Pace & Power - Marketing Drives Business Success With Digital Transformation

Businesses that need to change are often scared to make that leap but know they must change and change fast if they are going to survive let alone grow. The question is, how do business leaders go about agreeing what that change should be, how to go about it and how fast can it be without being too disruptive?

Crying Out For Change

In this McKinsey article, it shows how businesses create winning teams and maintain a relentless pace of business. It's incredible to think that if a business fails to adapt and embrace change, their demise is pretty much guaranteed. Nokia, once one of the most valuable brands in the world failed massively. It had several chances to take advantage of their position and change their business. They could have double-downed on new business opportunities and probably knocked the iPhone off the shelf before it was even launched. Sadly for all those Nokia fans, it just didn't move fast enough.

So how do you remove bottlenecks in business and drive digital transformation that everyone working there is crying out for & praying for?

Martech & Digital Transformation

I've driven several digital transformations in excellent businesses like Athena Advisers, James Gray Associates, Reed and Randstad among others. Indeed, in my most recent role in a PLC, I removed a bottleneck that had been there for 14 months with a solution that everyone bought into and delivered results. In some of my roles, my brief was to take over the marketing reigns & keep the engine running. However, when I rolled my sleeves up and got stuck in, I started to understand that what I was being asked to achieve and the tools I had to deliver that growth were incompatible. I soon realised that these businesses needed dramatic, disruptive changes to sustain the business let alone grow it and hit targets. Not next year, but this year's numbers. Marketing is so fast-moving and real-time now, it's much more than just making things "look pretty" or the "colouring-in" dept. Marketing should be at the heart of every business process. There is so much marketing could do in a business to improve sales success and drive operations & efficiency. A marketing lead is becoming more of a blended role between a CTO, COO and CMO and must be at the top of their game to drive through the changes businesses need.

That might be quite surprising for a business owner / CEO to hear. IN my previous roles, the board, deep down, knew it to be true and wanted someone to drive the changes in their marketing technology, operations efficiency and customer experience that I was proposing. New CRMs, new websites, new intranets, new business processes, new, more efficient and effective ways to add product, distribute product materials, engage with leads, enrich data, new business processes to engage with prospects, new team members, new invoicing processes, follow up after a sale, eliminating/disqualifying prospects automatically, nurturing customers better, increasing customer lifetime value, enriching data for sales teams on prospects and speeding up sales conversion. All driven by marketing technology and an ambition for change.

According to the Harvard Business Review [1], 46% of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are focused on commercial marketing such as advertising, digital content, social media and events. 31% focus on growth, innovating, understanding the customer, analysis and product design. The remaining 23% do both and own a P&L. They are focussed on the design and implementation of strategy and may be considered future CEO material.

A typical B2B business is usually sales or technical-led and tend to have commercially-focused CMOs; a business support function that isn't seen as critical to success as sales or finance. It gets worse. According to Marketing Week, the number of CMOs planning to leave their roles within 3 years in the UK is 82%, with 41% within the next 12 months. Often, once I've delivered a digital transformation project and "replumbed" a business, I've set up the infrastructure (suppliers, team members, freelancers etc) to implement the strategy and growth that's desired so it's time for me to move on. Sometimes I wish I could stick around and take all the glory, but that does not make good business sense. I think this fluidity at the top of the marketing team is driven by the pace of technological change along with their ambition not matching those of the business. Are all the departments collaborating effectively? Are there roadblocks to each these new marketing initiatives that can be removed/dealt with so the marketing lead can lead the business as they need to?

So Why Do Some Marketers Fail?

Marketing Week suggests that the inability to express results in terms of financial performance, frustration with the job or not having their plans carried through (unappreciated or unable to change the organisation) are the primary reasons.

Marketing Return on Investment (MROI) is something every business owner thinks he understands and knows. It's only when you actually get to a number accurate to specific pence, that they realise their lead generation process had holes all over it and needed a complete overhaul. Not to mention the technology that can deliver these numbers and the insights the business needs. It's crucial to be able to measure value and the return from all your marketing activity, including those earned media channels that might not cost a lot but are usually the most effective. Nowadays, it's much more than MROI - it's about a holistic approach to brand experience - for employees as well as prospects and customers.

Sometimes, the CEO or FD might not understand why you're asking for more investment or want to change the amounts spent on different channels so soon or ditching a plan that has just been hatched or agreed at the start of the year (or just a couple of months ago). Businesses need to be agile in their approach and execution. The ethose needs to be iterative, Test & Measure" everything. When you have the right metrics and KPIs in place, (and tech to visualise them effortlessly across the business) rather than this change of strategy be questioned, you're more likely to be asked why hasn't the rest of the activity that's working been increased already! Why are we still doing X when we know Y performs 10x better?

