Here at Triggerfish we strive to help companies form a Marketing Operations mindset.
This means moving away from a project-driven or “set it and forget it” way of thinking and evolving your marketing function to operate on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis.
Your MarTech will never be “done”, so instead of reaching for the holy grail end result, think about identifying the right things to work on and making incremental progress over time.
To help organisations start thinking operationally with respect to their marketing function, or help them build a marketing operations team, we have created this 12-part blog series. We will be covering everything from Sales & Marketing alignment, growth marketing, digital strategy, creating ROI, cross-functional teams, and much more!
Today, Digital Strategy
From a marketing point of view, what's digital strategy? Why is that important for marketing operations?
Digital strategy in a marketing operation sense represents the key goals that we need to achieve from an organisational point of view in a digital environment.
Digital strategy helps set the goals, metrics, and goal target for how we measure progress in our marketing operations. It’s also not a “once and done” type thing. It's a question of how we make ongoing relentless progress towards achieving the strategy in a larger context.
In the context of business to business (B2B) marketing, we need to help people understand their progression against high consideration products and services, and long sale cycles. We do this by decomposing what that looks like in a potential customer’s awareness, interest, and consideration cycles (funnels). From a consultant point of view, we also need to make sure that we know what it looks like when a strategy is going well, and how to communicate this to our clients.
What are three things a Digital Strategy needs to address?
A digital strategy needs to address three critical points in order to work.
- Who are we trying to talk to?
You can’t reach out to everyone, so you need to define audiences carefully. This doesn’t just mean lists of names – you need to understand what motivates them and what is stopping them from purchasing your product.
- What are you asking of your prospects?
Whether you want them to click a link, sign up for a newsletter, or outright purchase your product, you need to carefully define what you want your prospects to do - and feel - in response to a given outreach. Ideally, you want to identify the holdouts – those who can buy your product but have not yet – and then give them the information to understand why a product or service is relevant for them.
- How do you measure success?
B2B products have high prices and long cycle times. If you measure your success purely in terms of sales, you’ll spend a long time in between wins – but on the other hand, fewer conversions provide more revenue. What you need to know is how many people you need to reach, how many of them will move down the funnel, how many will convert, and at what cost.
Be comfortable with experimentation
Because B2B segments are a lot smaller, you have less data on every individual prospect. The only way to validate the data that you have and get more data is to put a digital strategy in action.
Therefore, the big takeaway when it comes to digital strategy and marketing operations is that you need to kind of be comfortable with not having it perfect. The real issue currently is that you can spend months trying to figure out where your digital strategy currently sits, instead of getting a clear view of what that looks like and then implementing it quickly and testing and learning. You’re going to be much better off getting it 80% right and into market, with a clear understanding of what you need to do to make progress.
We are big believers of putting it into the machine and seeing real results, testing and pivoting as often as possible.
At Triggerfish, we strive to provide companies with a best-in-class consultative experience that can supercharge marketing efforts and realign them towards business goals. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you transform your marketing approach, contact us today.