Building Your Company's Marketing Machine
Intro
Marketing machines not only require technical and executional excellence, they also require strategic planning that’s in close alignment with business goals. Sufficient upfront planning means less throwaway work, as well as more speed and flexibility in pursuit thereof.
Start with operationalizing goal tracking throughout the customer experience through automation. The strategy and roadmap is built around these business goals, drawing upon the company’s historical marketing performance (if applicable), the always evolving marketing best practices, and the risk/reward tolerance of the leadership and investor team. During execution all the hypotheses come to life, learning happens in real time, and the momentum builds - all in pursuit of the organizational goals where this all started from.
Key point is this can go as quickly as is appropriate and/or preferred, and consistently meets & exceeds organizational goals. Marketing machines can be built in just a few months like with Bartesian who attained elite Shopify Black Friday Cyber Monday with its marketing machine built in just 90 days (see Bartesian case study), over a longer duration like Time Study whose marketing machined supported 25x pipeline and 4x ARR improvements (see Time Study case study), and/or often on an ongoing basis during annual/quarterly planning - whichever fits best into the organizational growth model.
Let’s dive in.
Organizational Goals
Organizational goals can vary widely depending on the type of business and its stage of development. Some common goals that companies might have include:
Business Model: Depending on the nature of the business, the goal might be to reach consumers directly (B2C, e.g. ecommerce) or to sell to other businesses (B2B, e.g. software/SaaS). Within B2C, the goal might be to sell directly to consumers through an ecommerce platform (D2C), or to work with retailers to distribute products.
Growth Stage: For businesses in the early stages of development, the focus may be on customer acquisition, while for more mature businesses, the goal might be to focus on loyalty and retention.
Product Category Stage: Some businesses may be focused on creating new categories and disrupting existing markets, while others may be focused on competing within established categories.
Funding: Depending on the stage of development, the business may be self-funded (bootstrapped), looking for investment at various stages (e.g. Series A/B/C/D/E), preparing for an IPO, or managing quarterly growth for investors as a publicly traded company.
These are just a few examples of organizational goals that companies might have. It's important for businesses to identify and prioritize their goals in order to create a clear and focused marketing strategy that will help them achieve those goals.
Goal KPI Data Measurement
Source of Truth
Identifying sources of truth is an important step in building a marketing machine. These sources of truth are the data sources that marketers can use to understand and measure the performance of their marketing efforts. Some common sources of truth include:
Customer database: For businesses that have a customer database, this can be a rich source of information about customer behavior and preferences. This might include data from an ecommerce platform like Shopify, or a CRM system like Hubspot or Salesforce. These can be augmented by survey tools like Fairing.
Store sales: For businesses with physical stores, point-of-sale (POS) data can provide valuable insights into sales trends and customer behavior.
Traffic sources: By tracking the sources of traffic to the website, marketers can gain insights into which channels and tactics are most effective at driving traffic and conversions. This might include data from ad platforms, offline media, and SEO links.
Front-end analytics: Tools like Google Analytics and Mixpanel can provide a wealth of information about website traffic and user behavior, including things like page views, conversion rates, and visitor demographics. This also includes the critical crossover point with traffic sources via the URL attribution parameters including UTMs.
Branding and competitive: Tools like Google Search Console and the Keyword Planner can help marketers understand how their brand is performing in search and what keywords are driving traffic to their site. This can be useful for tracking brand visibility and understanding the competitive landscape.
By using these sources of truth, marketers can gain a deeper understanding of their audience and the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, which can help them optimize and improve their campaigns over time.
Core KPIs
Calculating and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) is an important part of building a marketing machine. KPIs are metrics that help marketers measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and understand how they are performing against their goals.
To calculate the core KPIs, it's important to first define a data dictionary that outlines the sources of truth and the data points that will be used to calculate the KPIs. This helps to ensure that the data is consistent and accurate.
Once the data dictionary is in place, marketers can manually run the KPIs over a historical period to verify the calculations and ensure that they are accurate. This is known as quality assurance (QA).
Once the calculations have been verified, the core KPIs can be automated into an operating dashboard, which can be used to track performance in real-time. This can be done using a third-party tool like Funnel, which can ingest spend data to provide a more complete picture of marketing performance.
