As a marketing professional for the past 3 decades (20 years as a senior executive), I have seen a total transformation of the discipline from misunderstood art form to data-driven science. The impact of digital has been profound, enabling meaningful engagement with buyers on a grand scale. The science of messaging has altered the way digital content is used to facilitate the buyer’s journey, from the initial stages of awareness and interest to the latter stages of purchase consideration and decision. The availability of analytics has paved the way for continuous improvement of campaigns to build a strong brand and drive consistent demand for products and services.
At the executive level, I’ve seen many forms of marketing success and failure, but I have found a constant theme. When marketing campaigns are architected with an accurate and aligned targeting, messaging and engagement strategy, they can deliver a strong and steady return on investment, with incremental revenue in the range of 10x to 20x marketing expenses. If building a campaign strategy is approached like solving an equation where the marketing variables are determined with accuracy and the campaign elements are aligned with precision, you will develop a repeatable formula for marketing success.
The Harsh Reality of Marketing
What most non-marketing executives fail to realize is this undeniable fact. If any of the marketing variables are off the mark (e.g., wrong buyer profile, weak brand identity, misaligned campaign messaging, ineffective visual presentation, wrong channels of engagement, or poor campaign execution), time, money and opportunity will all be wasted. It’s the harsh reality of marketing in the digital age where instant access to information allows buyers to evaluate more choices in less time.
Solving the marketing challenge can be murky and confusing to business leaders. Nevertheless, with an entrepreneurial spirit, many try to beat the odds and roll their own marketing function based on intuition alone. The thought process goes something like this: “How hard can this be? I know my marketplace better than anyone. I’ll just put up a website, drive some traffic and manage the leads as they come in.”
It’s a nice idea, and it’s admirable, but it just doesn’t work that way in the real world.
Developing a successful marketing function is no different from developing a product or service. It must be architected, engineered and perfected over time. It requires the systematic development of branding, messaging and the right method for reaching buyers. It must be closely managed with a process for continuous improvement. Marketing is not easy, but a systematic approach for doing it the right way can be captured in a roadmap for executives to follow. All it takes is the time, energy and commitment to see it through.
The Executive Marketing Roadmap
This article is the first in a 6-part series that will present an executive roadmap for marketing in the digital age. The roadmap covers 5 stages that form a progression from defining foundational strategies to executing with continuous improvement. Follow this roadmap and your marketing operation will become an integral part of your business development and customer acquisition process.
The diagram below is a mind-map that shows five stages of an Executive Marketing Roadmap. It provides a structure for implementing best practices. Each roadmap stage is devoted to an area of focus: Messaging, Website, Content, Campaigns, and Analytics. Each focus area has five steps to be completed before progressing to the next stage.
During my consulting engagements, I facilitate business leaders through this roadmap with a series of templates that ultimately become a strategic marketing plan for the organization. The exercise serves to align stakeholders, document a plan of action and galvanize a sense of urgency and commitment for successfully meeting the marketing challenge.
Here is a brief overview of the 5 stages in the executive marketing roadmap.
- Messaging: Before you can do anything else, a fine-tuned messaging framework must be built. Without the right messaging, your website, content, and campaigns will fall flat. Each target market you address requires its own messaging framework.
- Website: As the cornerstone for all marketing activities and assets, your website must articulate your messaging in a crisp and compelling way. Whether it’s used as a vehicle for branding, lead generation or conducting sales transactions, your website must perform as if it were your best salesperson.
- Content: Once your messaging is solid and your website accurately conveys it, you’ll need a strategy to guide the development of compelling content to facilitate the buyer’s journey. Content is the fuel that will power your campaigns, motivate buyer action, and drive actionable sales opportunities to your business.
- Campaigns: Now you’re ready to run an effective campaign that is based on messaging targeted to specific buyers and content that drives awareness, interest and purchase decisions. Each target market should have its own focused campaign to match buyers with solutions that address their specific pain points and illustrate ways to realize value.
- Analytics: Campaigns must be reviewed and continuously improved on a regular basis. Visibility into what works, and what doesn’t, comes from tracking the right metrics that roll up to your key performance indicators. KPI’s are an essential way to align marketing objectives with sales targets and business goals for achieving growth and profitability.
In the coming weeks, I will be publishing a series of in-depth articles to cover each stage, or focus area, contained in the Executive Marketing Roadmap. This 6-part series can provide a structure for building out your own marketing function. Or, you can use it as a reference point for the marketing investments you’re already making to grow your business.
Resist the urge to randomly run some AdWords campaigns to your home page or hire an intern to make telemarketing calls. Instead, approach marketing like any other critical business function like finance, engineering or production. It requires the same level of attention to planning, operations, and process efficiency. Use the Executive Marketing Roadmap to begin this journey.
In part 2 of this series, we will explore the best practices for Building a Messaging Framework to serve as the foundation for everything you do in marketing.
To accompany the roadmap, you may also find it valuable to conduct your own Business-Driven Marketing Assessment. This online self-assessment will help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your current marketing approach. The assessment is a useful tool for performing a gap analysis to understand your current state of marketing, the ideal future state, and the gaps to be filled in order to move from current state to future state.
Click here to take Business-Driven Marketing Assessment