From identifying a campaign’s short- and long-term goals to its execution, the overall outcome of any marketing management process should be to ensure clarity and speed around its delivery.
However, while every marketing team will have the right components – goals, ideas, metrics, reports – those components can often be disparate and disconnected. The team might have a process of sorts, but it won’t necessarily be clear. Without clarity, they’ll sacrifice speed – in planning, execution, and reporting.
The easiest way to ensure clarity and speed is to put a growth marketing platform in place, this will help guide your team in the right direction, focus on the most impactful ideas, and to plan, test, and measure to move fast.
To help you get started, we’ve pulled together a simple framework to guarantee your marketing campaigns are as efficient and effective as possible.
Keep it clear, make it fast
First thing’s first, clarity is essential in any marketing management process.
Without clarity, members of a team can effectively work in silos, with no oversight into what their colleagues are doing and how their own contribution fits into the bigger picture.
So, how can your team prevent this disconnect?
- Set clear expectations from the start. All meetings should have clear agendas, with no doubt about who owns each particular part of the process.
- Agree on a cadence with your team. Align on how often you’ll do certain tasks: look at the data, review whether you’re on track, adjust tactics, etc.
Increasing clarity, and the resulting efficiency benefits, mean things will naturally begin to move faster. Putting rules in place for automatically approving campaigns below a certain budget, for example, will save a considerable amount of time previously spent waiting for sign-off.
How do we take it one step further and add even more speed to the marketing management process?
- Eliminate red tape. Measures like the one above – automatic approvals for some campaigns – can drastically improve the speed at which a process is actioned.
- Shorten the test-measure-learn loop. Bespoke metrics can help shorten this cycle. A consolidated approach makes it quicker and easier to track the progress of a campaign, make course adjustments when necessary, and report on its impact and ROI once it’s complete.
- Centralise the process. Consolidating the number of tools used by a team will also go a long way to improving its speed. When all the necessary tools are together in one place, the whole process can suddenly seem far more manageable.
That’s exactly why we created the TrueNorth platform. It allows marketers to source and compile all the information needed for an effective marketing management process, supporting them at every step from ideation through planning, delivery and beyond.
A 5-step framework for a highly efficient process
The next step is to implement an efficient framework that allows you to streamline your process and meet your marketing goals. To keep your framework simple, break it down into key steps:
1. Goals
Goals are there to provide clarity, purpose, direction, and vision. They are what leads to success for you, your department, and the business as a whole.
That’s why it’s critical to work with the wider business – including the sales team, the finance department, the c-suite – to understand the most pressing needs. From there you can create clear and ambitious marketing OKRs (objectives and key results) that will ladder up to delivering the business’ wider objectives.
2. Audience
It’s essential that you know exactly who comprises your target audience – consider their age, gender, income, location, and interests. Are they decision makers? Or the supporters, whose demands influence the decision makers? Begin by analysing your current customer base, as well as that of your closest competitors.
Conduct market research and study industry trends to identify where your product or service can offer the greatest value. Personas are useful, too. Although they can often be broad-brush portraits, a persona based on certain lifestyle and demographic characteristics can help you focus your marketing efforts.
3. Distribution/channels
Knowing who you’re targeting is all well and good, but you also need to know the best ways of reaching them, online and off. Again, look at what your competitors are doing – where are they strongest? Read up on the subject, too. Marketing blogs and media will always cover the latest techniques and tactics – there may be something there you’ve never considered. Testing different channels is a best practice as well.
4. Map out your plan
Having collated, analysed, and reviewed the information from the previous points, outline in as much detail the audience you’ve chosen to target, the content you’ll be targeting them with, and the channel you’ll be using to distribute that content.
5. Measure and adjust
The best thing you can do to identify the effectiveness of your new, improved campaign process, or workflow is to test it. But the metrics you choose depend on the nature of your goals. If you’re looking to build brand awareness, for example, you need a way of measuring the level of familiarity your target audience has around your product or service. This could involve conducting a survey with consumers, or a social media audit, to gauge the amount of online chatter about your brand. Likewise, social media can help you identify the level of brand engagement, as can measuring the rise – or fall – of the number of visitors to your site. If your marketing objective is to generate a high volume of qualified sales leads, then measurement couldn’t be more straightforward. Whatever your goal, it’s vital that you have an appropriate metric in place. Without it, all your effort will be for nothing.
Maximising your marketing process
Now you have a deeper understanding of the importance of the marketing techniques you can use to speed things along, you’re well positioned to make your process as efficient as possible. But, while you have the knowledge, it’s essential you also have the tools.
No marketing process is perfect – we all know that.
The good news is that there are plenty of powerful software tools and apps out there, including TrueNorth, that are specifically designed to help marketing teams to streamline their processes and centralise all of the information needed to manage marketing in one place.
To see for yourself how TrueNorth can help you design and implement a marketing management process that will deliver the best possible results, get a demo here.