Finally, the core KPIs can be visualized using a tool like Google Data Studio, which allows marketers to create interactive dashboards and reports that can be shared with the rest of the organization. This can help to ensure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to marketing performance and helps to drive more informed decision-making.
Syndicate KPI Signals
Once the core KPIs have been calculated and automated into an operating dashboard, it's important to syndicate these signals to systems that orchestrate the end-to-end customer experience. This is how people & machines work together collaboratively. This involves integrating the KPIs with various orchestration systems, such as:
Ads: Platforms like Meta, Google, Amazon, Criteo, and The Trade Desk can be used to manage and optimize advertising campaigns. By integrating the core KPIs with these systems, marketers in collaboration with ad servers (yep, people & machines working together) can better understand the effectiveness of their ads and make more informed decisions about how to allocate budget and resources.
Messaging: Tools like Klaviyo, Iterable, and Hubspot can be used to manage email, SMS, and other types of messaging campaigns. By integrating the core KPIs with these systems, marketers in collaboration with data science algorithms (yep, people & machines working together again) can better understand the performance of their messaging campaigns and optimize them for better results.
Site: Data enrichment and personalization tools like Google Optimize, 6Sense, Drift, and Clearbit can be used to improve the customer experience on the website. By integrating the core KPIs with these systems, marketers in collaboration with web servers (yep, people & machines working together again for the trifecta) can understand how changes to the site are impacting performance and make more informed decisions about how to optimize the customer experience.
In addition to these orchestration systems, it's also important to consider data management and 3rd party integrations. This might include tools like Google Tag Manager and Segment, which can be used to manage and track data from multiple sources.
By integrating the core KPIs with these orchestration systems, marketers can better understand and optimize the end-to-end customer experience (in collaboration with machines), driving better results and helping the business achieve its goals.
Strategy and Roadmap
Marketing Program Audit
Conducting an audit of the current state of the marketing program is an important step in building a marketing machine. This can help marketers understand the strengths and weaknesses of the current program and identify areas for improvement.
Some key areas to focus on during an audit might include:
Understanding of the target audience: It's important to have a clear understanding of the target audience and their needs and preferences. This will help inform marketing efforts and ensure that they are targeted and relevant.
Product positioning and messaging: Understanding how the product is positioned in the market and what messaging resonates with the target audience is crucial for success.
Brand identity: The brand identity should be consistent across all creative assets, including the website, social media, sales materials, email signatures, and advertising.
Channel prominence: It's important to understand how different channels are performing relative to the core KPIs and make adjustments as needed. This might include both paid and organic channels, as well as online and offline channels.
Developing relationships and communities: To what extent has the company built relationships with customers, developers, and power users, as well as targeting specific accounts through account-based marketing (ABM).
Conversion rate optimization and pipeline velocity: Optimizing the conversion rate and velocity of the pipeline can help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the marketing program.
Effectiveness of MarTech system usage: Understanding how different marketing technology systems are being used can help identify opportunities to optimize and improve their usage.
Program integration with KPI data: To what extent are all programs integrated into KPI data ingestion and calculations for seamless reporting into the operating dashboard.
Team culture and dynamics: To what extent there is an environment of constant improvement or status quo inertia. Also the risk/reward tolerance of the leadership and investor team to gauge how aggressively to pursue goals.
Each one of these areas can go very deep in the audit. It all depends on the activities that currently take place for the business as well as the areas that will most heavily impact the organizational goals.
As an example, even starting with developing relationships and communities has so many factors, some considerations are below. And then can go deeper into each of the factors below.
Engage with customers: Engaging with customers through channels like social media, email, and online forums can help build relationships and foster a sense of community. This might include responding to customer inquiries and feedback, sharing content that is relevant and helpful, and creating opportunities for customers to connect with each other.
Foster relationships with developers: If your business relies on developers to build or integrate your products, it's important to foster relationships with them. This might involve providing support and resources, hosting events or hackathons, and building developer communities.
Target specific accounts: With account-based marketing (ABM), marketers can target specific accounts that are most likely to convert. This might involve personalized messaging and content, targeted advertising, and personalized sales outreach.
Competitive Assessment
Conducting a competitive assessment is an important part of any business strategy. It involves identifying a set of companies to benchmark, understanding their corporate and marketing strategies, and analyzing their websites, news, and other competitive intelligence. The goal of this process is to gain a better understanding of the competitive landscape and to identify opportunities for improvement.
