How to scale your marketing with a small team

Transcription

1 How to scale your marketing with a small team

2 What You ll Learn How to choose marketing initiatives that generate return on investment How to efficiently grow your marketing programs How to build systems to harness brand assets you can use and re-use How to streamline repetitive tasks and execute faster How to succeed with marketing partnerships Introduction As Marketers, we usually have big imaginations and aggressive growth goals. The challenge; however, is we re also frequently short on time, budget, and resources. Small marketing teams of are often hit hardest by resource scarcity making it a challenge to come up with new inspiration, stay on top of cross-channel initiatives, and track and report on results to make informed business decisions. As consumers become increasingly tougher to please, and attention spans get shorter, small marketing departments are often caught trying to create enough original content to stand out from their peers. These challenges create a lot of open questions for marketers. How do small teams scale their productivity and effectiveness? What makes small marketing teams more efficient? How do you create compelling, creative experiences when you and your teammates have to fill in for multiple different roles? What steps can you take to achieve the results of and compete with larger teams and bigger budgets from enterprise competitors?

3 Step 1: Develop a concise set of goals & metrics

4 Metrics are a marketer s best friend and worst enemy. When chosen thoughtfully, these data points can unite your team around a common set of objectives. The challenge with metrics; however, is that there are so many you can choose from between impressions, social shares, conversion rates, open rates, web traffic, click-throughs and other performance indicators, your marketing generates a lot of data. One of the first approaches you can implement to save your team time is lean analytics: agree on three key -- typically revenue-related -- performance indicators to guide your strategy and measure progress. These will typically fall into the areas of: Customer lifetime value How much does your average customer spend on your product? Cost of acquisition How much spend was required for the conversions (sales, signups) you generated? How are these acquisition costs changing over time? Your role as a marketer is to establish and maintain the best marketing margin (cost of acquisition versus customer lifetime value) that scales efficiently. Business growth What sales and revenue outcomes stemmed directly from your marketing? Depending on the reporting needs of your leadership team, you can assess performance daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly. Look for trends over time, as they relate to specific marketing activities. You can also look at revenue generated from new vs. repeat customers. These three goals provide an umbrella for other metrics that you ll inevitably measure and optimization for instance, cost of acquisition will be based on the performance of your different marketing channels and the rate each one converts. The metrics you choose will be unique to your business and specific marketing goals some will be a higher priority than others. For instance, web traffic is more important to a web publisher that relies on display ads for revenue than B2B software companies that depend on leads and sales funnel optimization. A rate or ratio can also be a better guiding indicator than an absolute or cumulative value. For example, Shopping cart conversions per day is a more actionable metric to improve upon than Annual sales.

5 One way to quantify your goals is to follow the process Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup calls innovation accounting. Here is how he explains the process of choosing metrics in Harvard Business Review: Actionable When an employee sees a report about a specific metric, it s essential that they have some idea how to replicate the result in the report. Techniques like split-testing, where discrete groups of customers see different versions of the product, are the gold-standard here. Following the scientific method gives confidence that the observed behavior was, in fact, caused by the change being tested. Accessible Most data warehousing systems provide reports that are too complicated to read and take too long to generate. As a result, many teams don t get any benefit out of them. In order for reports to be worthwhile, it s essential that: Everyone in the company understand how to read them Everyone in the company has easy access to the latest data Additionally, to keep accessibility high, the feedback loop between taking an action and seeing the results should be as short as possible. In my experience, waiting for even a weekly round-up or having to ask a data warehousing expert to run a report creates too much friction. Key data should be available to any employee, anytime, in a matter of minutes. In order to achieve that goal, the reports themselves have to be extremely simple. I recommend you follow the three A s of metrics. All metrics should be actionable, accessible, and auditable. Auditable The biggest benefit of actionable metrics is that they can be used to reap the biggest savings in all of product development, when they tell you that you don t need to do something. Metrics have to be credible to the people who drive the product vision, including company founders. Even if they understand a report, and know what caused it, that doesn t mean they will actually learn. Is the report accurate? Believe me, when it s your idea on the line, it s much easier to believe the report is the problem rather than the idea. This framework will make your marketing team more focused, while also encouraging a culture of creativity and testing. At any given time, your team will know exactly what result they re trying to improve, supporting better prioritization and more efficient decision-making.

