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, Outcome-Focused Marketing
Although we’d like to say that every marketing effort is focused on the outcome, a lot of marketing efforts tend to devolve into busywork. Marketers may spend more time focused on processes as opposed to what their ideal outcomes look like. As a result, more effort is spent on processes – and less effort is spent understanding whether their processes are contributing to the outcomes that marketers would prefer.
Thinking about outcomes versus details prevents marketing efforts from getting lost in the process-focused weeds. In addition, thinking clearly about the outcome of your marketing efforts gives you a better chance of linking them to a business goal. If we can think about outcomes that drive business goals, then the work that we do actually tends to be worthy work instead of just busywork.
At Triggerfish, we’re strongly in favor of doing work that needs to be done, and much less in favor of doing work that makes managers feel like we’re going productive.
How do you make sure your work is moving the needle?
It comes down to time.
This may sound reductive, but our objective is to enhance marketing operations by spending more time enhancing processes that matter to the desired marketing outcome. Marketers all have a limited amount of time to do their jobs, so it’s important that they spend most of their time contributing, developing new skills, and having ideas – and less time checking boxes, doing data entry, and looking at reports.
One of the secrets to maximising your time is learning to say, “no.” Marketers should have somewhat narrow specialisations. The broader your portfolio of tasks, the more likely it is that some of the tasks you’re doing are not important to the marketing outcome. From a consultancy point of view, much of our job involves helping marketers see from a 30,000 foot view – helping them understand whether their day-to-day tasks are really worth the effort that they’re putting in.
Identifying the Most Valuable Processes
We help marketers focus on outcomes by first looking at what their typical day involves. As soon as we see a checklist of tasks, our response is, “what outcome do these tasks move you towards?”
More often than not, once we realign the marketer’s to-do list into an outcome-oriented approach, we see improvements by the end of the quarter. Our goal isn’t necessarily to move heaven and earth in just three months, but rather to understand the things that change for the better by tweaking and eliminating unnecessary processes. This puts us into a place where we can generate even further refinements.
At the end of the day, marketers might find themselves working on fewer tasks, but the tasks they’re working on will be much more important to the higher functioning of the organisation. There’s an added benefit – once they’re stretched less thinly, marketers will find themselves to be more relaxed and in a position to generate a higher quality of ideas and innovation.
We strive to provide companies with a best-in-class experience that can supercharge marketing efforts and realign them towards business goals. If you’d like to learn more about how we helped Hastings Deering create an operational rhythm with Marketing and Technology - read the case study.