Ensure Successful Marketing Execution
- By Ampersand
- Execution
5 Execution Essentials to get your Strategy Off the Ground
AMPERSAND Overview:
- Marketing strategy is important, but having a robust execution plan to turn ideas into action is critical.
- Poorly executed marketing and advertising strategies are a waste of resources. Healthy systems ensure that energy = impact for your brand.
- Critical components of a marketing execution include a strong meeting cadence, leveraging your CRM, robust project management, a realistic and balanced budget, and utilizing marketing analytics to make informed decisions.
- Lastly, creating a culture of accountability is essential to success. It is important to communicate a clear vision to get team buy-in, practice strong follow-through on the marketing plan, and establish the leaders as champions for the success of the marketing initiatives.
Strategy may get all the hype, but at Ampersand, we know that smart ideas are only as valuable as the execution systems and rhythms behind your brand. If you’ve ever struggled to allocate resources, felt uncertain about the effectiveness of your campaigns, or overspent on a project and had to cut corners elsewhere to make up for it, you aren’t alone. Businesses of all shapes and sizes come to us when they are struggling with broken execution systems…and we are here to help.
SIGNS OF A BROKEN SYSTEM
BRAND AWARENESS
- Poor Marketing Strategy
- Insufficient Budget
- Inconsistent Execution
LEAD GENERATION
- Insufficient Budget
- Mistargeted Efforts
- Underperforming Salesperson
SELLING PROCESS
- No Sales Accountability System
- Minimal Marketing
- Support Tools
Poor Lead Quality
GAIN COMMITMENT & CLOSE
- Unknown Close Rates
- Unknown Incentive/ Offer Effectiveness
- Individual Sales Performance Issues
FOLLOW-UP & REENGAGE
- Low Repeat Business
- No Re-Engagement Strategy
- Low Brand Advocacy
As you can see, poorly executed marketing and advertising strategies are not only frustrating, they are a significant waste of resources for your business. By establishing a healthy system of execution essentials, you can ensure that energy = impact for your brand. Let’s break it down:
Marketing Execution Tip #1: Establish a Strong Cadence
Skipping or postponing meetings, a start/stop approach, and other business priorities often get in the way of success. Bringing a reliable marketing cadence to your business helps drive outcomes and consistent leads, all while reducing team fatigue. Our tried and true platform for execution ensures a reliable rhythm through:
We can help you build an actionable, realistic plan that outlines each month of the year and the activities, expenditures, and outcomes you can expect from our team.
It’s critical to set and stick to your meeting cadence with proper preparation and agendas. We help make marketing a priority, ensuring there is sacred time spent building your brand.
Your strategy and marketing meetings are designed with accountability in mind. Minutes ensure we all leave on the same page, while project management software and tracking help keep us on track.
Marketing Execution Tip #2: Leverage your CRM
While many organizations have CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, few dedicate the energy it takes to maintain, leading to data quality issues, poor user adoption, and a challenge when it comes to leveraging it for your marketing efforts. We help improve your customer relationships, marketing automation, sales funnel reporting, and ultimately help close sales by:
Helping find the right tool, properly engineering the software to your business needs, implementing in a phased roll-out, and building meaningful reporting are all critical to the success of a CRM.
From record cleanup to training and developing standard operating practices for contact management, we help ensure your data is trustworthy and able to be leveraged for marketing initiatives.
Email marketing engines, digital channels, and even traditional tactics are supported through proper integrations and data connections.
Marketing Execution Tip #3: Ensure Strong Project Management
Undercoordinated or mismanaged resources are one of the most common challenges we see when it comes to growing a business. Stop missing deadlines and opportunities by establishing a strong project owner. As professional project managers, our Account Team connects strategy to execution through aligning resources, ensuring timeliness, and improving the overall impact of your initiatives through:
Aligning the team early in the project is critical to its success. From clarifying whether the tactic is aimed at brand awareness or lead generation, to confirming that all critical elements are in scope, this alignment sets the foundation for strong outcomes.
Similar to CRM, clean data, deadlines, and education and adoption by all parties are critical to using a project management tool. We have designed workflows for all marketing channels and know the path to success.
An empowered project manager knows that it takes drive, accountability, and team collaboration to get things done. We often joke about being “professional nags,” but oftentimes it’s this dedication that we need to stay on track.
Marketing Execution Tip #4: Build a Realistic, Balanced Budget
Building a realistic, comprehensive marketing budget is one of the more difficult things an organization can tackle. From overspending to misallocating resources, this can have a detrimental effect on the marketing mix and lead to constant decision-making. With more than 15 years of experience in marketing budgeting, we help align the leaders and marketing teams…enabling progress and reducing decision burnout. Let’s get focused through:
Our strategies factor in time, talent, and money into your plan. We help evaluate your internal resources, gather vendor pricing, and align on budgeted agency services so we are all on the same page.
Understanding your target markets and preferred marketing channels is a fine balance, and we’re prepared to help you build a diverse, yet cohesive marketing budget that spans many platforms.
With an agile spirit, it’s critical to have watchful eyes on the marketing expenditures throughout the year. Helping to keep the budget in check, we can plan for unexpected opportunities and prepare for future initiatives.
Marketing Execution Tip #5: Turn Analytics into Marketing & Sales Intelligence
Data can be confusing, overwhelming, or even misleading… especially when it’s sourced from dozens of platforms, sources, and biased third-party media vendors. We help make data-driven decisions through applying standardized filters, consistent metrics, and customizing marketing dashboards that help tell a story and support future marketing investments. Let’s regain control of your analytics and make them intelligent through:
Making every effort to build apples-to-apples reporting is difficult, but it’s possible. By understanding and simplifying conversion metrics as well as ensuring consistency over time, you’ll have a better grasp on the trends and outcomes for your business.
It’s critical to measure campaign and ad spend effectiveness, justifying or adjusting your investments in advertising. Too many organizations focus on measuring things they aren’t devoting resources to; we can help narrow your focus to what is most important.
Agility plays a big role in marketing effectiveness, building a reporting structure that can help refine strategies in an agile capacity. Regular tracking is critical, refining tactics, placements, and budgets to ensure results.
BONUS Marketing Execution Tip #6: Address the Challenges Behind the Solutions
In closing, while these five marketing execution tips are critical to any organization’s success, it’s also important to acknowledge that there are people, process, and culture challenges behind the scenes that can thwart your growth. As we strategize and execute together, we focus on the leadership and collaboration opportunities that can truly impact growth, such as:
Having a plan is great…communicating that vision to your team is even more important. By sharing your vision, equipping individual performers for success, and supporting efforts year-round, we can achieve more together.
Starting at the top, we believe that plans are only as good as the expectations we set to follow them. While agility is important, staying the course with your marketing initiatives and being accountable to the work it takes to keep them off the back burner is the true definition of success.
It’s critical to note that leaders set the pace for the organization. Blessing your marketing strategy and execution plan allows your team to execute with confidence and clarity. Armed with your vision and empowered with the authority to carry it out to completion, we’re all primed to grow.
Need help building a truly executable marketing strategy? With more than 15 years of experience as a Virtual Marketing Department, we know what it takes to ensure a strong, consistent approach and bring these Execution Essentials to each and every business we serve. Contact us today to uplevel your business, we’re ready to grow!
