Filter for Critical Areas of Impact in Marketing Operations

"The role of leadership is to transform the complex situation into small pieces and prioritize them."

- Carlos Ghosn

Because of today’s rapidly changing business environment and seemingly endless marketplace of ideas, perspectives and opportunities, many marketing leaders are struggling to develop an evolving, clear and achievable set of priorities and targets. The result: organizational dysfunction, operational in-efficiency, unanticipated risk and/or missed opportunities. The lack of proper prioritization of marketing initiatives can take a number of different forms including:

1. Going after too much.
2. Going after the wrong things.
3. Re-inventing the wheel from discovery to execution.
4. Doing things that don’t add customer value.
5. Not selecting activities that closely align to strategy and/or solve business problems.
6. Changing course too often and lacking follow-through.

To avoid these problems, the art and science of getting marketing FOCUSED starts with creating a strong and systematic ongoing prioritization process. When using a process to FILTER marketing efforts, there’s essentially three areas of consideration: backlog generation, scoring and prioritization.

While these stages generally won’t always occur in a linear fashion, they do require continuous grooming and refinement. Backlog generation and refinement includes establishing clarity around ‘all the things’ your marketing organization wants to go after or is currently working on, from an operational, technical, organizational development and tactical perspective. Secondly, and equally important, it involves vocalizing and communicating this list to the broader organization or team and various stakeholders.

Scoring backlogged activities involves applying points to those backlog lists based on certain criteria. Simply, the higher the point value, typically the higher the priority. Low scoring items get filtered out for future consideration. There are generally four major areas to score your initiatives against.

Strategic Fit

Can these activities or initiatives be mapped to organizational or business goals, objectives, problems and KPI’s? Is there alignment with other organizational function strategies?

Level of Impact

What value is being delivered to customers, internal or external? How is value competitively positioned and how will it impact revenue and other key performance indicators? Here we can look at various assumptions based on prior efforts, market research, qualitative and quantitative research and case studies.

Feasibility

Are the necessary resources available or is there a potential to go over budget and over capacity? Will it pass internal political interests?

It’s likely you won’t have all the answers here, but this will become a best estimate after working with other stakeholders and understanding relative capabilities.

Competency

Performed as part of a gap analysis, establish the organization’s current level of maturity in the area relating to the particular initiative. Depending on your organization’s approach or philosophy, initiatives within areas of lower maturity may be weighted higher as they are needed opportunities for improvement, or alternatively, weighted lower as they don’t fall into your marketing’s core or important competencies. There’s a little bit of overlap here in competency with feasibility and strategic fit, however it may be beneficial to call out this separately as its own factor to provide a current state of affairs.

Finally, prioritization is the rank ordering and potential planning of those activities. It involves identifying the key areas or buckets in your marketing ecosystem (ie. dashboards, partners, sales enablement, software, etc.), mapping backlog activities to those key areas, reviewing against the four areas just mentioned and scoring appropriately. This can be a team and/or individual activity. An example of a short list is provided later in the chapter.

What gets initially included in the filtering process as ad hoc decision-making, unchecked experimentation and misaligned tactics, leaves as a smaller set of achievable initiatives that fit into alignment with larger business objectives.

The goal is to create an ongoing, standardized process that fits into your organization’s management frameworks.

Channel Evaluation

Depending on the level of sophistication of your organization or business, marketing communication is often the primary activity of a marketing function. However, if your marketing function plays a greater role in the entire product or service lifecycle, this may mean examining channels for delivering your product and service to customers, partnership programs and front-line customer service.

So, let’s consider a more holistic approach that includes what’s required to distribute an organization’s brand message, products, services and value in the marketplace. The channels you choose, therefore, and not choose for that matter, are critically important. Filtering out underperforming channels or activities within them can provide greater focus on the channels that can deliver the greatest impact.

Ultimately, you want to determine which channels best fit your unique value proposition or strategy in the marketplace, and that will drive the greatest value to your firm and customers. Some examples of channels to evaluate might include:

• E-commerce
• Partner networks
• Social media
• Sales and customer service teams
• Referrals
• Strategic relationships
• Advertising
• Brick and mortar experiences
• Co-marketing
• Advocacy groups
• Influencers
• Digital properties
• Supply chains
• Franchises
• Affiliate sources
• Marketplaces
• Physical properties
• Events

Once you’ve identified all existing and potential channel opportunities, add all future
and ongoing work to the backlog or current roadmap. You’ll ultimately want a complete
picture so you can map these against various areas of evaluation discussed later.

