How To Do More Marketing With Less Everything

Doing more with less or, as a boss of mine used to say: Be more Stretch Armstrong.

This phrase usually appears in the same sentence about budgets being cut, head counts freezing or redundancies in motion. The reality is, doing more with less doesn't mean being more efficient based on where you are today, the expectation is usually to keep doing exactly what you're doing (and more) but with less people or budget.

And that's a huge ask.

It's also frustrating when you've got your 2 year growth strategy, your day to day delivery plan, and you've spent months (or years) building up the team and getting C-level buy-in.

As we head into 2024, with more redundancies looming, a global recession still being predicted, and an ever increasing demand for more revenue; efficiencies are one of the only remaining plays.

So what can you do? Based on my experiences of the same story year after year: Less marketing investment, higher targets, here are my recommendations:

1) Reduce siloes.

This is my number one for a lot of great reasons. Call it networking, call it streamlining or sharing resources, either way you have to get a better understanding of what’s happening elsewhere in the business and how you can all help each other. It won’t just be marketing affected by penny pinching and everyone else will think they’ve got it as hard, or even harder, than you. So make friends and start influencing.

Your first priority should be to learn, start regular conversations with relevant teams and understand individual focuses, priorities and projects. You can do this across B2B and B2C marketing but also extend this to include teams like customer experience, sales operations or global teams. At a local level start asking yourself whether there’s any alignment with your targets. Don’t wait for management to point out the obvious, go and find out for yourself and, if there is alignment, offer up your services to help achieve both of your goals. Remember you’re trying to win friends here so demanding or requesting they swap priorities and help you probably won’t go down well but a conversation that says “it looks like we're trying to do similar things, let me help you” should get you far.

If you're a global business there are likely other regions who have done what you’re trying to do right now, have better tech and have already made mistakes. Learn from them and pick up new skills or knowledge. There's no point doing the same things twice in different parts of the business, or even reinventing the wheel. Understanding what makes someone tick and what they value will help you tailor these conversations, that’s why it’s important to go in with an ambition to learn - soak up all of the knowledge you can, reflect and then apply it to your local goals. Only then can you start to strategically map whether there's crossover or mutual benefit for the other teams or stakeholders. If you get lucky you might find a stakeholder that will go above and beyond to help you succeed, especially if they’re trying to expand their remit or find a new challenge.?My number one golden rule here is to give more than you take. Whilst generally people will help and support, it shouldn't be an expectation if you're closed off to doing the same.

2) Optimise your tech.

How much of your technology do you actually use? Do you understand all of its capabilities, or are you guilty of implementing the new shiny tool? Recent research shows that only 29% of businesses use more than 75% of their martech capabilities* which leaves an awful lot of efficiency potential on the table. If you don’t know what you’re currently using, the first step is to do an audit in addition to what else is available to you. Don’t just think about your marketing team, either. Some questions to get you started:

• What do other marketing teams or client/customer facing teams use?
• Are there other instances of the same tech in other parts of the business?
• What area of marketing do these tools cover, e.g. analytics, engagement?
• What are the gaps we’ve got and are there existing tools that have this capability?
• Do we have the skills/knowledge on how to use these tools?
• How does our tooling compare to other regions?

When looking at what’s missing with your stack, start to consider how automation or AI tools play into this. If you’re not currently using them, why not? When I was at Equifax my team spent 6 months automating BAU email activities by implementing processes and using existing automation tools. This took us from less than 5% of email automation to over 80% and we used the extra time to build out lead scoring models. Not only were we more efficient but we were focusing on more value added projects.

Work through what this looks like for your team and business. Finding new relevant features and capabilities can inject some spark (and time) into your plans.

3) Renegotiate contracts.

Linking beautifully into the above, this step is all about putting cost savings into motion. Once you’ve found out what tools are in use across the business (don’t forget to include all brands, mergers/acquisitions or tools that rogue salespeople are using) then you need to sit down and strategically put everything together.?

• How many tools are through the same vendor, e.g. Adobe, Google or Salesforce?
• Are there multiple different tools that do the same thing?
• What tools haven’t been used for months or years?
• How many licences does each tool have and how many are used?
• What are the costs and renewal dates of each tool or technology?

Do a “keep”, “merge”, or “kill” list where:

• Keep highlights capabilities you need to keep regardless of cost. This would be things like you CRM or analytics platforms.
• Merge should be opportunities for contract amendments, re-negotiations, tool sharing, ownership changes, or additional usage/features that are underutilised. This step is trickier if it involves other stakeholders and areas of the business so tread lightly and make sure you know why you’re making the recommendation (and it can’t just be a benefit to your team).
• Kill relates to tools you won’t use based on lack of skills, knowledge, fit or time. These items are a drain on your budget line so you need to make a plan to remove them, whether that’s immediately or in 6 months time.

One final point is to consider global or multi-country contracts. This takes some of the ownership away from one area but could have great cost savings if you’re turning multiple contracts into one. As an example, the last time I did this I reduced yearly renewal costs for one platform by ￡100k, simply by signing up with two other international teams.

4) Find your quick wins.

Despite knowing sales cycles can take 6-12 months, there are likely still expectations for you to drive in-year revenue, and this pressure will come at the end of the quarter, half or at year end. Targets are targets after all.

Part of being a great marketing leader is finding the balance between strategic and tactical implementation. The business wants tactical, always, but it also wants strategic - it just doesn’t know it. I’ve found a lot of success in delivering in the day to day but also chipping away at those strategic elements in the background, the stuff that’s going to make life easier in several months, the things that if done now will mean next year won’t be as difficult. It’s hard to get business buy-in for these so you need to be delivering the tactical (or tangible) so you can work away at the strategic (intangible) items in the background. Get it right and you’ll get a free pass.

Quick wins fall into this tactical bucket and you can make those miracles happen by using data to find new audiences. This should be led by marketing ops, don’t be reactive and do “stuff”. When the business says “we’ve got a 10% target to hit in 2 months” go back and say “great, here’s what we should be doing and who we should be targeting.” You can find this by looking at:

• Which companies/accounts/contacts are stuck in the pipeline?
• Which opportunities weren't ready last year but there's potential this year?
• Who’s going to be up for a contract renewal soon?
• Who’s using a product that could benefit from another (cross sell)?
• Who’s using an older version of a product that could benefit from v2 (up sell)?
• Who’s falling into your intent or retargeting audiences?

This stuff won't necessarily win you a Markie or Drum award but it gets the job done and the board will be happy.

5) Align with sales.

One of my first years as a marketing manager, I vividly remember spending 8 months working on campaigns and activities and then speaking to a salesperson to follow up on leads. I remember as they said “oh yeah, we didn’t do anything with them as we don’t get commission on that product.” Right. Brilliant. Terrific.?

Luckily, things escalated quickly and that was the start of a journey to bring sales, marketing and product together. But the lesson is big - make sure sales want the leads you're sending them. This is such a crucial step, you need to get sales excited about leads you're working on or people you're engaging with.?

Similarly, make sure sales know what you’re working on and the tools in the background. I’ve had conversations where sales want to hire more BDRs to manage enquiries but marketing’s already working on lead scoring and nurturing which will drop enquiries by 50% in 2 months’ time, making the headcount (almost) redundant. This type of communication is crucial to keeping the business efficient but also solving problems and sharing resources.

What's missing/doesn't smell quite right? Let me know at either: Jade Faulconbridge / Attributed Marketing

Looking for more information on the work I’ve done and how I still help businesses be more efficient? Check out my website or drop me a message.

*Digital Connections 2.0 (2023), Modern B2B