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Jennifer Foster Marketing

process improvement

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Marketing Process Improvement: More Cake, Less Icing

Marketing process can be a lot like icing a cake. You start with a solid foundation and then add a few layers of icing and maybe even some added toppings.

A few years ago there was a commercial that showed a man lovingly bumbling his way through the process of frosting a cake. Every time he’d mess up the cake he’d plop more icing on it and continue to try to smooth it out. He was admittedly quite endearing and even he seemed to find the humor in the process. But make no mistake, more icing did NOT fix the cake.

When it comes to marketing, you can’t always plop and smooth icing onto bad processes either. (Else you might end up like this dad in an unrelated but adorable video). Absolutely, there are times where service goes poorly and you need to refund, correct or comp something, but if you find this is happening more and more regularly, it may be time to get under the hood of your processes to see what’s really going on.

I hope to be well-known for the fact that because I focus on marketing process improvement I’m always interested in what is not working more so than I am with what is working great. Fixing the broken things in a marketing process provides much more opportunity than polishing things that are already working well.

Not too long ago, I was introduced to the client of a client at a meeting here in Dallas. After explaining that I was a marketing strategy consultant, the company representative listed some of the marketing endeavors she was hoping to employ. The longer we talked, the more I understood that their challenges really related much more to employee turnover than to marketing. They were looking for marketing solutions that would keep their employees happy. The employees they’d entrusted to provide care for patients simply didn’t stay long, which caused downstream patient disruption and ultimately loss of business.

Throwing marketing money at this wasn’t going bring much resolution. 

Your marketing needs to be more cake and less icing.

To really make headway in a very competitive market, this agency needed to discover why employees were leaving. I replayed and analyzed the conversation and I found myself formulating a plan of what I would do if I was consulting for them:

  • Perhaps it was a training problem. In a home health care setting, its easy to understand the challenges in caring for sick and aging people. One of the first things I would look at is if the company is putting the caregivers into a situation they didn’t expect. Maybe the job was more complicated than they expected.  Or too emotional.
  • Maybe it was a hiring problem. Most of these people who were hired were being brought in from Craig’s List job listings. Nothing against Craig’s list… okay well maybe something about their job listings. We can likely agree it is likely not the place to find professional and dedicated employees. Paying for a listing on a respected site or a professional recruiter could yield investment returns for years to come.
  • What if it was a payroll problem? The most commonly cited reason for leaving was for higher pay. Maybe a couple extra dollars per hour would encourage people to stay. One of the things I learned very early on in my corporate career was that hiring staff is EXPENSIVE. Hiring the wrong people costs even more. It costs a lot of time to find them, hire them, and train them. If they leave quickly, you have to start all over again. Do this over and over and you’re likely investing thousands of MORE than it would cost to simply increase pay.

Spend your dollars wisely!

Concluding, your marketing leaders should be as interested in the cake as they are the icing! Marketing dollars may actually be better spent on process improvement!

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Why Data Matters to Marketing

I’ve been thinking a lot about data-driven marketing the past few weeks, most recently I’ve been thinking about how hard having bad data makes our lives. I’ve come to 3 realizations:

Bad Data Makes Your Customers Crazy

Somewhere along the way I missed the exit to the “creative side” of marketing (1). Instead, I seem to constantly be in the midst of a project focused on figuring out how to build and manage data. Companies today acquire and store customer data at lightning speed, often different teams use and manage the data in different ways, sometimes creating their own separate repositories.

marketing with out dataIf you think of some of your most recent experiences that left you frustrated with a large company, it was likely due to mismanagement of your information.  Most recently for me this was the rental car counter.  I have few expectations of the rental car company. 1. Take the reservation and 2. hold the reservation (Bonus points if you got the Seinfeld reference.) Honestly, my expectation is that I have a car and that I be able to pick up and return without stopping at the rental car counter.

Two weeks ago upon my “preferred” rental car company’s big red board which normally directs me right to my space instead said the dreaded CTR (2 & 3).  As I trudged to the counter, I was informed that my credit card had expired. Easy fix, gave them new card, came out from under my cloud of doom, and went on my merry way. This week, upon arrival at the same airport, I was again summoned by the big red board to stop at the dreaded counter instead of proceeding directly to my pre-reserved, mid-sized chariot. (4) The gentleman at the counter proceeded to inform me that my American Express card wasn’t able to be processed. To which I said, “Um, yes but I gave you a NEW MasterCard 2 weeks ago at this very counter.” Bad data makes your customers crazy.

Bad Data Makes Your Processes Inefficient

In my former corporate life, one of my biggest responsibilities was overseeing the team responsible for hundreds of different letters. The letters were highly dependent on data from upstream systems. In addition to standard demographic information there were generally very sophisticated calculations which would derive content and then populate personalize content into the letters. Very often the data was wrong… or it broke along the way. This lead our letters to be wrong. Which created calls to the call center. Which created complaints. Which created issue logs and break-fix projects and correction letters. Which created testing environments. Which created…you can see where I’m going here (5). We were in a constant state of fixing our bad data.

Not uncommon until you think about the time it took to actually do all that, in the meantime the error continued to churn out incorrect information. So we created quality assurance teams to check the data, strip it off and send it back for correction. We hired teams of people to shore up weak data going through unstable processes. Those teams took time to do their work, which slowed down our timeliness. A horrible case study in efficiency for the sake of accuracy. Bad data makes your process inefficient.

