Are your marketing efforts falling flat? Do your colleagues on the executive team think that marketing is not providing business value? Are you helping sales be more effective in engaging prospects and customers? You may just need a more integrated, holistic approach to your campaign planning and execution. Jeff Clark, our resident Rockstar CMO Strategic Advisor, has some advice.
In episode 141 of the RockstarCMO Podcast, we talked about how a deep, holistic understanding of the personas within your customer base will make your sales and marketing more effective. What do you do with that information? The answer is focus as much of your activity as possible directly on the needs of these personas.
In fact, let’s resolve to build integrated, multi-channel campaigns that engage these personas to demonstrate that we understand their needs and know how to solve their business problems. Anything you do outside those campaigns is bluntly wasted effort.
Let’s Stop Random Campaigning!
The term campaign is often misused in marketing circles. We talk of individual tactics as if they’re campaigns, like an email or a webcast. However, those tactics are one, often minor, interaction that is a blip on a buyer’s journey. Even multi-touch, nurture tactics must be in the context of a larger campaign. Any individual in a buying group may engage over a dozen times with a vendor and their content, and that’s just one member of the buying group.
Rather than organizing your activity by the functional execution of tactics, let’s put more wood behind fewer arrows (i.e., integrated campaigns). Those campaigns are the conversation that we want to have with our prospects and customers.
By the way, forget that our marketing and CRM systems think each tactic is a campaign. What do they know?
Inject ARTE into Your Campaign Strategy
My colleague Ian Truscott’s mantra is that marketing must be about ART, i.e., building Awareness, impacting Revenue, and instilling Trust in customers. I totally agree. And the same thought process applies to your campaign goals and objectives! Integrated campaigns must incorporate those goals. Your marketing impact is after all the sum of your campaigning.
I’ll add one more Enablement. Enablement is important in the context of a campaign because you need to get everyone who interacts with the customer on the same page. Marketing has helped determine the customer needs and what drives engagement. So, let’s get our sales and marketing collaborators up to speed on effective messages and tactics. To ignore this element is to commit your team to more random acts of marketing. Here’s the role they play:
- Awareness. Working with press and influencers, as well as brand advertising, to build general awareness, solidify perceptions, and win the customers’ buying preferences
- Revenue. Getting buyers to raise their hands and engage with you through direct marketing, events, digital advertising, content syndication, and other demand generation tactics
- Trust. Building a loyal customer base with vocal advocates using customer-centric tactics that help with on-boarding, product adoption and maintaining communication
- Empowerment. Training sales and marketers with tools, content and messaging that supports effective engagement
Each of these compounds the impact of the others. As you build awareness with your personas, your demand generation efforts get better engagement. More effective engagement builds trust with prospects that become customers. Empowerment ensures that customer facing teams work as one.
Why Are Integrated Campaigns More Effective?
There are many benefits to taking this approach. It starts with putting your customer first:
- You’re taking a customer-focused, not product-focused approach. It’s time to put the customer and their needs first because they want you to address their problems, not lead with your products features.
- The campaign addresses the buyers’ journey and entire lifecycle. Aligning your messages across the tactics within each element enables your company to tell a consistent, engaging story to all the members of the buying team. Plus, your campaign is not done with the purchase.
- You bring sales into the conversation. They are important to the buying journey, so get your story straight across both online and in-person engagement with your business.
- The campaign is focused on achieving business outcomes. At the top level of a campaign, you set goal to drive revenue growth, build brand loyalty, or improve customer retention, not just drive leads or get bums in seats.
- The outcomes are measurable and relevant to the business. It’s hard to measure the business impact of a webcast or email promotion. When you budget for the integrated campaign, you can show a return on your investment, e.g., we put $1 million into the campaign, and contributed to $5 million in revenue or improved brand preference 20%.
Orchestrating an integrated campaign is as much an art as it is a science. In upcoming posts, we will cover strategies and skills that will help your campaign managers paint on a bigger canvas.
The image of a woman throwing dice in the street was created with A.I. using NightCafe Creator
Ready to rock?
Fancy a chat about this? Or maybe we can help with our advisory services or get in touch!
Subscribe
Join hundreds of your peers and get your weekly fix of marketing street knowledge from the Rockstar CMO community.
Share this article
Author
