The pragmatic approach to marketing transformation

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A no-nonsense guide to introducing change in your organisation.

the-pragmatic-approach-to-marketing-transformation

A no-nonsense guide to introducing change in your organisation.

The only constant in business is change. Whether you want them to or not, your environment, customers, competition and team will change, leaving you with the simple decision of adapting or dealing with the consequences of resisting.

However, introducing change is not easy. Operational disruptions, employee pushback and confusion amongst management can all lead to serious business ramifications that have put more than one company under. This is why obtaining a guiding partner to help you facilitate change can make all the difference for when the inevitable happens.

This blog will provide some pointers for implementing change throughout your organisation. It will help you identify problems and solve them before they affect your business and demonstrate how to implement change that is long-lasting and effective. 

Begin with the data

Making the decision to implement change within your organisation should not be taken lightly. There will always be disruptions and is always the possibility that you may change something that is currently working perfectly well for your objectives. The key questions here are three-fold:

  • What do I want to accomplish?
  • Do I need to change?
  • What do I have to change?

In today’s world, we are spoiled for choice when it comes to what data we have access to - so use it. Data will be your best friend when answering all the above questions. Below, we’ll briefly provide pragmatic advice that you can use to start highlighting what you may wish to change in your organisation, or if you even need a change in the first place.

What do I want to accomplish?

This question may seem obvious, but for the purposes of practical change, you need to dig deeper. To answer this question, begin by looking at your business objectives. From there, drill down deeper and get specific Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that could indicate the success of that objective. 

Some professionals may struggle to find KPIs that best fit their objectives. To this end, we suggest using the ‘how’ process. Here is an extremely basic example for a business that wants to achieve more sales:

  1. What do you want to accomplish?
    1. More sales.
  2. How do you get more sales?
    1. By getting more leads
    2. Approaching more customers
    3. Converting more leads to sales
  3. What are the KPIs for those?
    1. Lead generation rate.
    2. Sales efficiency - the number of prospects addressed.
    3. Lead conversion rate.

Once you have the KPIs that relate to your desired business strategy, you can begin to examine if the figures indicate whether you need to change or not.

Do I need to change?

As the old saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. You want to take a hands-off approach to something that is working for you in case you change something that is already performing quite well.

However, many companies are not entirely sure if a KPI shows the functions it is associated with are performing well or not. Many factors could play a role in poor and great performance alike that internal change will have little effect on. The recent events of the Covid-19 pandemic is a great example of something that is beyond the control of any company.

A good way to determine a KPI you can influence through change is by comparing your figures with industry benchmarks or competitor data. This way, you can effectively take the external factors into account by comparing your performance against a benchmark that is experiencing the same external influences.

From here, it’s easy to determine if a change is needed. If you are underperforming it may be time to consider the next question - what do you have to change to correct this.

What do I have to change?

If you’ve worked your way up until this point, this next question will be the easiest of the three. 

You have already identified the KPIs to target in the first question and validated them in the second question. Here, we’ll match the KPI to a solution.

For example, if you’ve identified that you need to improve your sales efficiency, it may be worthwhile to invest in a sales enablement platform that can streamline your sales process and provide them with the insights they need to close more deals. On the other hand, perhaps implementing a new approach to customer engagement could assist with increasing your lead generation and engagement.

When it comes to solutions, there is an endless supply of possibilities. The catch is, they all require some form of monetary or time investment. Only by selecting the best tool or approach for your needs will you be able to capitalise on the true benefits of change. By undergoing the above process, you have already made an important first step in the right direction.

Selecting your Marketing Solution

As a trusted marketing consultancy, our objective is to find solutions that go beyond a single campaign or fixing one specific problem. We like to implement sustainable and permanent change that has positive, long-term effects for a company. 

For this, we address five core marketing areas that customers engage in and where marketing technology can boost your performance.

Building a value proposition

When it comes to adjusting the way you conduct your marketing, we believe the place to begin is the value proposition. If you’re looking at changing KPIs surrounding your marketing and lead engagement and don’t know what it is your company is valued for, it’s the first thing you should get in place before addressing anything else.

