Transforming A Traditional Marketing Organization In To Digital And Data Centric

Author: Abhay Reddy

Traditional marketing organizations are structured by functions such as Communications, SEO/SEM, Web, PR, Partner Marketing, Field Marketing, MARCOM… and the list goes on. These functions are structured independently, and operate in silos with little to no interaction. Essentially, this type of org prevents companies from adapting quickly to business necessities, or even executing unified objectives effectively.

Transformation involves multiple changes

• Org structure, Objectives and Ownership: Most marketing organizations have some key unified objectives such as revenue growth, new product launch and brand relaunch. The preferred approach in such cases is to have an owner for each of these key objectives so that campaigns can be executed end to end across groups. This includes planning, execution and communicating out. One of the key elements of this type of structure is to review campaign/project performance, and ensure that KPIs across each stage are being met. It also allows ‘objectives’ to take the center stage while individual teams can specialize.
• Management Buy-in and support: Digital transformation is a disruptive process. It involves reorienting teams, building capabilities and frankly stopping some of the past practices. Education is key to this process including re-training individuals, hiring new talent, and aligning all team goals towards the key objectives. Management support or executive sponsor is required to facilitate transformation. 
• Quick wins and stretch goals. Transformation can be overwhelming, so create achievable milestones and celebrate wins. Set stretch goals after each win to achieve exponential changes 
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should always be tied to the end objective. Define key tangible KPIs such as ‘10% revenue growth’ or ‘Increase traffic to site by 2x’. It is ok to define secondary KPIs such as impressions, clicks and engagement, but they should be related to the primary KPIs.
• Test and Learn: Measure everything. Its important to know how campaigns/web/content are performing at each stage of the customer journey. Analytics, insights and quick updates are at the core of the modern marketing machine.
• Stop or Expand: Setup broad experiments with the best available initial information. It is ok if a campaign doesn’t work, but… its more important to identify this quickly, and either stop or make necessary adjustments. All teams should have an open discussion about what worked and didn’t. 
• Customer behavior changes over time, so content and tactics should keep pace. Ex: Millennials consume information different from earlier generations; or changes in purchasing behavior after COVID Pandemic. 
• Ideal Customer Profiles: The more accurate the ICP’s are the more effective content and tactics get. Coming up with an ICP is the first steps. These profiles will evolve as the initial hypothesis are tested out.  Content and tactics must be aligned with customer behavior
• Tactics/Channel Evolution: Digital marketing is always evolving, so keep abreast with the latest trends, and run pilot projects to evaluate effectiveness. In general, effectiveness of tactics (and content types) reduce as more companies adopt them. Ex: Banner ads were once all the rage, but they now have very low conversion rates. Even for some of the standard tactics such as Events and Tradeshows, think of how they can be executed differently. Ex: Setup meetings ahead of the event with key prospects vs trying to prospect at the event.
• Integrated Campaigns allows marketers to run highly targeted and effective campaigns. Performance is amplified as it matches customers behavior across multiple channels.
• Targeted: The onus should be on targeted vs broad strokes campaigns. Targeted campaigns are not only more effective, but they also cost less. The digital signature of individuals will only continue to grow. You can now target by account, web, prior search, geo, intent, behavior, look alike, topic and lot more. Leverage tactics that allow you to reach a small group of customers in a personalized manner.
• Content is still king. Many organizations focus on volume vs quality. They end up with lot of content with short shelf lives that cannot be reused. This is fine for a new product launch or specific cases. but the preferred approach is to create base content (templatized) that can be quickly updated. The content can then be broken up into smaller chunks for use across multiple channels. Content is king, but so is presenting the right content at the right time. Content can now be created dynamically based on customers prior actions, so short format in-the-moment content is preferred.
• Service Level Agreement (SLA): SLAs between marketing and sales allow everyone in an organization to be aligned on the objectives, definitions, quality metrics and responsibilities. They also help create a predictable model for analysis and forecasting.
• Infrastructure: As marketing transitions to be more digital and data centric, the number of large and small companies catering to this sector has grown exponentially from around 150 in 2011 to 7000+ in 2020. Refer to my post for more information about current tactics and software. My suggestion is to start with the core software, and then scale up based on needs.
• Skillset: Marketing relies on a wide range of skills. The challenge is to expand into both artistic and technical skillsets. Create a skill gap chart and hire accordingly. 

Above listed changes are only the starting points. The next steps involve expanding the scope, and making improvements based on data.