A Balanced Approach

Start by thinking of marketing as a microcosm of a typical business with functional areas like production, engineering, operations, sales, finance, distribution, etc. To operate at its best, similar to how a business holistically operates, marketing must be able to examine and improve functions that reflect similar needs. For example:

• Content creation (production)
• Content promotion (distribution)
• Internal communication and buy-in (sales)
• Design and development around product support, content, delivery (engineering)
• Spend control (finance)
• Project and campaign management
  (operations)

A balanced approach should be used to address each area and there should be an understanding of how each area impacts the other. Use areas of imbalance or inefficiency to identify items for the backlog. In other words, identify whether or not you’re operating at full capacity on all fronts, and your particular areas of weakness. Or, conversely, if you’re working at areas that don’t matter. For example:

• Are there controls in place to balance spend and budget across all channels over time?
• Are there the right processes in place to ensure proper buy-in and evaluate a project’s ROI?
• Does the product team have the right structure to deliver efficiently and effectively?
• Are the right technology solutions and people in place to execute against plans?

Imbalances in systems could be areas you want to address. Add them to the backlog. Gap Analysis Determine the current performance or the level of maturity of deploying the tactics in each area. Levels of maturity are discussed in more detail in the chapter on EVOLVING. A Radar chart can help visualize gaps between current competency, performance or level of maturity in an area and the expected levels.

Backlog Development

Once you’ve established the channels you’re currently using and plan to use, the areas you need to improve to operate effectively as a ‘businesses' within your organization, the gaps within your current level of marketing maturity and the goals you want to achieve, it’s time to get everything out on the table.

Work backwards to create a list of the tactical initiatives necessary to reach these objectives or solve these problems.

Organize them into 7-10 major categories, appropriate sub-categories and include all of your current activities in each category, as well as other potential initiatives you may deploy in the future. Some of the broad and corresponding sub-categories might include:

• Customer Centricity: research, service community management, satisfaction
  testing, experience design
• Sales and Marketing Enablement: marketing support of sales, cross-functional support of marketing
• Analysis and Measurement: access to tools, processes of measurement, frequency and depth of analysis, data delivery, dashboards
• Strategy and Management: planning process, objective and target scoping, budgeting approach, process management
• Technology Enhancements: digital capabilities, system integration, automation, project management
• Product and Service Management: training, competitive positioning, development process
• Demand Generation: offline and online marketing activities aimed at generating leads or customers
• Training & Development: training, recruiting, re-organization, succession planning, etc.

Evaluate and Prioritize

Now re-evaluate the backlog again based on strategic fit, level of impact, feasibility and competence to create an overall priority list. Give each a 0-5 score (or some other scoring rubric) based on degree of fit, impact and risk. Sum the scores from a priority perspective. Then filter the entire list by both lowest performance/maturity scores and highest priority. These become your potential areas of focus or ‘big rocks’ for the quarter, year, etc. This list can then be revisited and fed into your tools and processes for managing daily and weekly activity. Scores could be in the 0-5 range and based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative data, or simply by using intuition and gut feel.

For example, a score of ‘1’ would likely indicate very little effort or focus, whereas a score of ‘5’ might reflect use of best-in-class practices or highest levels of performance. You might enlist members of your team or other stakeholders to help provide feedback for either the qualitative or quantitative portion of your evaluation. Filtering may require some additional up-front research such as auditing channel effectiveness, stakeholder surveys, new research on audience preferences, etc.

Typical reasons to remove activities:

• Weak tie to business objectives
• Doesn’t produce scalable results
• Low impact to customer value chain
• Not timely or can wait
• Level of effort unjustified

After establishing a baseline for the quarter or the year, you’ll need some ongoing processes to re-evaluate and prioritize. Businesses and markets are in a constant flux, and you should change and adapt accordingly, just not blindly, or without purpose or team collaboration. Additionally, some activities may have been identified as too risky, and need further validation to justify prioritization through piloting, prototyping or further research and evaluation. This activity may simply need adjusted and called out as a pilot or test.

Here's a sample matrix that could be used when conducting your evaluation and
prioritization of marketing activities.

Action Items

• Create a backlog of all unfinished activities and programs.
• Collect a thorough list of categorized best practices based on industry and other factors
• Develop categories and sub-categories for the work you do.
• Run a gap analysis to understand current capabilities against potential ideal state.
• Create a list of future and potential activities
• Rate activities by strategic fit, impact, competence and feasibility.
• Sort and produce a plan.
• Discuss ways with your team to ensure ongoing effectiveness prior to evaluation.
• Identify activities that require additional research or validation and re-prioritize.