How Your Business Can Create a Scalable Growth Marketing Engine
Goodbye Chaos, Hello Results - With a Scalable Marketing Engine
In fast moving companies days can feel chaotic and marketing teams can feel rudderless. Marketing is a vast discipline with an endless mix of tactics to trial but throwing it out there to see what sticks isn’t a scalable route to success. Getting Marketing and Sales to partner effectively is like herding cats but it is a requirement to meet your goals.
Let’s put an end to the daily chaos with clarity, focus and a robust structure to get your business where you want it to be. To get great results from your marketing that build both your lead generation and your brand I have a proven and effective 5-step approach.
Five Proven and Effective Steps to Results
Step 1: Clarify your most pressing need.
Understand your most pressing need. Is something going wrong and needs to be course corrected or it is a new opportunity that you need help seizing? Let’s get to the core of it so that your team can be laser focused on the right priorities.
Step 2: Keep the best. Chuck the rest.
Audit plans and activities. Identify the marketing activities that are performing and those that aren’t. Try to understand the ‘why’ behind the good or poor performance so you can apply these insights to new initiatives and tactics. Maybe your Inbound activities are plateauing and you need to look at Outbound tactics. Maybe it’s time to try account based marketing (ABM) or another methodology to segment and communicate with your target market. Rationalise the quantity and quality of work - because you can’t do everything at once. Set benchmarks for activity performance.
Quick note: Setting benchmarks without actual results can be intimidating because you have to rely on guesswork and you may or may not reach the target. That said, if you don’t set any target or benchmark how will you know what to aim for, how will you forecast ROI and what will you compare results against? You need this stake in the ground as a reference point. It’s not a failure to miss the benchmark but it is pretty unforgivable not to learn from your initiatives.
Step 3: Plan to Do the right things at the right time.
Create a structure for marketing within the organisation so that it riffs off product and enables sales. (I like The Cadence Philosophy developed by David Sacks, founder and former CEO of Yammer.) This involves harmonising activity plans so that the key areas of the business are coordinated and in synch, enabling a systematic, repeatable and scalable rhythm of business that avoids chaos and burnout. Next, develop/update the marketing plan to address the pressing need from Step 1. This often involves focusing down on the most important activities with a key anchor activity each quarter (remember you can’t do everything simultaneously). Everything else that quarter supports and amplifies the anchor activity/lead campaign.
These core tenants also apply to complex businesses with multiple product lines and prospects in different industry sectors or verticals. Start with the core and then layer on as required.
Quick note: I think marketing plans should be short, highly actionable, living documents. If your plan is lost on the server someplace, you need a better plan. If you have a rolling list of tactics but no overarching marketing plan, you need a better plan.
Step 4: Build the Engine.
Lead and work with the marketing team to implement the new plan efficiently. Review WIP results against your initial benchmarks and optimise. Keep doing the right things. Ditch the wrong things. Find more Right things.
Track and record everything so you have a living history of what you’ve done and what you’ve learned. For larger campaigns and initiatives invest the time in debrief sessions to capture cross-discipline learnings. Don’t just move on to the next thing without taking stock and really digging in to the results. This is also a time to stress test your KPIs. Are they the correct indicators that help guide your decision making? Should you be looking at other measurements that are more meaningful or informative?
As you uncover what attracts and converts qualified leads put these activities at the core of your engine and look for ways to make them systematic and automated. Take the time now to put structures in place so you’re not constantly re-inventing the wheel. These are the foundational structures of your scalable marketing engine that support brand awareness and sales, and enable business growth.
Step 5: Create a Best Practice Growth Marketing Playbook
Support scaling your marketing by creating a playbook of your marketing approach and a living repository of marketing activity performance. This will help any new hires in marketing, sales, customer success, or even dev teams get up to speed. You can also use your Marketing Playbook with external providers, like agencies and freelancers, to start everyone off on the same page and avoid duplicative ‘Discovery’ meetings. Plus this transparency helps the current teams feel confident that marketing is ‘on it’, helping to drive business growth and success.
Want to learn more about creating a scalable growth marketing engine, get a bit of guidance and an outside perspective? Book a no obligation, no cost strategy session.