In a post looking at a modern marketing team, we covered elements of an organizational structure for a revenue marketing center of excellence. But if your teams don't master critical marketing processes, it'll all be for naught!
If you're lucky enough to have a dedicated marketing function at your organization, then you know that an important part of their job is in defining, documenting and refining the core marketing processes that keep teams and systems running well.
Let’s narrow the discussion to the top five processes (click to jump to that section) - and get into what each really means for your organization:
The lead management process outlines the steps for tracking and reporting on leads as they are created and move through a funnel, becoming qualified or disqualified, and eventually passing through any lead development representatives to sales or channel partners.
A typical process includes the following components:
Without these established and enforced, you'll simply leave money on the table because opportunities aren't properly acted upon.
This is a hugely important marketing process, and one that is the root cause of so much lost revenue!
Why? Because it outlines the steps for tracking and reporting on leads as they are created and move through a funnel. During this process leads become qualified or disqualified, and eventually pass on to a lead development team and finally onto sales or channel partners.
A typical process includes the following components, and you can read more about each in our blog diving into lead management:
The defines who will report on what, when, and for whom. Where will they get the data, and how will the reports be made available?
Before you raise your eyebrows to the ceiling and slam me for stating the obvious, consider that the resources for doing reporting in mid-sized organizations are usually limited, and so often the function is decentralized. (I.e., many marketing field offices report on their piece only.)
Without some defined process, templates, definitions, rules, and handholding, your ability to roll up the reports will be either laborious or impossible!
A thorough analytics marketing process features:
Most firms, when they first dip their toes into the results reporting waters, look to report on their funnel results which depend entirely on having a functioning lead management process.
But before you can start, you need these two definitions:
As a CMO, I don’t have much time for activity reports; I need to understand how my department is impacting revenue on a regular basis. This means I need useful reports.
So, what constitutes a useful report?
Getting teams to the point of analyzing the data and making data-based decisions on a daily basis will not happen just organically. Leadership has to lead in this practice and drive it down into the organization.
Provide the training and resources necessary to bring the team up to speed and allow time for the organization to acclimate to these new expectations. It’s a satisfying experience to attend a marketing status meeting and hear the broader team excitedly talking about changing their immediate plans based on last week’s or last month’s significant shift in a trendline!
No, this is not solely the job of IT or sales. It absolutely includes marketing as both a customer of the data and a provider of much new data!
The best way to corrupt a perfectly-fine CRM database is let an untrained person in marketing or sales, with no enforced process, do a 100K contact data import into their marketing automation platform and have it sync over to the CRM.
From a marketing process perspective, here are some of basic must-have components for your data management:
As the old adage says: Garbage in, garbage out! This is an often-overlooked (or ill-defined) need that we've seen so many companies struggle with.
If content is the fuel, and analytics is your dashboard, then data is surely the wheels and tires on your marketing vehicle. There’s an adage in auto racing that races are won in the pits, and the tire changes that happen there affect the race strategy and must be suited to the course.
Similarly, your data will dictate where you can go, and how fast you can get there. It will be impossible to become a data-driven marketing organization if the data quality is poor. Having a resource in marketing who is responsible for data operations is becoming a requirement for successful marketing.
Marketing data is fragmented and getting more so every day. Research by Experian uncovered that 84 percent of organizations are experiencing data quality issues. Compounding these issues is the explosion in marketing technologies (to the point Scott Brinker's supergraphics have become quite insane!), which further fragments data.
So, the importance of clean data is increasing.
In larger organizations, marketing operations will likely have a data operations resource. Their responsibilities include:
This resource will not need to address the areas covered by the broader IT organization:
At a very tactical level, the data operations person will own the data import and enrichment processes. They will be responsible for the right data being available in the right marketing system, which will ensure effective marketing execution and great customer experience with marketing digital properties.
One might ask, why do I need a campaign development process? In truth, if your campaigns look like a linear flowchart in their execution, you may not need a built-out process because your marketing isn't mature enough to warrant it.
But what if your campaigns involve multiple touchpoints and plenty of complexity? Think offers, landing pages, ad copy, graphics, emails, etc.
To coordinate this and launch flawless campaigns you need a defined campaign development process that outlines the roles and expectations for every player involved. Your campaign development process, however simple, will probably contain these stages and definitions for how the campaign transitions from one stage to the next:
The strategy stage is where the program or campaign is proposed, the costs and benefits are weighed, and if approved, it moves to the design stage.
During the design stage, the campaign brief, potentially a creative brief, and ultimately the detailed campaign blueprint are created.
While the campaign brief is a simple, one-page document that describes the campaign, the blueprint is the document that you hand off to your marketing automation platform campaign builders. It contains every detail they will need to build, test and launch the campaign. It has every requirement in it, including dynamic content rules, A/B testing, campaign flow, timing, templates to be used, URLs desired, channels, offers, UTM codes, etc.
In general, we recommend you don't move into the development stage until the blueprint is complete and all the assets, offers and content are ready. Changing the blueprint (aka the requirements) after development has started will cause rework, slow the campaign down, affect other campaigns in the queue for building, and increase the risk of errors.
Quality assurance (QA) and user acceptance testing (UAT) are vital. Please do not discover this for yourself by sending an error filled email to 100,000+ people. Builders, especially neophytes in your MAP system, are allowed to make mistakes, but QA has to be flawless so use your senior people to do the QA.
Content operations is responsible for the optimization of all things content including strategy, ideation, storage, curation and measurement housed in a central location and supported by a content operations platform. A core value of content operations is the streamlining of content development and production.
The content development process is likely to have components such as:
To avoid the chaos and spend your budget wisely, you will be well served by organizing your content operations along these lines:
So, those are my top five Revenue Marketing processes that your team absolutely has to master. Would you prioritize something else higher than one of these? Are you attending to all of them today?
If you want to drive necessary change in your organization, our Revenue Marketing Bundle is exactly what you need!
If you're missing one or more of these, here's the priority order I would recommend for getting basic coverage in all of these areas:
Need help? We're here for you, but in the interim, I wish you the best as you upgrade these five core marketing processes to drive greater wins and revenue for your organization!