6 Step 2: Position your content marketing around reusable assets

7 Content is the atomic currency of modern digital marketing. The challenge with good content; however, is that it s difficult for a two or three person team to create a lot of it. In a recent survey of more than 200 marketing leaders, 61% reported that content marketing takes too much time, 38% said that it s too labor-intensive, and 28% said that it costs too much money. That s why so many small marketing teams rely on freelance designers and content creators to scale their content programs it s too much to manage in-house. But even hiring freelancers can be expensive. A 600 word blog post can cost as much as $500, while whitepapers and infographics can cost thousands of dollars. You need to make sure that your content marketing spend is paying off in terms of signups and sales. But in many cases, they don t. According to one study, 10 to 20% of a company s content drives 90% of its web traffic, while the rest has little value. To capture better content efficiencies, look to generate brand assets that can be re-used, re-purposed and re-distributed. For instance, if you re writing a whitepaper think about how you can slice your content into multiple blog posts. Similarly, if you re writing up blog posts, think about ways that you can compile these resources into a longer guide. When interviewing customers for case studies, think about the common themes you re observing and ways that you can craft these trends into another piece of content like an infographic. Monitor what s getting traction across your efforts and replicate these initiatives across mediums. For example, you could convert a successful blog post into a SlideShare. In addition to hiring freelancers to produce original content, one way to scale your content marketing program is to build an engine for sourcing user generated content (UGC). These are photos, testimonials, and stories that are created by your community and often shared via social media.

8 For marketers working to deliver consistent, relevant brand experiences to their audiences at scale, UGC content can be an efficient way to source timely, authentic content from fans. But despite the fact that friend recommendations and online consumer opinions are the two most trusted information sources for consumers making purchases, only 3.3% of online retailers use user-generated photos in their marketing. So what s preventing brands from adopting UGC? The first obstacle for working with UGC is legal rights; brands need the appropriate permissions to use third-party content without the risk of copyright infringement or other misuse claims. The second complexity is managing UGC at the speed of social. Often, even when marketing teams can get permission to use third-party content, obtaining the necessary media releases and legal approvals takes too much time. Finally, marketers need tools and processes to consistently curate UGC while maintaining brand voice and content quality. So is real-time, safe and scalable UGC a possibility for content marketers? The answer is it depends, primarily on the processes and technologies you use to manage your UGC procurement. You can read more about UGC and resources available to build your workflows in our free guide Getting Started with User- Generated Content (

9 Step 3: Test consistently, scale successes quickly

10 At any given time, your marketing team has access to more ideas and choices than it could ever execute on. Between content marketing, event marketing, marketing, social and search, where do you start? If you focus too much and don t test new channels, you risk missing out on potentially more cost-effective ways to grow your business. If you run too many marketing campaigns at once, you risk spreading your team too thin and sacrificing quality. Following this process, every new marketing campaign could begin with a small, controlled test. Cap tests by limiting your budget and your test window. For instance, you might choose to run a retargeting campaign with $100 per week budget for one month to see if you re able to generate positive ROI relative to spend. Once you have proof of ROI, shift the experiment into your 70% bucket by pushing out a weaker performer, and scale your efforts in that channel. For small teams, we recommend a 70:30 approach -- spend 70% of your time on channels that are stable, tried and true and producing results. Then spend the other 30% running controlled, manageable marketing experiments that test a specific hypothesis for a pre-defined amount of time. When testing new ideas, your goal should be to succeed or fail as quickly and as cheaply as possible the sooner you can focus on what doesn t work, the more quickly you can focus on what does. But how do you choose what to test? Stay closely aligned with your team s skills and interests. With people at the heart of every successful marketing campaign, your best strategy is to focus on tests that your team will enjoy running and optimizing. The more you focus on your strengths, the higher likelihood you ll have of achieving success.

