The business is an interesting collection of talented individuals. They’re comprised of educators, strategists, programmers, artists, designers and more. The variety of talent gives them an advantage over their competition. But more importantly, their collaboration creates innovative solutions for their clients.

The solutions they produce are highly visual in nature. These large images help communicate strategy so that employees can understand the “big picture”. Associates can then have a dialogue with their peers about important, strategic issues. The visuals unlock understanding, that words so often, can not.

The Team

The outcome of these engagements were often riddled with “a-ha” moments. They are moments when an employee would stop and say “I get it!”. The visuals provided a much clearer picture than a presentation filled with bullet points. But the visual isn’t born out of thin air. It takes a close partnership between the business strategist and the creative artist.

The development of these visuals always begins with the problem. It starts with the team sitting down with the client and listening to the challenges they face. Each team member hears the problem from their own point of view. These unique perspectives add immense value to the solution. In today’s marketplace, the collaboration between marketing and software development teams will become invaluable. This partnership can spark innovation and will be more powerful when they work together. And as marketing continues to move online, development must have a seat at the table. They will play a vital role in growing the customer relationship.

The Collaboration

This partnership between the artist and the strategist is important. Even though their views are different, the goal of engaging associates is the same. Likewise, the collaboration between technology and marketing is critical. These two functions have operated in silos. They are focused on their own goals, without consideration for the other.

The collaboration between marketing and software development will become invaluable and more powerful when they work together.

The collective reset button needs pressed. Teams should tear down their silos and realign on the purpose and goals set out by the organization. What is that purpose and goal? Creating seamless user experiences that add value at every stage of the customer relationship. Media buyers used to operate in lock step with marketing, and many still do today. They work together to understand how customers buy products. But communication channels are changing. Digital is now how we reach and connect with our audiences. Many organizations must work to help teams come out of the dark ages. They must forge bridges of awareness and understanding.

The Approach

So what approach do we take when aligning marketing and development? Marketing automation is a perfect place to start. These two teams must converge to meet today’s customer demands. Just like the artist and the strategist, aligning around the common goal is where we start. People would always wonder how an artist and strategist could work together. With a common goal, these two different views always produced incredible results.

Let’s take a moment to reflect on the roles of marketing and software development. Although unique, they are two sides of the same coin. How does this collaboration work effectively?

• Listening: Strong developers and designers always begin by listening. Both these roles need a thorough understanding of the problem. This understanding is important before thinking through the problem and crafting the solution.
• Design: Any approach to solving a problem requires a big picture view. This view reveals all the elements that may impact the desired solution. Trusted marketers understand the entire customer experience and likewise, trusted developers are focused on creating structure and order in their code.
• Focus: Good marketing and design requires simplicity. There should be one single theme or idea. Great developers create beautiful code that works well with as little “extra” fluff as possible. This focus removes clutter and aligns our efforts.
• Vision: One of the most important elements that developers and marketers exhibit is vision. Marketing should take into account customer buying trends and consider feedback from their audience. Developers should also look ahead. Potential problems should be identified and resolved before they become an issue.

This approach, combined with a common goal, will create more meaningful value. And at the end of the day, that is what we want for our customers.

Marketing automation is becoming a more integrated way to do business in the digital age. It’s clear that these two roles not only have common ground, but approach their work in a similar way.

We are excited about the community of Mauticians that represent both marketing and development. It has, and will continue to, provide us with the ability to meet the needs of organizations around the world. It is in this special collaboration that we can provide tools to help you reach, engage and develop relationships with your audience.

We can also become too mired in the details of our journey. And if you have children, you know exactly what I’m talking about. “How many hours will it take to get here?” “I have to go to the bathroom.” “Why are we stopping?” “I’m hungry.” And on, and on it goes. These are indicators that they our precious cargo are more interested in the destination than the importance of the journey. Seeing the big picture can offer us a view that is holistic, and gives us insight that we might not otherwise consider. That is why this final post in our big picture series is focused on starting your marketing automation journey.

