Is your marketing velocity keeping up with the market and your competitors?

Throughout the ages, it seems that we are always trying to catch up, to do things faster, bigger, better. We strive to scale beyond the consumer, the market and most importantly our competitors. And as is common with marketers, we gave this concept a name - marketing velocity.

First, let’s define what we mean by ‘marketing velocity’. This term refers to the speed at which a company creates, executes, and measures marketing campaign performance. In other words, the ability to quickly adapt to market changes and deliver new campaigns that capitalize on the shifting landscape and resonate with your customers. Marketing velocity is critical because it allows you to stay competitive and capitalize on new opportunities.

As the business landscape evolves, so does the way we market our products and services. With new technologies, changing consumer preferences, and increasing competition, it's more important than ever to ensure your marketing velocity is keeping up with the market and your competitors. In this article, we'll explore why this is important and how you can stay ahead of the curve.

In the past, our answer to this was to throw people and even beasts at the problem. Over time, we evolved to use mechanical solutions and jumping to current times digital automation. Now we have advanced to the point where we have started leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve our effectiveness.

If just one lever or dial could be turned up to 11 (out of 10), things would be a lot easier, but there isn’t just one. Dependencies exist. New cogs and wheels are introduced to the machinery as fast as we figure out how to use the last new ones. And processes need to come together to make this happen.

To create marketing velocity that will outpace the market and your competitors - you need to build a marketing environment that can scale.

The following are some of the key areas you need to address to be ready to scale and provide the velocity to pass everyone else.

Vision + Principles

Without a clear Vision understood both within your organization and outside, nobody will know what direction to run to. The Vision helps to focus everyone on their role to help steer the business and the marketing in the right direction.

Your vision doesn't need to be earth-shattering, but it needs to be easily understood. Most importantly, your employees should be able to see how they directly support that vision.

The principles help to keep you in check and ensure you are achieving the Vision in the way you intended. Principles provide the guidelines to answer questions about where you invest of divest of technology, strategy, tactics, or any resource. Principles help you put people in the right positions to succeed. Principles keep you focused on the types of clients and opportunities you should accept to achieve success. This will shape how people perceive you. It is the essence of your brand.

Think of the Vision as what you are trying to achieve, the ultimate goal, and the Principles are how you will achieve them.

Process

One of the biggest enemies of scale is how you establish processes. Processes can’t live in the head of a few key people. Process can’t be interpreted or followed differently by different team members. Yes, they might really be good at that process, but what happens when you want to grow your team? What will do you do if you lose a key person who had all that information in their head?

Start by documenting your process. Perfection is the enemy of progress. Don’t worry if your processes aren’t final. In fact, assume processes are never final but evolve with marketing velocity. Just don’t ignore them. Without process, team members don’t have structure to help them understand what needs to be done next or who needs to be involved to achieve the desired result.

By documenting every process, you accomplish the following:

1. Knowledge retention – protects your team, if a resource gets promoted, or leaves, or if you grow the team. Getting new people up to speed is much simpler with defined processes.
2. Standardization – now you can ensure that everyone is following a vetted process - which allows them to move faster because there are maps to ensure team members don’t miss any steps.
3. Process improvement – because as we noted above processes are never final. As you add new technology, new data, new roles, you can quickly evaluate the various steps and see where improvements are needed to improve delivery and results.
4. Improved quality – while sometimes time consuming and tedious, processes are what ultimately ensure all necessary steps are completed and if not an easy way to trace back through your work to determine where the break occurred. All of this leads to higher quality of work and happier clients and teams.

Most importantly, processes set your organization up to scale effectively and in the right direction.

Data

This is the lifeblood of modern organizations. It has never been easier to collect and use data, however, there has also never been as much focus on its privacy and security, and it is only going to increase as consumers expect organizations to be more respectful of their expectations. 

Start with a solid process to gather, cleanse, and organize your data with a key focus on identity resolution, consent, and master data management (MDM). Fortunately, data systems have evolved where there is no longer a need for all data to be housed in one location for it to be effective.

Think of data like money you deposit in a bank. If the bank was unable to immediately provide your current balance, withdrawal history, or enable you to transfer funds easily, would you want to continue to use that bank? 

Standardize your data and processes. The more you standardize imports, exports, and storage, the more agile your organization will be. As with the banking example - the more you can show proof of where you received data (money) from or where you sent data, using clear processes to show how you data and keep it safe – the better.

Strategize on how to export cleansed and standardized data to required systems efficiently. It is critical to understand destination system use cases in order to set up effective transfers of data. Having the data in the first place is great. Having the data cleansed and organized is better. Being able to leverage that data quickly and easily for practical use is the best case to achieve scale.

Tools

With my role in MarTech Strategy and Enablement, you might argue that I might put the most emphasis on this section, but you'd be wrong. I have seen organizations with strong organizational management and weaker toolsets outperform other organizations with arguably a better toolset. In some cases, a great toolset can make up for weakness in process, but it’s best to have both.

Ultimately you need to align your toolsets to ensure they are supporting your Vision and the capabilities needed to accomplish it.

Many marketing technology vendors do a great job in showcasing their abilities and claim they have an ‘easy button’ that will accomplish everything you want with minimal effort.  It is easy to buy into this pitch, but you should first revisit your Vision. Does this software meet the defined capabilities in your plan. Be sure to explore competitors and vet them across the impacted departments in your organization. Otherwise, you may find yourself adapting your Vision to the toolset.

Stay true to your Vision and get tools to support it, not the other way round.

Measurement

Without measurement, you lack visibility into your progress. Having KPIs in place for all areas of your Vision will help you understand growth and development in each area. With a measurement plan in place, you can compare results from campaigns and tactics and ensure they are still holding true to your principles.

Reports and Visualizations need to be tailored to the audience, whether internal or external. Conduct focus groups during the design process to make sure the content is easy to understand, relevant and inspires insights.  Doing these two things will help rally everyone towards your goals and demonstrate how the initiatives are supporting it.

BAU + Experimentation

Consider your marketing operations teams when you consider how to structure your Business-as-Usual (BAU) and testing processes. Ideally the ratio between BAU and testing should be around 80:20%.

Think of how you can create automations around your BAU operations to establish your core marketing engine. This is everything that keeps the lights on and moves you forward at a steady pace. This includes automations around all your awareness and funnel process to get people to convert and then also how do you nurture and retain your existing customers.

Experimentation is then how you refine how well the engine is running and which opportunities may accelerate your progress.

It is critical to ensure that experimentation is part of your core culture and make it easy to execute and measure it – this is how you can quickly prove if a new trend or initiative will have traction with your audience and then allow you to quickly integrate or discard these initiatives.

Conclusion

In a race between your organization, your competition, and the rest of the market, being able to move faster than the rest will always give you an edge. Focusing on these different areas will help you get into the right shape to achieve that speed.

Are you faster than your competitors yet?