Aligning digital marketing, advertising and sales teams for business ROI success

Goals! more precisely, clear goals. 

Here is a case scenario of a disastrous misaligned team strategy in an organization focused on ROI:

The digital strategy team of the company, in-house and external focused on getting new leads and market reach; the internal marketing and advertising (non-digital) worked on creating quicker customers and new leads, the sales team focused on the products / services towards increasing the overall market reach and new customers. To make things much worse, the organization had employed sales, both in-house and external to focus on sales ROI, newer leads etc which were part of the in-house marketing and advertising strategy which was non-digital in nature. Here, the incentives and rewards were directly aligned to their actual sales conversions and leads. 

Can you see the disaster happening already? 

Many times, marketing and sales divisions have different goals, focus and strategies from each other. Which is to some extent fine. Why? May be to may be focus on different sets of products and services launched? May be to focus on a new set of customers on a different location or each goal aligned to focus or target audiences across different demographics etc.

In each of these cases, having a slightly different goal and strategy across marketing, sales, digital / non-digital is even welcome at times. But the problem arises when there is a very thin line of being able to differentiate between different strategy and creating a strategy that acts as it’s own competitor within the departments and or divisions. That’s when the problems start! 

Over the past eight years (since 2010), we as a digital agency have worked with 67 clients and client brand partners catering across seven countries (India, USA, UK, Australia, Austria, Spain and UAE) and that too across 23 different industries for eg. finance and banking, trading and broking, retail, luxury lifestyle, fashion, education, infrastructure, hospitality, tourism, speciality travels, luxury adventure, FMCG, media and publishing, advertising, events, real-estate, health and wellness, restaurants, hotels & speciality restaurants and boutique hotels, automobiles, telecom, technology products, insurance, etc to name a few. 

Across these, we have delivered digital marketing social media ROI campaigns for 38 of them directly or otherwise of which 73% were successfully delivered for their specific ROI goals.

These were some of the ROI goals that we have delivered over the years for few of our clients: 

• Actual sales revenue
• Quality lead generations
• Enquiries
• Footfalls
• Brand engagement in real-time
• Site traffic across targeted demographics with focused and clear Search engine optimisation results (SEO) 
• Influencer marketing & social media contests for real-time brand mentions…
• as core ROI measurable goals during the campaign periods. 

Here are the few things which came to light when we looked at 73% of successful ROI focused campaigns and 21% unsuccessful campaigns and of course, 6% of the campaigns wherein we never received a feedback from the said clients.

In the case of successful digital marketing social media ROI campaigns as a digital agency, we noticed these two to be common with all of those clients:

1. Patience and long term contracts: The clients had a long term business contract (3 months social media marketing followed by 6 months or more ROI based campaigns) that enabled us to invest in better quality of tools, use more clear, focused long term strategies and allowed us space and flexibility to change and or edit the campaigns based on what was working best and to get more of those focused successful sales and or digital marketing ROI results. 
2. Trust: Their trust, feedback, acceptance of our strategies and in our ideas, etc were immense. They gave us complete freedom especially during the first 3 months of the campaign without interfering most of the times to simply ‘have their say’ in the digital strategy. They respected and trusted our ideas even if it sounded like 'it might not work at first', but they thought of letting our ideas marinate and see the results before rejecting them as ‘it won’t work for us’ or even ‘we don’t think that should be done because our clients are….’ which is a way of saying that we know our clients better than you, so you simply do what we feel should be done.

The problem with preconceived notions about what will work for you is that, you end up using same and or similar strategies just with a different platform.

Rather, since you are venturing into digital with a new team, it would be advisable to give them a chance to prove themselves. If you feel you know much better than anyone else, then what’s the point of hiring a new set of brains to do your company’s work. You have hired someone to add value to your ideas, new strategies, new focus and light on things that you might have overlooked, so giving them a chance might deliver much better than expected.

In more than 83% of such cases, the clients who showcased utmost trust in our services and actually accepted more than 80% of our digital marketing social media ROI strategies and ideas, we ended up delivering more than 30% actual sales ROI and more than 40% quality lead conversions and more than 65% other ROI goals on an average across for these set of clients.

