It Comes from the Top – or Not
The biggest, most consistent problem I’ve found is when an organisation does not have SMART business strategies supporting SMART marketing strategies informing and guiding digital marketing strategies. Or they exist but are not communicated or, for some reason, do not guide the company’s day-to-day running.
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What are SMART targets again, and why is it important?
SMART goals and targets are a popular framework for setting objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. The acronym SMART stands for:
Specific: The goal or target should be well-defined and focused. It should answer the questions of who, what, where, when, and why.
Measurable: The goal or target should be quantifiable so that progress can be tracked and evaluated. It should answer the questions of how much, how many, or how often.
Achievable: The goal or target should be realistic and attainable, given the resources and constraints available.
Relevant: The goal or target should be relevant and aligned with the broader objectives or mission.
Time-bound: The goal or target should have a specific deadline or timeline for completion.
Examples of SMART goals and targets might include increasing sales revenue by 10% in the next quarter, reducing customer wait times by 20% within the next six months, or launching a new product line by the end of the year.
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The bigger the company, the more this is prevalent; a big company is like a big tanker. It takes more time and more people working together (or not) to gradually move it one way or another. Working alongside, or sometimes within, these organisations can feel like pulling aside a big ship. The crew are waving their hands, shouting out of the portholes, asking you where the icebergs are, where they should go, and how to avoid them. Your first thought might be, why are you asking me? I can help you, but I can’t tell you where you should be going.
Even if we can come up with the perfect direction, if it doesn’t come from them, they won’t believe it, and if the captain or captains do not fully endorse it, then it’s all pointless. This point is particularly relevant to data and analytics. The state of the analytics is just one symptom of a bigger problem – a lack of leadership and strategic direction.
Source: Ian Luries ‘Marketing Stack’.
Ian Luries has created an elegant, simple way to prioritise marketing activities following the structure of a typical sales funnel (see figure). The Marketing Stack shows the raw elements of marketing, breaking down types of marketing into the common paid, earned, and owned channels. Marketers and senior stakeholders often think from the top down. They’re considering where to spend advertising dollars and what the website or content looks like. However, while Analytics and Infrastructure come last, they are the most important: they are the foundations of everything but often receive the least investment or attention as part of the marketing and business strategy.
You could spend a million dollars on your campaign, and it may deliver awareness, sales, or leads, but if you don’t have the working infrastructure, you can’t process payments. If you don’t have operational analytics, you might not know what worked and what didn’t and so you can’t learn, and you can’t recreate your previous success and avoid the failures.
I know of a massive e-commerce website that is guilty of this – a vast international retail shopping chain. Post-COVID, they were unsure what to do about online. Customers wanted online shopping, but for them, it was far less profitable to encourage their customers to purchase online; for years, they were behind the times in everything digital. Their analytics was broken and had been for at least 12 months. It regularly reported only half of what was sold online. This fed into all their paid, earned, and owned marketing, leaving them potentially wasting thousands monthly on ineffective marketing or unreported infrastructure and UX content issues. Still, like Blockbuster before Netflix, no one wanted to acknowledge what was happening before it was too late. Those working within the company received very little support from the top and regularly left when realising how pointless and ineffective their role was without support.
An excellent place to start is to assess this for yourself:
· Is your business more focused on effectiveness or efficiency at scale?
· For example, is your team focused on driving better ROI or overall user experience?
· What proportion of your sales and operations are offline vs. online?
· Are you looking for greater acquisition and growth or customer loyalty and retention?
· Is your aspiration to offer innovative products and services, or are you more conservative and more comfortable working with proven ideas or technologies?
Source: MckTui Consulting.
What makes your organisation great, and what do you want to improve? How is your company strategically positioned? Are you a Walmart or a Tesla? That must be clearly and widely known before thinking about personalisation strategies. One of the key reasons for this is that without an agreed direction throughout the company, you will achieve no traction. Good data requires everyone within the organisation to see why good data is a fundamental part of your direction and should be financially and strategically supported. More often than not, data is stored in silo tools and teams; those teams have seemingly competing priorities.
