Joining up the dots to make marketing work.

As a business leader are you frustrated that it is hard to see what return you are getting from all that investment in glossy communications, high profile events and whacky new internet ideas? As a marketer how often do you feel you are being asked to deliver isolated tactics and then held responsible for delivering benefits over which you have no control? We reckon a little joined up thinking will go a long way to enabling marketing to be seen to deliver value. Let’s explore that idea a little further.

Marketing is really very simple. It is about making it easy for customers to buy from you. So let’s nail one heresy on the head straight away, marketing IS about selling. It is not a discipline that can or should stand in splendid isolation. Success for marketing is seeing sustained, profitable sales growth.

The problem for marketing is that it has become detached from much of the business planning function and is too busy “doing stuff” in response to requests from the business. When asked to develop a telemarketing campaign or a new brochure marketing expends tremendous energy, and ingenuity, ensuring it is the very best brochure or the most innovative campaign when, quite possibly, they were not the right things to be doing in the first place.

There are four areas, or disciplines, that marketing needs to focus on to ensure that real added value is delivered to the company’s stakeholders; strategy, messaging, communications and business development. So let’s have a look at each of these in turn and see how marketing needs to engage and drive the debate.

Strategy is about what you want to be tomorrow, not what do you do today. Too often it is confused with tactics as in “what’s the strategy to win this business?” Strategy requires a longer term view and vision backed up by commitment and consistency. Above all, strategy needs to be about thinking from the outside in; where are the best opportunities, how well do they play against our brand values, what products and services do we need to deliver, and will we be able to deliver added value to the shareholders in the longer term?

If you can answer these questions you should be able to move on to the next phase; messaging. Marketing can’t be expected to develop messages that are meaningful for customers unless there is a clear understanding about the strategy, vision and values of the company, what products and services are being offered and what value those deliver for the customer. The best messages tap directly into customers’ needs and desires and reflect directly the brand values and offerings the company is making. One of the best examples of that was “the future is bright, the future is Orange” campaign which offered to explore an exciting future with the customer where wireless communications will enable a better world.

Now that marketing knows what messages it is trying to get across to which customers, it is ready to address the issue of communications. The array of communications channels has become bewildering in recent years. The traditional channels of print and broadcast media have been supplemented with a plethora of internet based alternatives from webcasts to blogs, wikis and social networking sites offering the promise fantastic viral marketing opportunities. At the same time the pressure has been on to personalise messages with everyone striving for the nirvana of true one-to-one marketing with more focus on peer and industry expert influence. All that means is that there are many more ways of wasting your money on inappropriate messages down inappropriate channels, unless you clearly understand what you are saying, to whom and why, and what is their preferred method of receiving communications.

Which brings us on to business development, the ultimate goal for marketing but ultimately the one area where there seems so little real return. The gap between sales and marketing has never seemed so wide. Sales complain that the leads generated by telemarketing are worthless and marketing refuse to be measured on sales because they claim they have no ability to influence sales, and worse, that sales don’t know how to sell.

The fact is that marketing have failed to join the dots between strategy, messaging and communications so that, by the time they get to driving out sales campaigns it will be pure luck if prospective customers react to what they are being fed and start to interact with sales.

By treating the areas of strategy, messaging, communications and business development as an integrated vertical whole and by tapping into the years of experience that exist in the company on both the vendor and purchaser side of marketing, Think Smart has developed a simple but robust process that ensures where ever the entry point is, be it a request for some collateral, a sales campaign or message development, all the elements of the process can be checked and validated quickly so that the correct tactics are deployed for maximum return. Just ask Hybris Software, a European e-commerce platform provider.

Let us show you how we can make marketing work for you. Contact Paul Bevan

And in our next newsletter......Is filling the pipeline from the top the wrong tactic?

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