Big Picture

As marketers we can become so hyper-focused on specific goals, campaigns or initiatives, we forget the broader context with which they fall into. This big picture view is critical as we begin to understand how marketing automation fits within our business. It’s important to remember that our understanding of this view will enable us to make the right decisions on how to automate our processes and marketing tools.

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve highlighted broader systems that your organization needs to consider as you evaluate the big picture view of marketing. It begins at the business strategy level, then works it’s way down to your marketing scorecard and goals. As you determine the metrics you would like to impact, it is imperative that these blend into your customer touch-points and not override them. If our customer journey becomes secondary to your goals, we are missing the point. The customers’ journey to your business is the windshield of your marketing efforts. It should be clear and unobstructed.

The Roadmap

With that, let’s climb to a higher altitude and see the big picture landscape of our marketing automation journey. First and foremost, marketing automation is not a bolt-on solution. For automation to be truly successful, you must consider all of your marketing efforts en masse. Some think that a landing page with a compelling call-to-action is all their organization needs to integrate automation. But this is a shortsighted view. Consider our road trip. Let’s say it will require multiple days to get to get to our destination. If we plot our course without considering the climate, construction and traffic at each stop, we may miss alternative paths to help us get there in a more effective and efficient manner. What if it is quicker to go around the big city? What if construction is slowing traffic down?

This is true of your marketing automation journey. If we consider our customer touch-points and lay that context beside the omni channel approach, we will begin to see paths and connections that we may not have considered before. This is one of the key approaches to automation that often gets overlooked. The layering of channels and touch points is as vital to the creation of automated processes as content creation itself. If we don’t evaluate the intersections of the customer journey in connection with the channels we communicate through, our efforts will fall flat.

Start Your Marketing Automation Journey

So now that we have a map of our marketing automation journey, where do we go from here? This is a conversation that will be entirely unique to each organization. We are extremely excited to have assembled a community of developers, users and marketers that have plotted their own journey’s and have committed themselves to share what they’ve learned with you. Mautic is unique in that this community cares about your success. This is not a profit game. This is a journey of connection. You see, when you win, we all win. Here are a few thoughts to get your marketing automation journey started.

• Assemble your team: As we’ve noted in previous posts, your marketing efforts involve a number of teams. As Macy’s discovered, Macys.com was having a significant impact on in-store purchases. The online team learned they had to work with brick & mortar and understand how the customer searches and purchases.
  

  “We used have 2 separate silo’d budgets, we really now have one Marketing budget. And we look at the best way to spend that, what’s the best allocation, what’s the best media mix, whether it’s digital, offline, how do they work together to deliver…yeah of course the most sales, but really, that best customer experience.”

  For more information on Macy’s teamwork, click here.

• Understand your customer: This goes without saying. When you understand your customers needs, you will be more in tune to their purchase cadence. You will know more about their buying habits, how they seek your product or service out and what tools/communities they use to evaluate. This will help you deliver the right value at the right touchpoint.
• Determine the channels: The channels which you communicate and connect with your audience, will be incredibly important. If your customers are online, than connect with them there. If they are in your stores, connect with them there. If they are in both places at the same time, make the connection seamless. Don’t tackle every channel if your customers aren’t there and don’t automate what you don’t have the structure for.
• Automate with a goal: You should never automate without a set of goals you are seeking to achieve. Automation should further assist your audience/customer in meeting their need. It should never be self-serving. When you deliver value, your customers will remember. They will follow you because you care more about meeting their need than meeting their bottom line.
• Review and verify: This is as critical to the process of automation itself. Always be testing. Always be analyzing your audiences’ behavior and purchase cadence. This is an area that, as marketers, we need to become more adept at understanding the information that is being gathered with every click, every visit and every purchase.
• Adjust course if needed: Marketing automation is not a “set-it and forget it” proposition. It is a complex digital conversation that grants you access to the voice and cadence of your customer. Your customers change. They are constantly looking for value in every area of their life.

Remember, your marketing automation journey is more about relationship building than it is about channels, touch-points and data. With every piece of information you learn more about who your customers are, what their likes and dislikes are, and how they desire to be connected with. Our job is to listen, and trust that we’ve provided value at the right touch-point, through the right channel and at the right time.

