How to make marketing accountable is an age old question that keeps rearing its ugly head in nearly every organization. And every time sales slide we hear the same old song: our marketing is not working, we don’t have enough leads, we aren’t sending the right message, our positioning is off, we are too expensive and the competition has better marketing “they are everywhere.” My dear old boss at Hummingbird, Jan Adamek would always say “marketing smarketing let’s just sell the stuff.” In many ways he was right and in many startups sales and marketing are connected at the hip, this is not the case in many large organizations where marketing often sits in the glass house.  Last week we discussed Indium’s three Cs of social media and how MVP executes best practices in integration social media marketing to drive lead generation and revenue for SAP. This week it’s the old and the new of marketing.

Sales Driven Marketing People Rock

I firmly believe that marketing is too important to be left up to marketing people. So recruit and develop marketing people that have carried a bag. There is no substitute for front line selling experience, and if you find and/or convert sales people to become marketers they are, and/or will become your best marketers.  However, they are a rare breed, find them and your marketing department shines. For them marketing every day begins with sales and they think about it from the perspective of a sales person and what a sales person needs to sell.  They will automatically reach out to sales people and ask them what the current barriers to sales are? What ammunition (content, influence & qualified leads) can they put in a sales person’s hands that day and what kind of air cover they can provide for the sales marines in the field? Marketing and its various communications functions are in many ways the air force of business war, sales guys are the marines.

Measuring Marketing & Communications

Nearly everything you do in marketing and the various functions of communications efforts can now be measured. The first step is to take a close look at all marketing processes and look at how they are integrated to fill your funnel. Marketing in the sense of the four Ps used to be much harder before the Internet in my view, but those that have not adapted to the social media change will say it was much easier. The fact is that it is much more measureable now than ever.

 

Four P's

Marketing your product to a place and positioning it with a price was the foundation of early marketing that has changed radically in the last ten years.

Think about how difficult it was to get competitive information fifteen years ago, it meant going to trade conferences, in some cases dumpster diving, and the best case scenario was always when the customer hated the competitor and told you all about them.

What is Measureable Today?

  • Traditional Marketing Vehicles:
  • Brochures and collateral created.
  • In person events and trade shows
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  • On premise customer visits.
  • Snail mailings
  • Executive thought leadership
  • Third party thought leadership
  • Sales visits
The Internet & Web 2.0:
  • Search word and engine effectiveness
  • Click through, from partners
  • Unique visitor’s impressions
  • Chat streams
  • Downloads of content, ebooks etc
  • Global distribution of visitors
  • Webinar and virtual trade show attendees
  • Brand experience and sentiment.
  • Number bloggers on your radar screen
  • Blog tonality
  • Social media sites that review your products and services
  • Engagement: Facebook, Twitter, eg blog comments

Communications in its various forms is the mouthpiece of marketing and the two organizations are connected at the hip in most successful companies. This is often the case in startup companies and SMEs where marketing- sales - senior management are completely integrated and this provides them with significant competitive advantage over larger competitors. And they simple can’t afford not to have effective marketing.

Measuring Brand & Thought Leadership

 

In the social media world it is becoming easier to measure reputation and brand experience by looking at the tonality of the blogosphere and social media peer groups involved with your products and services. Marketing is more than branding and brand management; however, these are two factors that were not easily measured just ten years ago. Brand is one aspect of marketing that is still very hard for small business to measure; however, social media can make it easier when employed. Thought leadership is also more measureable than ever within the collaborative influence chain that social media enables. Finding your thought leaders and evaluating the depth of their ecosystem and number of followers has never been easier.

As Darwin so aptly said, “it is not the strongest that survive, but those that can adapt to change.” The smartest marketers today are rapidly adapting to the social media tsunami and are leveraging it to competitive advantage.

Beachcombing Tidal Drift Zones

 

Every day our oceans fluctuate in a pattern of low tides and high tides in two sequences, with two lows and two highs every twenty four hours. When the moon and sun are in alignment with our earth we have our lowest and highest tides because of the gravitational pull exerted by these objects. Gravity pulls our oceans towards the equator and they bulge out creating extreme highs and lows in regions north of the equator. These are called spring tides and when they occur with storms we see the most damage and erosion on our coasts. During these times we have the highest and lowest tidal amplitudes and they can be very extreme, examples being the Sea of Cortez and Bay of Fundy where tidal amplitudes can exceed fifty feet. I have experience extreme tides in both of these areas and it is truly an amazing event.

As a young man I spent a great deal of my time working the tides and learned that on every beach there are two tide lines. At the top of the beach we always find what is called the high tide line and at the bottom of the beach or coast is the low tide line.  When beachcombing one should always walk both tide lines because they will have different animals and shell and of course my favorite beach glass. Beachcombing is one of my favorite past times and until next time I wish you great marketing and selling in the millennium.