Ask questions such as what makes your company stand out, what your voice is as a brand and what value you bring to your customers that no one else can. From there, we can identify what tools would fit into this collective vision.

Developing engagement capabilities

The next area we often implement change in is engagement capabilities. This typically refers to tools, processes and technology that can make a major difference in the way your organisation operates. 

For example, implementing marketing automation can dramatically speed up the acquisition and conversion rate of leads into customers if such a KPI needs to be addressed. Likewise, a company may find that they have to implement new solutions due to external influences. The Covid-19 pandemic is an excellent example of an external influence that would force many companies to change their engagement capabilities to be more digitally focused. 

Designing customer engagement experiences

If you have a strategy in place and the capabilities to make it work optimally, it may be that your customer engagement experience itself needs some tuning. There are many connected aspects that go into this, however, explained in a simplified way,  customer experiences need to be focused on providing value in exchange for information. You then use that information to provide more value and gain the trust of your customer before convincing them that your solution is the best for their needs. Aspects that could be changed here include what information you ask for, when you contact customers, how you contact customers and what you offer.

The digital tools available for this include website forms, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms and analytical insights.

Executing customer engagement 

A very straightforward concept, but one that is important to mention nonetheless. The execution of your customer engagement experiences needs to be of high quality. If the quality is not there, the KPIs will reflect this fact and indicate the need for change. Tools such as Salesforce are often used to enrich customer engagement and sales performance.

Measuring and optimising customer engagement

Some companies do everything right but still lack the results they want. These companies would often match up against industry benchmarks quite well, but there’s always room for improvement. In this case, the risk would be adjusting something for the worse (see our ‘if it ain’t broke rule’). 

Therefore, having solutions that measure and optimise your customer engagement is critical to identify the little details that could make incremental improvements that add up over time. Selecting how you measure and optimise your customer engagement is an essential part of your entire strategy and is a viable candidate for change once the other areas are performing well.

Implementing the Change

After you know what you want to change and how to change it, you can then go ahead and begin to introduce the change to your organisation. This in itself is a monumental task that could be the topic of several blogs, but for our purposes, we’ll give you a few pointers from our own experience.

Everyone must understand the why

When implementing change, it’s important to communicate why the change is happening. People across an organisation may feel threatened or confused about the changes. Informing them of the reasons behind the change and their individual contribution to that change will help you resolve some of these negative reactions and get your team on your side.

Change incrementally

You may need to change a lot of elements to achieve your goals, but you should address each individually at different times. Too much change at once is only setting you up for failure. Select small, incremental goals and work through each, one by one to drive the change.

Drive change with a team-first approach

Many companies bring in external consults to create change for their business while their internal team maintains the status quo. Once that change is implemented, the external consultants hand it over to the internal team to operate, causing a period of operational disruption until the team is experienced enough with the new implementation. This conventional approach is, in our experience, incorrect.

We suggest a collaborative approach between external consultants and internal staff, with the external consultants working with the internal stakeholders to drive change and innovation. From there, when the new implementation is ready, it’s just a matter of phasing out the external consultants and continuing what your internal team is already performing. This is an excellent way of creating a smooth transition, minimising employee pushback and operational disruptions. 



Let us guide you

There’s no need to sugar-coat it - digital transformation is difficult. That’s why according to a McKinsey study, a whopping 70% of all digital transformations fail. One of the biggest challenges of digital transformation is not having an enterprise-wide digital transformation strategy, which only comes with technical knowledge and strategic experience.

Here at Demodia, we have extensive knowledge and a proven track record for digital marketing transformations. We have helped hundreds of companies digitally transform their marketing for the better who consistently see results year on year. 

If you are interested in digitally transforming your organisation or simply revamping your approach to marketing, consider contacting Demodia. As a premier digital marketing consultancy, we’re on call to guide you through the process step by step.

Contact us today to discover what we can do for you and your business.