For a full-size PDF of “Your Marketing Automation Journey” visual represented above, click here.

5. Encourage action from your audience

One of the first things you want to do in your marketing strategy is to encourage your audience to take action, to do something. You want your marketing efforts either directly or indirectly to cause your target market to react (positively) and perform some action as a result of your marketing plan. Don’t think that everything needs to be a sale either. Some of the best marketing campaigns don’t encourage a purchase or a subscription but simply encourage action. Maybe your action is self-improvement for the audience, or maybe your action is for the common good. Action can take many forms and you shouldn’t be afraid to take the long approach.

Also, don’t get suckered into thinking every conversation, every marketing campaign needs to end with a revenue increase. The intangible aspects of building a brand and a following are very important keys to a successful marketing team.

Encouraging action and involvement from your audience causes motion and motion presents opportunities for change and change leads to growth. And just as you want to encourage this action, don’t be afraid to start small. This leads to the second observation.

4. Be focused on small wins

Notice that this title doesn’t say, complete this 100 item checklist, read this 1,000 page essay, and then create a 10 year daily marketing plan. Instead the focus is to start small. Do this one thing. By lowering the expectations and the “ask” from your audience you set the stage for an easy win. This is a similar approach you’ll find in the most popular video games. In fact, this philosophy is well-studied and has been the topic of many research papers.

Take any mobile app game these days and you’ll be sure to find this concept at work. Hundreds of tiny levels. Each one slightly more challenging than the last but each one providing a single, simple task or challenge. This is a perfect example of the small win objective. As you complete more levels you become more engaged, you continue to play the game driven by the motivation to win just one more level, after all it’s such a small investment of time and effort.

This ‘small win’ mentality will serve you well as you build your marketing strategy. Don’t ask your target audience to do too much at once. Be ok with starting small and setting them up for success. Remember that this wins don’t all have to end in a sale either. You’re working towards a long-term relationship.

3. Be positive in your engagement

The blog title says “to win” this instills a sense of positivity. You will be successful, you will win. This positive reinforcement encourages your target market to undertake the task at hand because you’ve planted the suggestion they will have a positive outcome. When you’re interacting with your audience don’t be overly negative or pessimistic. No one likes to be around someone that’s always complaining. Saturday Night Live portrays this perfectly with their “Debbie Downer” skit. Watch below and have a good laugh.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/19280

Wait, did you see what just happened? You were given a simple focused task, it doesn’t lead to any measurable outcome, but it builds the relationship, and this particular task ends (hopefully) in a few smiles. This type of positive engagement encourages and motivates your audience. They want to continue reading, continue interacting, continue building the relationship.

Don’t get carried away thinking everything needs to be upbeat all the time, but keep a good perspective. Keep your overall marketing message clear, encouraging and supportive.

2. Have a plan for your marketing

The final piece of the article title says winning at “your marketing strategy”. This implies that you have a plan. Your marketing must be focused on accomplishing a purpose. Don’t get so caught up in the immediate short-term wins that you fail to establish long-term goals. You don’t want to lose momentum or lose potential direction because you’re not focused in your goals. Have strong and yet achievable marketing goals. Create a marketing roadmap and set a course of action for how you will accomplish that strategy.

A marketing strategy can be quite detailed and involved. You should focus on defining key milestones, again focus on the easy-to-accomplish wins. Just as your audience needs to build their confidence through small successes, so do you as a marketer. You should devote your time and attention to accomplishing small and measurable wins.

1. ______

Now, you’ve skimmed this article, partly because you are looking for a golden key that will make your marketing strategy successful. You’re looking for the one thing you need to do to win marketing strategy. Here’s your answer, here is the one thing you simply must do and if you do you will win.

As a marketer you absolutely must continue to learn. You can’t sit still and stagnate. You have to read articles like this, you have to identify where you are weak in your marketing strategy, and you have to grow. Don’t think of this as a single key, but rather think of it as a reminder to focus on what’s truly important and to refocus on what you should be doing as a marketer. Learn, practice, improve, grow.