A Step-By-Step Guide To Having A Successful Marketing Team That Improves Business Growth
Some of us left 2019, thinking it was the best, worst or the most indifferent year we had. We were all about finding our perfect client, doing the next big thing to increase sales, or trying to improve our brand perception on social media. We also got involved in client promotion by getting customers to refer us to friends and family.
Yes! We did all or some of these. Some had some measure of success while others had none at all but the fact remains that businesses succeed at the above when they have laid out plan or strategy in place that will take them to their goal.
A safe assumption is that most brands are thinking on…
- How do I improve on my marketing activities?
- How do I get returns on my investment?
- What do I need to consider to decide what my online marketing budget should be?
- How do I get more clients?
- How do I get my clients to do repeat sales”
The answer… “A successful marketing strategy for 2020. But do you have the right people to implement it in your business?
”Truth is, change starts from within and when you work on the inside, you begin to see fruits on the outside and that’s what we are about this year. The most important thing to determine and understand is your business goals. Determining the resources you need to achieve the goal will get you on the road to achieve those goals. So three things to note are:
Determine the business goals. – What is the reason for setting up the business and what do you hope to get out of it? It could be to help people buy their dream home.
What you need to acheive those goals… identifying the key resources that will help you achieve those goals. A marketing plan, brand awareness and clients.
How you intend to achieve the goals – what tools or strategies are need to get you the right track? Online and offline marketing strategies.
So without further ado let’s talk about how to launch a successful marketing strategy for our business this 2020.
There are 3 important things to change or modify that will increase income, save cost and improve service delivery if they are all done right.
1. Organise Your Tactics
Your organisation has got to be aware of where it stands in the marketplace. Many organisations find it a very comfortable position when they are on the charts as “the best service provider of the year” in their industry.
Question is, “Was that a goal you wanted to achieve this year? Are your customers still happy to be paying money for a product that is barely satisfying their needs?”
You need to know what level of satisfaction your customers derive from your products and, the different improvements you need to make within your organisation (for the employees) and outside the organisation (ensuring that the customer’s needs are always met).
3 major things we will be focusing on this year for every organisation to pull off a successful marketing strategy are:
Awareness
For you as a brand it is – Being aware of your need for a predictable marketing strategy and having an idea of the results you will get from it.
For your clients – they need to know you exist. Many times, we find out that the people we want to provide solutions to are on various platforms asking questions and looking for solutions. As a brand, you need to have an omnipresent approach to reaching out to these people. It’s that simple. Be visible on these various platforms and become relevant there. Contribute on the platforms by sharing valuable information that profers a solution so they begin to view you as a solution provider and expert in the niche.
Engagement
For the brand – Being aware of how to speak to your audience both internal (within the organisation) and external (people who are likely to pay money for your service). Treating your internal clients with respect and care will translate to happy clients. Comfort gives comfort. Your employees will only act based on what they have been taught.
For the clients – Every business needs to communicate in their messaging that they are set up to provide their clients with the solution they need. They aren’t only set up to make money off of them.
An example: Client who wants to buy a drill really needs a hole. On further consultation, you will learn what he is trying to achieve. Does he need to put up blinds? Does he need to hang a big picture frame of his great-grand father? Knowing what exactly he is trying to achieve comes from your engagement with the client.
A preemptive brand will do it’s best to engage clients so they certainly and consistently provide the ideal solution that sets them apart from what every other similar brand is doing.
Conversion
For the brand – Being aware of people who pay money for your service and those who are hesitant to do so – find out why. Systems need to be put in place to meet clients at different touchpoints. You need to know why they are hesitant to buy so you either provide them with more educational information or send them over to another brand you feel can provide a suitable solution.
For the client – Let your target audience be well educated on how you intend to solve their problems so they can make an informed decision on doing business with you. That’s the only way they will convert to a sale.
2. Organize Your Training
Please don’t assume your employees know what they need to be doing (a 100%) to help you achieve your goals. Many times, you’ve got to show it to them and/or teach it to them.
You may be thinking to yourself, “then why did I hire them if they do NOT know what they should be doing?” They need to be coached.
