Marketing Operations Consulting, Percassity Marketing Data Solutions

Marketing: don’t do it this way

March 16th, 2011

Simon Daniels director, Marketing Operations Consulting, Percassity Marketing Data Solutions – discusses the worst practices in marketing operations and offers solutions

The economic turbulence of the past couple of years and ensuing upheavals present the opportunity to re-evaluate the role of marketing operations.
This is particularly the case for the many marketing departments that have shed staff and now need to find smarter ways of undertaking some of those lost individuals’ activities.

Many activities within marketing have become so routine that nobody questions them, but they represent ‘worst practices’ that limit success. So, here are five of those I encounter regularly and suggestions for avoiding them.

Simon Daniels director, Marketing Operations Consulting, Percassity Marketing Data Solutions

Worst Practice No. 1: Renting mailing lists at the last moment

Obtaining targeted contacts for campaign activity requires a long-term approach, rather than renting a list at the 11th hour, just to meet some arbitrary quantity of names or an unrealistic deadline. In an ideal world, only individuals who have explicitly opted-in would be added to a marketing database and the appropriate content, social media and search engine optimisation programmes would maximise ‘natural’ database population.

This may not always be practical and a more concerted database building effort might be required. Successful organisations spend time researching the right data sources and using bespoke contact discovery if necessary. This is not an overnight activity but will still be considerably faster than organically building a database while optimising the resulting data quality.

Check points:

Plan data acquisition well in advance of campaign execution and allow sufficient time.
Test samples from different data sources to establish which are most responsive, before rolling out to a wider selection from the most successful source.
Consider undertaking bespoke data discovery, entailing custom research to identify the required contacts and build your database.

Worst Practice No. 2: Tracking every marketing campaign separately

Outsourcing campaign execution is a tried-and-tested approach, particularly for digital activity. External vendors can pull landing pages and micro-sites together easily, where building such facilities into a corporate website can be onerous and time-consuming.

It’s very tempting, particularly when the focus is on getting the campaign out of the door, to allow disparate reporting mechanisms to be adopted. Usually involving spreadsheets, PowerPoint slides and email alerts, they’re frequently understood by only a few people and are best avoided. Issues arising from ’going out of process’ can range from unnecessary additional work, through harder cross-campaign analysis, to restrictions on proper touch control and opt-out management.

Where a marketing or campaign management system exists, it should be relatively straightforward to capture such responses directly. And don’t be tempted to execute activity outside of such a tool, as doing so completely negates the investment that’s been made. If a ‘tactical’ campaign doesn’t seem worth undertaking within the system, it isn’t worth undertaking at all!

Check points:

Ensure all campaign reporting takes place within business as usual processes, using existing campaign and response management tools and systems.
Avoid over-reliance on processes that depend on a single individual undertaking manual activity.
If you do use external agencies for campaign execution, make sure you define your outcome data requirements up-front.

Worst Practice No. 3: Keeping the sales/marketing databases separate

A common issue afflicting marketing is a lack of integration between sales and marketing systems, particularly when it comes to sharing contact data and leads. Holding sales and marketing data separately is a significant lost opportunity for data maintenance.

Successful organisations will usually have implemented marketing systems with interfaces to a sales force automation system, ensuring that qualified leads appear directly in these systems – not shared by spreadsheet or email. This should ensure that high quality customer data is properly maintained and leads are available to Sales for prompt follow-up. This improves lead tracking, ensuring against leads getting lost with the eventual outcome unknown.

Check points:

Enable contact data to be shared between Sales and Marketing, including updates and amendments.
Present leads (once qualified) to Sales via a sales force automation system, not spreadsheet lists or email. There are plenty of solutions out there at all price points!
Ensure the outcome of leads passed to Sales can be recorded and tracked in order to measure return on marketing investment.

Worst Practice No. 4: Checking data extracts just before they go out

Performing a quick last-minute check of the list before campaign execution is an all too familiar occurrence. Reviewing data at this stage of a campaign is too late in the process, though, resulting in it being a panic activity that never gets done properly. Ideally, a data quality programme and suitable system would be implemented in order to create a framework for proper data management. Data quality need not be complex or technology-heavy, but using data quality tools and processes as a business-as-usual activity is crucial.

In the absence of such a strategic approach, consider using one of the many (not necessarily expensive) tools available to identify data quality problems. In this way, issues can be resolved on a routine basis and their sources identified and resolved. And if, in the worst-case scenario, list reviews are being conducted pre-campaign execution, at least these tools allow checks to be carried out methodically.

Check points:

Build data quality management into your organisation’s infrastructure rather than being an add-on process.
Ensure such data quality initiatives include both governance and technology solutions.
Use appropriate tactical tools as a stopgap, but don’t allow their use to become an excuse for not taking a strategic approach.

Worst Practice No. 5: Undertaking marketing campaign activity manually

Every sophisticated B2B marketer has a vision of multi-touch, cross-channel, behaviour-driven campaigns, featuring lead scoring and qualification processes, prospect nurturing and end-to-end measurement of marketing ROI. Such a marketer will quickly realise that attempting activity like this by conventional means is a quick route to failure or insanity! At some point, the need for marketing automation will become apparent. However, implementing solutions without due consideration will merely lead to executing ineffective marketing more efficiently!

Increasingly, successful marketing functions have a clear marketing automation strategy. Neglecting to invest in the necessary tools, processes and skill sets to support and drive marketing into the future is merely setting out to fail. The growing breadth of functionality and cost represented in the marketing automation marketplace means that a solution almost certainly exists to suit every requirement and budget, so there’s no excuse not to invest.

Check points:

Implement an appropriate marketing automation solution to achieve competition-beating campaign capability.
Fully exploit the capabilities of that solution, don’t allow it to become an expensive email broadcast platform.
Use an automation solution to ensure subsequent responses from the same contacts are related to any existing lead, ensuring joined-up response management.

Summary

Overcoming these worst practices will help propel you to best-in-class performance. Marketing operations should play a central role in creating the necessary infrastructure and environment for executing efficient marketing activity. The advantages are not only increased marketing effectiveness and an improved customer experience, but also clear productivity and cost-saving benefits.