Knowledge is power and speed is king. So that lack of knowledge (understanding of marketing's performance and return on investment) is crippling to many businesses. It's not that they don't know what the numbers are... it's just they don't know them precisely. It might be 10% variance or 30%. A 2% change in direction when setting out from London ends up in Mexico instead of New York. The same principle applies. Growth might be strong, but could it be stronger? Things carry on because the business has always done it that way and it works. No disagreement with that, but does it work better or worse than other channels or activity that's being proposed now? If the business only had ￡1 to invest, where should it go? There's a lot of grey or uncertainty that can be eliminated to take any subjectivity out of the equation. I would much rather iterate consistently over time and improve performance by small percentages over a period and make 1% or 2% improvements every fortnight or month than wait 6 months for a big 5 or 10% increase. A/B testing is the business mantra we should all live by and is what the most successful companies excel at.

Hire Digital Marketing Experts You Trust & Can Understand

Deloitte suggests that marketers need to be able to communicate across the organisation, “To make sure that a CMO has credibility, they have to be able to know how to talk to other members of the C-suite. CMOs must be comfortable talking to the CFO about P&L and to the CIO about technology needs.” The most effective CMOs or Heads of Marketing work "hand in glove" with sales and customer services to understand customers pain. They're able to translate that buyer pain into meaningful insights, feedback to sales in a loop and adjust messaging, material, content and context to ensure the right messages, get to the right prospect/customer at the right time in the buying process. Some of the jargon and technobabble that is used needs translating into actionable, simple tasks that can be executed by the team.

How Should Marketing Work For The Boss?

The Digital Marketing Institute [4] suggest that 68% of senior people expect CMOs or marketing directors to be growth drivers; to be finance experts, technologists and understand how to connect with customers. Typically, top marketer tenure is the lowest in the C-suite.

80% of CEOs expressed dissatisfaction with their CMO, either an expectation gap or a measurement gap. Either way, that perception might be greater than in reality but that doesn't matter. Marketers know perception is king. Accurate and relevant marketing KPIs to drive business performance is key to success, measuring MROI and to prove the value your marketing investment and activity have delivered to the business. Talking with and working closely with Finance, Marketing teams will collaborate better and deliver better value to the business. The CEO and CFO/FD will understand the rationale for decision making. It's this open and timely communication as well as agile execution that drives business success.

The Tail Should Wag the Dog

There's no better insult to the marketing department than being called the ‘colouring-in’ department or where you go to make presentations ‘pretty’. The organisations that fail to realise the strategic gains that can be made by working closely with marketing are most likely going to fail. Imagine all that customer insight, product feedback, lead generation and increased sales that can come from having the marketing dept lead the business strategy not just execute the sales lines and make them look "creative". It's time for the tail to start wagging the dog. Marketing needs to be at the heart of your business strategy. Marketing is completely different to 10 years ago, even 5 years ago. Such has been the proliferation of channels, Google and Facebook are now called "old school" or "traditional" digital channels.

Forbes [5] state the following 5 trends shaping the marketing profession:

1.   Use the right data, at the right time, for the right purpose

2.   Focus content on customer experience and understand responses (neuroscience and neuromarketing)

3.   Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning to predict the next actions

4.   Personalise your buyer's journey, tell them a story, tailor it to them & their situation

5.   Display advertising is less effective but native, video and live content are growing

Change Your Business, Or Die

Looking at the key trends from Forbes, is your business really geared up for the coming (and in some cases present) landscape? Data analytics, Data Visualisation, AI, Chatbots, Marketing Automation, Customer insights, Marketing Channels all drive more dynamic, relevant content delivered on different devices seamlessly. Sounds like marketing professionals are actually working in the IT dept. Business cannot afford to rely on word of mouth, referrals, repeat customers, a 2.0 stand-alone website, Adwords and a pretty brochure. Change is needed. Focus on lead generation, customer acquisition, conversion, return on investment and lifetime value, Your business is going to go through a transformation over the next 12 months whether you want it to or not.

Marketing Strategy & Implementation

With over 20 years digital marketing experience, and focused on driving marketing ROI, I drive digital transformation where it's needed, robust agile marketing plans delivering growth, rebrands where creative needs refreshing, digital strategy and implementation if lacking and orchestrate and implement marketing automation to champion inbound marketing. If you'd like your marketing team led, business growth realised or have a greenfield project you need to kick off and reach its potential, give me a call