible examples.

Let’s say your company wants to grow through a current customer base. So we’re going to think about ways that marketing can help sales accelerate deals. Maybe it’s creating a lead scoring system so that the most likely to buy or most perfect customer and your database gets pushed to the top of sales list. Maybe you identify a customer segment using your data that would be perfect for this additional upsell opportunity.

So you’re going to create a specialized webinar and some case studies to put in front of this group specific. And that’s all helping that that goal of growing within your existing customer base. And the nice thing about creating assets like that is that they can go live on your website and be an additional resource to drive net new leads.

So you’re not completely ignoring this other portion of the business. But, you know, 80% of your attention is going to this high level KPI. A lot of times we have trouble answering these questions as we’re going through the process. So first, understand where your business is going, what is the revenue goal, when do you want to get there and how are you going to get there? Then establish how marketing can clip in to accelerate or amplify that goal.

Understand Are you set up to be able to do this? Do you need additional help or partners or more technology inventory what you’re currently doing and be ruthless in your prioritization of those tactics?

Which ones align to the goal that we establish and which ones would be nice if we had extra time and then figure out your plan to be able to hit those goals? How does the thread tie between all of those activities to line up to the business objective?