Like a competitive athlete trains to win by perfecting a balance of the optimum diet, exercise regime and mental focus, a CMO’s task is to develop a winning marketing machine. By coordinating every element to work together, the marketing machine will deliver short-term wins and outperform and outpace tough competitors.
The question is: what workout plan will sweat out inefficiencies, build the strongest muscles, and prepare a team for the highest performance level? The answer is a marketing workout plan that outlines a series of short but high-intensity and compound movements that are radically more effective at eliciting the desired cross-channel fitness result.
Essentially, we need a workout plan for cross-channel marketing as effective as CrossFit is for our bodies. But you can’t just jump right into full-blown CrossFit training—we have to be eased into it. Here I share with you a workout plan that will help you start strengthening your marketing channel muscles across channels.
1. Drill Your Demand Generation
Getting people excited about your company and product is hard work. Most marketers use a variety of materials and also recreate those materials every time they need to speak to an audience.
The first step to getting your cross-channel marketing in shape is taking an audit of what content, visuals and assets you currently have at your disposal. Think about how they can be reworked into new content to drive demand. Next, make sure that you actually sit down and map your content to the buyer journey. You need to ensure that everything you are creating focuses on the buyer’s needs.
2. Shape Up Sales Enablement
Tied to creating product demand is the need for companies to improve the effectiveness of sales enablement. Do this by first understanding the customer journey through all stages of the sales pipeline. Map your current sales resources along the pipeline stages, key verticals, buyer personas and differentiators. Understand the use case scenarios given by the sales team and analyze any bottlenecks preventing quick and efficient access to those materials. And ask your team to think about these questions:
3. Whip Partner Channels Into Shape
- Does the format of your resource match the use case scenarios?
- Are customer cases used during in-person or online customer presentations?
- Are they mailed, emailed or simply referred to during online presentations?
The power of an extended sales team and a partner channel network cannot be underestimated. But companies need to do some things to make sure partners have access to relevant collateral.
Make all relevant resources easily available. Create relevant and engaging content for your channel partner sales team. Interview that team periodically to see what resources they’re using, which are effective and what would be beneficial to create. Make the most of your existing direct marketing and sales collateral. Edit, re-use and re-purpose webinars, eBooks, case studies and other collateral and modify your creative workflow to generate collateral for both direct and channel at the same time.
4. Workout For Website and Ecommerce
Websites and digital platforms are often the primary channels of customer engagement and need to be the core area of focus for marketing teams. But how?
Increase conversion for targeted industries by creating personalized landing pages based on the company’s industry, size and location. Implement a website personalization platform, such as DemandBase, to deliver personalized content to segmented visitors. Use consistent and attractive visuals throughout the website that support your copy to create an eye-catching web experience. Use dynamic content to further customize each visitor’s experience. Coordinate marketing and eCommerce operations for a cohesive omni-channel customer experience.
5. Condition Content Marketing
In a time when content marketing is a key driver of engagement, businesses are feeling overwhelmed by the amount of content they’re expected to build, distribute and track, all within tight timelines.
To streamline content production, content marketers need to get smart in their approach to stand out from the competition. This means investing in content strategy, aligning it with business goals, and setting up processes and platforms for effective content creation, re-use and distribution. Strategize and create a plan for content that includes measurable goals and aligns with business targets. Make content quality over quantity a priority. Edit, re-use and repurpose content across your entire organization and partner ecosystem. Track content usage and ROI and create a feedback look into the following year’s content planning.
7. Strengthening For Field and Event Marketing
Field marketers are in the trenches, often spending days or weeks away from their head office. Creating a balance between corporate strategy and real-world requirements is an arduous task. Keep a catalogue of approved and high-performing imagery from past events to quickly create campaigns for future events. Take what has worked will and create an “event-in-a-box” campaign. This reduces training and ensures contracted resources can self-serve and use the right assets and messaging without taxing your valuable field marketers.
8. Social Media Shakedown
Social media can be one of the most powerful tools in a marketer’s arsenal. From Twitter and Facebook to Instagram and Pinterest, all employees are online. But to get it right, companies have to put up-to-date collateral in the hands of employees.
Enable all employees, especially internal advocates, with easy access to approved on-brand shareable resources. If you’re managing your social engagement with Hootsuite, consider connecting content source SKD to your Hootsuite account, enabling any user to use pre-approved images, content and resources. Repurpose your content into visually impactful, bite-size, shareable resources. Create fact cards or slides from your best practice and eBook resources that are easy to share on social. Share your company’s involvement with non-profits and the community. Over time, tell the story of your culture or brand.
Equipment For Cross-Channel Marketing Fitness: Digital Asset Management
As you build strength, CrossFit routines will start to incorporate various kinds of exercise equipment: medicine ball, weight bench, pull-up bar. In cross-channel marketing, you also need equipment. One of the most valuable tools at the enterprise level is a digital asset management solution.
Digital asset management provides companies with a secure, central library for its media files, giving employees, partners and clients an effective way to locate, share and download their corporate digital assets, no matter where they are in the world. The future of digital asset management has arrived with integrations into other enterprise MarTech tools, such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, AutoCAD, Hootsuite, SharePoint and others. These integrations make sure that employees have quick and easy access to the rich media they need right from inside the tools they are already using to build out campaigns and marketing materials.
Poor customer service is unacceptable on any channel, including mobile. Download this brief, Cross Channel Orchestration Fundamentals to discover how you can deliver consistent customer service experiences and enhance customer loyalty.