Bad Data Renders Your Marketing Materials Irrelevant

One of the recent start-ups I have seen present (Meet Me@) uses an example of sending a frozen yogurt coupon to an ice cream lover.  While a relatively simplistic example of the impact of bad data, if you are the yogurt company you’ve wasted the cost of the coupon. The chances of the yogurt company having their own data is low so I’m really more concerned if you’re the agency who provided the “qualified” lead: you’ve wasted your client’s money on the coupon, and lost a bit of your own credibility on delivering qualified leads. (6)

Now we can take 2 paths with this, right? As a marketer, perhaps I want to try to convince my ice-cream loving targets to TRY my frozen yogurt.  Something along the lines of “Think you don’t like frozen yogurt? We bet you a free cup we can change your mind!” THAT is relevant and meaningful. However, as it stands simply sending coupon with a save money message will be effort wasted. Bad data renders your marketing materials irrelevant.

What is the solution to all this?  If you missed last week’s blog check out the role of Marketing Technologist (Read it here).  If your company doesn’t have a marketing leader who understands your database management systems you likely need one. It’s becoming truer every day that Everything is Marketing, your data powers your relationship with your customers from customer care to welcome letters/emails. You need to get it right the first time

1. The land of logos and PMS color matching… you know, where the unicorns, leprechauns and Super Bowl ads live.

2. I’m preferred, dagnabbit, my card says so!

3. The company shall remain nameless but whose claim to fame is that they “Try harder!” Which is a whole other blog topic what a horrible tagline!)

4. Friggin’ fracking… grrrrr!

5. This is actually the best case scenario where it actually got fixed; generally it went into an IT queue and was schedule sometime in 2017

6. And sullied the good name of marketing

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The Future of Marketing Depends on Marketing Technology and Operations

Marketing has always been thought of as a creative industry. “Marketing” folks are generally known for their ability to create and launch brand identities, their keen skills in developing the perfectly crafted sell sheets, advertising and leave behinds for their sales teams,  and lest we forget their awareness and ability to capitalize on trending social media topics.

However, in this day and age more and more marketing is becoming data-driven which is creating a new class of marketer: the Chief Marketing Technologist.

Sales collateral is not just customized, it’s personalized and tailored to its target.

Messages are automated based on an action (or inaction) with web sites or customer care centers.

Data-base marketing is becoming the standard by which teams deliver relevant content to customers.

Finally, all of these data-driven projects rely on even more aggregated data to create solid measurements when it comes time to budget for next year.

Wikipedia defines Marketing Operations as:  the function responsible for marketing performance measurement, strategic planning and budgeting, process development, professional development, and marketing systems and data.

Scott Brinker wrote an article in 2013 citing the need for a Chief Marketing Technologist who would sit within a companies’ marketing organization but serve as a technology expert for the purpose of improving the efficiency and accuracy of the organization. Some even go so far as to see marketing operations leader as a “Chief of Staff” because they are often responsible for handling so many aspects of the company’s success.

(Personal story: I remember dramatically lamenting to one of my former bosses who continually sent me on fact-finding and resolution missions with technology teams, that I wanted to work on things that “weren’t broken” — had I only known to simply dub myself a Marketing Technologist!)

Marketing-Driven Process Improvement
Marketing technology leaders quickly find themselves being experts in process modeling and improvement. Because they identify gap, and in my case propose and drive resolution, we are then tapped to create training and staffing plans. Then, we are responsible for incorporating metrics to prove the processes are better and the process starts all over again.

Brinker (@chiefmartec) includes a Forrester-created a diagram of how this role functions under the direction of the CMO.

The Marketing Technology Office

Breaking Out of Old Patterns
Companies who fail to understand this will continue to struggle. Several that I’ve seen firsthand, keep data tucked neatly away in the technology department without understanding how the data will even be used downstream, let alone understanding the consequences if it’s not correct. Marketing and communications staff will generally avoid understanding the complicated systems and their mysterious codes that generate the data.

This push-pull between departmental staff, over time will degrade the effeciency of how data moves through the process. Without anyone measuring the impact the organization slowly slides into a spiral of bad data, delayed activity and inaccurate measurements. Any data integrity projects are competing with mission-critical IT projects and its not hard to predict who will win if there isn’t an undertanding of the value of  marketing-driven initiatives.

The Future Relies on Marketing Technology
Marketing technology teams must become the biggest influencers within a company, and to do that we have to build our own accountability. At a recent client meeting I was faced with a very skeptical client who didn’t understand how marketing could measure itself. The short answer is probably that marketing can’t measure itself, however, it should definitely measure its effectiveness by the performance of its peers and vice versa.  The effectiveness of a marketing operations strategy and culture yields an increase in marketing efficiency and reinforces marketing in areas like customer care and information technology.

Building a successful marketing technology department is less art and more science, some data-driven industries like healthcare and finance, are definitely on the hook to adopt this approach sooner rather than later. But building it is only the first step, the operational intelligence that the team yields will need to be synthesized into meaningful priorities. Through continuous measurement, research and communication, a marketing operations team will stimulate ideas and internal discussion, provide cross-functional collaboration and give the entire executive team the tools they need for effective decision-making.