11 Step 4: Build systems to streamline workflows and automate repetitive tasks

12 Google Drive and spreadsheets can be a marketer s best friend until the same tools become their worst enemy. The challenge with generalist tools is that they weren t designed with digital marketers in mind. Excel, for instance, is meant for quantitative analyses, forecasting, and accounting, not collaborative editing, tracked workflows and complex data visualization. PowerPoint is designed for presentations not instructions for design and engineering. Marketers need tools and technologies designed for marketing. In addition to using software that promotes more efficient team collaboration, find ways to automate repetitive tasks. These processes include but are not limited to tracking bids for paid channel advertising campaigns, exporting data and reports from Google Analytics, merging datasets, creating revenue and cost reports, copying and pasting landing page URLs, etc. With Percolate, you can even pre-program logos, fonts and social network-specific image crops, allowing you to create high-quality shareable images in minutes, with the need for a graphic designer or photoshop. The first step is to better productivity is eliminating inbox overload and reducing s role in your collaboration comes in. That s where task management software like Asana, BaseCamp, and Trello -- or a dedicated, collaborative marketing management system like Percolate -- come in these software tools provide a central location for small teams to store their collaboration materials (as opposed to using for document management). The process of finding the right marketing software begins with your company s specific marketing goals. What channels drive the highest impact? Which are the most difficult to manage? Will you be marketing your content online, through in-person events, or both? You need to choose software that optimizes all of these workflows. Save time by asking your engineering team to write a few scripts for you and learn how to run them yourselves. If your company s developers are too swamped to help (or you don t have any), use a recipe-based automation tool like Zapier or IFTTT. Or, try to find freely available open source scripts for generic processes online. If you re experiencing a pain point or powering through a repetitive task you re probably not the other one. There are likely hundreds of other marketers sitting exactly where you are now. If you re not sure where to start looking for a solution, you can ask for help on message boards like GrowthHackers.com. Finding the right tools starts with asking the right questions internally within your marketing team, cross-functionally across your organization, and externally, within the marketing community. Build systems and choose tools that support your precise marketing goals.

13 Step 5: Find co-marketing opportunities

14 One way to amplify the impact of a small marketing team is to join forces with an equally sized or larger organization trying to reach the same audience. Co-marketing opportunities span a variety of marketing mediums from content to and webinars. You may decide to co-produce an infographic or whitepaper or promote one another s brands through strategic partner programs. Co-marketing opportunities are a blank slate it s up to your marketing teams to plan and execute initiatives that are resourceefficient and produce attractive results. The key to success with co-marketing is to find a shared value proposition. What assets can you share? How can each party provide value even if simply splitting costs? The biggest advantages of these types of marketing relationships are: the ability to instantly grow your marketing presence for a particular campaign the opportunity to expand your team s skill base by tapping into the insight of a partner team the ability to split costs between one or multiple companies Not to mention, you ll be able to share or split marketing assets. For instance, if you re running a webinar or producing a whitepaper, you can share leads that you ve generated. You can also share marketing materials and promotions with one another s lists. Conclusion Your ultimate goal in scaling a small marketing team is to move quickly and keep productivity levels high without sacrificing quality and originality. Focus on the messages and experiences you want to convey, put scalable systems in place that help your team collaborate more efficiently and work on getting the most out of the assets you already have. With good technology, evergreen content, a datadriven approach, and some good old-fashioned relationship-building, you re well-positioned to build a growth engine that delivers over-sized results.

15 Percolate is the system of record for marketing. Our technology helps the world's largest and fastest-growing brands at every step of the marketing process. Want to learn more? Contact for more information or request a demo today at percolate.com/request-demo