In case of unsuccessful campaigns that formed about 21% of the campaigns we delivered, these are the things that came to light:

1. Rift between teams: Few organisations thought it was a good idea to give different incentives to different teams within the organization to achieve their sales or lead goals to see who does the best work. The problem was, instead of creating a healthy team spirit, due to the misaligned benefits or incentives each team (marketing, advertising, internal revenue generation teams, digital agency team etc) each one ended up with different focus on ‘achieving their incentive’ when their focus should have been towards one clear goal of achieving success for the organization together and leveraging each others competency skills and complementing them. To make things worse, they offered different incentives which each of these teams could offer to their prospects or target audiences which made things worse because, in few cases, there were offers as under by different teams for the same set of target audience and the same products/ services:

- Sales team: They were allowed to offer upto 25% discounts to get customers

- Advertising team: They were allowed to offer long term benefits, instant gratification of cash back or aligned and allied freebies with 15% discounts to get customers

- Internal digital team: They were allowed to offer a flat rate of 15% with free long term value-adds to get customers.

- External digital agency team: We were allowed to give 10% to 15% discounts for getting the same customers across the same target audiences.

The response of the client for such ridiculous incentives offered were that they wanted to see who did well based on their association with the organization. Sales people were the team of employees who had been with the Organization for the longest. But the issue is, such ROI should not be aligned based on seniority of an employee, rather should be uniform so that the customers themselves don’t feel misdirected or cheated due to the various offers available across same product but from different sales teams approaching them, online or otherwise.

2) Know-it-all: This was the worst type of team to work with. We ended doing everything they said we should do, wherein less than 10% of our ideas and or strategies were put into practice and every time there was a conversion, the immediate response was, ‘of course, we were anyway getting these leads, they are our ideas’, and when something did not work, ‘why is this not working, you are supposed to be the digital team right?’. So if you see a micromanager as part of your ROI team, run towards the other direction. There is no point in working with people who feel they know it all, because if it works, ‘it had to’, and if doesn’t, ‘you aren’t doing your job well’.

3) Feedback: This was the most common of all in cases wherein the ROI campaigns failed. There was absolutely no response to ideas suggested most of the times or even if there was, it was very late and hardly convincing to showcase their support towards the same. Also, we sincerely understand that you know your customers definitely better than us, so at times, we need feedback, responses, content website support etc to make things aligned in a way that ensures your corporate communication and messaging style and tone etc. Most of these clients never thought of giving timely feedback, or even responding to emails as it was not on their priority list as they had right from the start written you off! The only reason you were still hired in the first place was because someone in their team thought you were the right fit but eventually, the individual dominating the team pressurises everyone to be convinced in the early stages, that “this won’t work, so no point in giving feedback”. 

We need to understand the following very clearly if we are working on focused ROI based digital marketing social media campaigns: 

• If you are hiring an external agency, let them put their ideas to work. Don't rush in and sign a ROI contract with a team you don't know. Give them time, start with a digital marketing or social media campaign first. See how well both the teams are able to work amicably and towards one clear goal.
• If it’s ROI based conversions, then invest well, give time and plan your campaigns in a structured and disciplined manner. An easiest calculation for understanding ROI based conversions which I have shared across so many digital marketing blog posts, my social media ROI digital marketing book, my social media digital marketing strategy articles etc is to ask yourself what percentage of return are you expecting? For eg. are you ready to invest around 10-20% of your total revenue (not profits, but total sales) in the campaign? If not, this is probably not going to work for you! Remember, a good digital strategy requires a knowledgable brain working towards it. And cheap, is exactly how it sounds like. So ensure to invest in your brand, because if you don't, no one else will.

One thing is for sure, in the past eight years, after delivering 73% successful digital marketing social media ROI campaigns for clients across industries and countries as an award winning digital agency, we know that digital strategy works and can do wonders if you plan it well in a systematic organized manner with all teams working towards the same goal of achieving success for the organization and not just for themselves.

At the end of the day, it is the duty of the digital agency to also accept and understand that the ROI success is not just their own, but part of the team efforts which includes at all times, the client themselves for their trust and faith through the campaign period.

Teams working together as one always achieve greater success! 

So, what has worked well for you as a digital campaign for ROI? Do you have any queries, if so, please feel free to reach out to us to know more and how can we help you to plan this better? 

You can add your comments here or use this quick Contact form link to reach us at our digital agency.

Be Well

Ananth V

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