To begin, it's important to identify the companies that you want to benchmark. These may be direct competitors, companies operating in adjacent markets, or aspirational companies that you would like to emulate. Once you have identified your benchmark set, you can start to gather information about these companies. This may involve analyzing their websites, looking for news articles or other public information about their business and marketing strategies, and using competitive intelligence tools to gather additional data.
Once you have gathered this information, you can begin to narrow your benchmark set by focusing on the strategic angles and channel details that will be most impactful for your business. This may involve identifying key differentiators, analyzing marketing channels and tactics, and looking for opportunities to improve your own business based on the insights you have gathered.
Overall, a competitive assessment is an important step in building a roadmap for your business. By understanding the competitive landscape and identifying opportunities for improvement, you can better position your company for success.
Strategy and Roadmap Formulation
Once you have a clear understanding of your current situation and your goals, you can start to develop a strategy and roadmap to achieve those goals.
If you already have an existing program, it can be helpful to focus on the aspects of your current strategy that are working best and understand the reasons behind their success. This can help you identify new strategic angles that leverage these strengths and test them to see if they are effective.
If you are starting from scratch, it can be helpful to develop a basic marketing toolkit and framework that outlines the key elements of your strategy. This may include a list of marketing channels and tactics, as well as your target audience and key performance indicators (KPIs). From there, you can develop a list of hypotheses to test and begin rolling out the winners while retiring the losers.
Whether you have an existing program or are starting from scratch, it’s critical to continue iterating and refining your strategy with focus on achieving your core KPIs and establishing a unified brand.
Resourcing
Resourcing your marketing efforts effectively is critical to achieving success in an ever-changing environment. There are several key factors to consider when determining how to resource your marketing efforts, including staffing, budget, and the right expertise.
When it comes to staffing, there are a few different options to consider. One option is to hire in-house marketing staff to manage your marketing efforts. This can be a good option if you have the budget and resources to support a dedicated team, and if you want to have more control over your marketing strategy.
Another option is to use external resources, such as agencies or software, to support your marketing efforts. This can be a good option if you don't have the budget or resources to hire a full-time marketing team, or if you want to bring in specialized expertise.
A hybrid approach, which combines in-house and external resources, can also be effective. This allows you to take advantage of the strengths of both approaches and tailor your marketing efforts to your specific needs.
Ultimately, the right approach will depend on your business goals, budget, and other factors. It's important to carefully consider your options and choose the approach that will best support your marketing efforts.
Execution
One effective way to manage the execution of a marketing roadmap is through the use of sprints. Sprints are short, focused periods of time (typically one to four weeks) during which specific tasks are completed. At the beginning of each sprint, the team should review the roadmap and identify the tasks that need to be completed during that sprint. These tasks should be broken down into smaller, manageable chunks and assigned to team members.
As the sprint progresses, it's important to track progress and report on task completion and core KPIs (key performance indicators) on a regular basis. This can be done through regular meetings and through the use of project management software.
It's also important to revisit the strategy and roadmap on a regular basis, typically every quarter, to ensure that it is still aligned with the needs of the business and that progress is being made towards the desired outcomes. This can involve adjusting the roadmap as needed based on learnings from previous sprints and changes in the business environment.
Conclusion
You now have a high level understanding of how marketing machines are built and their constant improvement mentality. It’s a lot of work, but smart work. And when focused on organizational goals, you’ve got a great chance of meeting & exceeding them.
And to review - Start with operationalizing organizational goal tracking and integration throughout the customer experience on a regular basis through automation. The strategy and roadmap is built around these goals, drawing upon the company’s historical marketing performance (if applicable), the latest always evolving marketing cannon snapshot, and the risk/reward tolerance of the leadership and investor team. And then execution, where all the hypotheses come to life, learning happens, and intense go to market motion happens - all in pursuit of the organizational goals where this all started from.
For those who would like to see the technical wiring & pipes of how data flows throughout the machine, we’ll have more articles about those finer details coming soon.
And for those who are facing complex challenges they’d like to talk through with marketing machine veterans, please feel free to contact us to schedule time to chat about your specific situation.