They have got to be doing what they know in line with the organizational goal not according to what they learned from Harvard or the great University of Ife or Lagos.
Give employees the relevant training they need and most importantly, in line with organisational goals. This will keep them dedicated to the company and make it very difficult for them to get poached. If you do not have any form of training or capacity building for your employees within a 1-year business cycle for your company, then we’ve found at least one MAJOR reason why you have a lot of things going badly for you. We have tons of training courses they can use to improve capacity.
Untrained staff leads to dissatisfied clients, angry clients, bad customer service, and even serving products to the wrong audience. It can also lead to increased overhead costs, poor overall business performance and the list goes on… at least until you start doing the right thing, which is training employees in their respective line of work.
3. Organize Your Team
This is the most important factor within the organisation because they set the pace for the company. They are the face, mouth-piece and ears to the company. They close the sales and more times than not, they are the ambassadors to the organistation. You have to know what you are doing here or else, you will repeat the same things you did in 2019 that didn’t get you the results you hoped for.
So basically, your team is broken down into these set of 5 words. Yes, shocking right but these set of people happen to be very important within the organization.
• Important – these are the key people at every customer touch point in the organization.
• Simple-Minded – they take care of simple tasks that put all the pieces together and make the “important people” look great.
• Paper – Pushers – honestly they are known as the human resource department that deals with making sure the organizational strategy works. If they have to get on their knees with their pens and papers to achieve this, they do it.
• Academics – they do it by the books and that helped, well the finance books.
• Irrelevant – they look irrelevant but they are the neat pieces to the puzzle, security, janitors, etcThis is what we had in the old school.
Let’s take a look at how to build an ideal team needed for a successful business year, 2020 – The New School. Because it is an integral and important factor in the organistation, we are going to dwell on this.
Steps to Creating a successful growth team.
Step 1 – Align Job Titles To Show They Are Different Positions But On The Same Team
• The Old Model: Marketing/Sales/SupportM arketing hates sales, sales hate marketing, support hates all.
• The New Model: Goodbye all… change the names. Customer Service is now Customer Happiness Officer. The names matter. What you call something or someone matters. Everyone wants to feel good about what they are doing.
Step 2 – Align Your Growth Team With The Customer Journey
The growth team isn’t just to make money but to make more successful customers have successful outcomes and remain satisfied.
The growth team owns the entire customer journey from strangers to raving fans, to repeat customers and ultimately to brand ambassadors.
Some once said, “Advertising is the price you pay for having an inadequate brand”. A great team will make a product feel and look great to the customer.
Step 3 – Align The Metrics To Allow For Handoffs… Not Conflict
If you want to change people’s actions, change what you measure. Every piece of marketing activity must be tracked and measured that’s the only way it will cause a change. It will show need for improvement, opportunity for growth and engagement and ultimately, it will show people what’s next in the customer journey.
Every brand needs a growth team that will create and implement a successful marketing strategy to improve business growth in 2020. If you don’t have one, employee one. It could either be in-house or an external digital agency.
Let’s take a look at what it should consist of.
Key Metrics of the GROWTH TEAM:
1. Content Team: They measure monthly visits, organic visitors, social reach, social growth, social shares, podcast downloads, content engagemnt, etc.
2. Acquisition Team: They measure number of leads, number of “converts”, return on ad spend. They are also responsible for unit goals, or unit measurement and not revenue.
3. Monetization Team: They are responsible for revenue, product unit sales, saves/recoveries, analytics, .
4. Success Team: They are responsible for tickets answered, average response time, customer satisfaction score, net promoter score, customer stories, customer support, client successful overall experience with the brand, etc.
And that’s a wrap. Please find a few action items that will help you immediately implement what you just read.
Action Items
1. Establish new position titles
2. Align the team with the customer journey
3. Align metrics and create a balance of blame.
4. Commit to cross-training (establish a shared vocabulary)
5. Get relevant training modules for the team.
Feel free to comment on the section below, should you have any comment, ideas, and suggestions.
If you would like to take a business growth assessment to see how you are doing in your business and what you can do improve and get closer to reaching your goals monthly, please head over here to asseses your business.
