Wayne Lockwood: How to Scale Your Marketing Strategy Without Sacrificing Engagement

Author: Patrick Groover

Companies are always looking for a new edge to capture mindshare and differentiate their solution within the marketplace. As people continue to diffuse their communication preferences across a growing number of channels, the role of the marketer can feel more and more like mission impossible.

To keep pace with the proliferation of new touchpoints, marketers need a scalable strategy for managing programs and tracking revenue that tips the balance of campaign cost vs. results in their favor.

Prove How Marketing Contributes to Business Growth

With marketing being seen as a cost center, it’s critical for you to understand how the dollars you spend translate into revenue growth. While you may be able to justify net-negative ROI in the short run, your marketing efforts need to result in positive ROI in the long run. However, one of the largest challenges that marketers face is determining how to properly attribute revenue across marketing activities.

You should measure your campaign performance based on two factors:

Did your efforts produce the desired outcomes?
Did the outcome justify the resources required to deliver on the objective?

First-touch attribution identifies which programs are delivering the most new names and last-touch attribution identifies the final call-to-action that helped push the conversion over the finish line, but most marketing activities that influence the overall buying decision are distributed across multiple points in time. Healthy reporting requires multi-touch attribution, which allows you to evaluate all the touchpoints needed to make an impact.

As an initial starting point, it is important for your campaign reporting to help you visualize the total contribution from touchpoints along the buyer’s journey towards a conversion or sale. Your marketing platform should be able to capture specific campaign successes, interesting moments, and ultimately report on cost per new name, cost per success, and automatically assist your team in distributing the reported revenue value across touchpoints.

Adopt a Solution That Grows with Your Needs

Unfortunately, many marketers struggle to measure their programs, let alone run their programs in a scalable and repeatable manner.

Do these inefficiencies sound familiar?

Copying the same email or content to make only minor changes to personalize the message for a new audience
Manually rebuilding programs, materials, and workflows from scratch for new campaigns
Rebuilding audiences within new platforms to support cross-channel marketing
Manually updating banners or materials for each piece of content within a program.

While it is difficult to eliminate all of the rework, it is possible to leverage marketing automation to keep repetitive tasks to a minimum, eliminating steps that do not add value. More importantly, an advanced marketing platform will offer features that support a true marketing ecosystem to help your team deliver engaging experiences within the Engagement Economy.

Here are three ways to help your marketing team stay lean while continuing to deliver high-quality campaigns that drive ROI:

1. Scale Your Campaigns

Analyzing your campaign management process can reveal inefficiencies that impact your performance. With the right platform, even non-technical marketers can make brand-approved adjustments to programs and content, without having to involve your creative services team.

Rather than creating emails from scratch, you can focus on developing user-friendly, modular templates that can be edited by typical marketing end-users. This will not only streamline campaign execution, but it will free up time so your creative services team can optimize the look-and-feel as well as the deliverability of the email templates.

Similarly, instead of building out new designs for each and every campaign, your team can agree on a set number of pre-formatted layouts and standard content adaptation rules. Striking a balance between creativity and timely execution can make a huge difference in the number of messages that can be supported by your limited marketing resources. These standards also help your organization set appropriate expectations for what your marketing team can deliver.

Another way to scale your campaigns is through the use of dynamic content and program tokens. “Tokens” or “Merge Fields” are system-referenced data points within an automation solution hat adjust contact-presented information based on field values. For example, marketers in a certain industry may need personalized content to capture their audience’s attention around industry-specific trends. Instead of creating multiple emails, you can reference the data values connected to your marketing database and customize content within the same email, landing page, or any other asset.

2. Scale Your Data

Many marketing teams spend hours pulling, uploading, and re-pulling lists over-and-over again. Centralizing access to data and personalization based on shared data points can be a huge time-savings to the marketing team. This is also a great way to eliminate the number of mistakes that can be made while setting up messaging audiences.

To leverage the principles of data scalability, it is important to have a true engagement platform. The right solution will allow marketers to access automatically updated data values and audience membership throughout programs, channels, and content.

Additionally, the ability to pass a pre-built marketing audience from your platform to other marketing channels such as Google AdWords or Facebook can reduce the amount of time you spend aligning and executing multi-channel marketing. And with a platform built on well-designed and well-connected architecture, you can centralize audience management to free up more time for your campaign managers to focus on high-powered messaging and content instead of building lists.

Listening and responding to interactions across touchpoints from a central platform will continue to be a growing component for delivering personalized communication at scale. As the number of solutions increases each year, it will be critical to reduce the number of systems that your marketing team must access to deliver a connected experience.

3. Scale the Replication

While efficiencies occur at the campaign level, advanced marketing teams have the capability to clone and replicate entire programs, including all workflows and content. Leading marketers devote a portion of their practice to strategically defining best-practice programs, layouts, templates, and more so that automation is not a laborious process.

Instead of recreating all of the materials and flows, scale your performance through template programs that require only minor adjustments before placing them into production. A great example of this is the ability to clone an entire event program, then update the banners, date and time, location, and speakers for the event from a central location that then populates all assets and program timing. Companies that leverage this approach are seeing dramatic improvements in available time for managing and improving go-to-market strategies.

As the number of marketing solutions continues to grow, process and program sustainability will be an increasingly important consideration. Take a critical look at the number of systems required to deliver your multi-channel marketing strategies and seek out platforms that can integrate scalability while delivering personalization across the buyer’s journey.

If your team is feeling the stress of campaign execution, ask for their input on which tasks are repetitive and non-value adding. Central campaign execution within a scalable marketing platform delivers unique benefits and efficiencies that help marketers keep pace with the new and unique ways to engage with customers.

As always, please feel free to ask questions or add your thoughts in the comments below.