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Digital Marketing

Ten Levers of Success I Use to Build a Marketing Center of Excellence That Bring Strategic Impact

Ten Levers of Success I Use to Build a Marketing Center of Excellence That Bring Strategic Impact

I’ve always had the mindset of staying ahead of the competition, regardless of the gap in between us. And that’s the exact words I tell entrepreneurs who seek my advice. Because once you’ve established a stable business, that’s all the more you can’t stop.

One of the ways you can accelerate your business growth is by creating a Center of Excellence (COE). It’s a vital component of any organization that wants to realize digital transformation for their company.

Gartner describes effective CoEs as “concentrating existing expertise and resources in a discipline or capability to attain and sustain world-class performance and value.”

In the context of marketing, concentrating this expertise and resources in the Center of Excellence framework means you can scale your marketing efforts with more effective strategies and efficient processes that give more value to every dollar you spend.

Essentially, a marketing COE would ensure you launch your campaigns at a targeted yet practical level.

Some of the many benefits you get out of a marketing Center of Excellence:

  • Continued education
    The pace of change in marketing is a well-known challenge. Your COE creates consistency in education and learning for marketing teams and the overall organization by tracking and updating best practices.
  • More efficient use of resources
    High-demand capabilities like skills, knowledge, and experiences should be centralized to widen the reach of the capabilities and streamline their access across the organization.
  • Faster delivery
    Eliminating bottlenecks by streamlining access to critical capabilities increases the speed of delivery, research, development, and maintenance of critical business processes.
  • Increased quality of services and product
    Standardizing best practices enables uniformity of service and product delivery and quality end-to-end customer experiences.
  • Cost optimization
    You can decrease cost by eliminating inefficient practices that reduce redundancy, maximize reusable assets, and optimize the use of all resources.

Ten success strategies that drive results

Creating a Marketing COE takes a significant investment of aptitude, time, and assets. From defining clear principles to continuously improving processes and allowing room to scale, here are ten strategies you can implement to help establish your own marketing Center of Excellence.

Clear strategic alignment and well-defined vision

Every COE must have a well-defined vision that is core to the organization’s strategy and long-term goals. Your marketing should align not only with your business objectives but also with every work you do.

In order to make your solution adaptable to business changes and how marketing evolves, as well as resilient to issues that arise, you need to define clear rules on how to build your COE. Each step in your process needs to have logging, traceability, accountability, and supports your long-term goals. This sets you off in the right foot and promises longevity in your approach while making sure you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.

Assigning completely independent and holistic team

COEs are not impacted by day-to-day business of an organization and have the flexibility to innovate. Your marketing Center of Excellence must be independent and armed with the right skills to understand and develop end-to-end technology, products, and services. This includes architects, product managers, people managers, technology researchers, etc., bringing competence and talent to the table.

For instance, a COE around content marketing must bring together a team the creates content for sales, video content, customer service, and research team to create a more effective and efficient content marketing engine. Respecting and engaging the expertise of the different disciplines is key. 

Led by trusted leadership

The success of a marketing COE hinges on a visionary leader with an unstirring passion for making an indelible mark in the craft. Creating the vision, mobilizing resources, and keeping momentum ensure that your COE can continue to create an impact. Right leadership will:

  • Create visibility in the organization and ensuring access to relevant stakeholders
  • Enable authority and decision-making that balances marketing and operations
  • Ensure the ability to align with the organization’s changing priorities
  • Facilitate continuous growth of competence and capability

Understanding customer relationship

An in-depth view of customer needs is critical when setting up a Center of Excellence. Insights on industry trends, regulatory changes, innovations, and disruptions are essential perspectives that drive innovation and let you adapt to changes. In addition, predicting potential challenges and risks that can aid customers and forge stronger relationships is an important component in a marketing COE and the 360-degree view of the business.

Enables effective resource management and stable, monitored establishments

Your marketing COE members must have access to shared resources such as tools, templates, calendars, and the like to function efficiently. At the same time, your organization must create a proactive monitoring routine that everyone adheres to for best practice and consistency. A proactive monitoring routine establishes repeated quality assurance and clear testing process that ensures your initiatives always follow best practices.

Strives for demand management and continuous improvement

Identifying execution gaps and areas that need focus and investments enables resource allocation to get work done and improve pipeline management. The fast-changing marketing environment must be foolproof, so business needs are identified and gaps are made known so a resolution can be immediately implemented for both your business and your customers.

A documentation repository for holding all team artifacts can help your COE members check information and learn as they go. This will help accelerate time-to-market and improve quality that hinges on continuous learning and adaptation. And it leaves a legacy that doesn’t rely on specific talents to function.

Promotes value and risk management and coordination across teams

I noticed when working with bigger companies how many divisions, departments, and teams become siloed in the way they work simply because there’s improper coordination across everyone. There are many solutions that allow companies to gain visibility into how work is impacting top objectives and how each body of work contributes to business objectives and KPIs.

Aligns with well-defined success criteria

Measurements drive behavior, and the correct behavior drives performance. It is critical for the organization to define success KPIs that are demonstrable to justify investments and continuous focus on a marketing COE. A centralized tracking, auditing, and reporting ensures that you are always on track of your activities and sees to it that every marketing initiative, project, and effort drives you to your COE’s goal.

Unlike implementing new technology, or redesigning your website, creating a Center of Excellence for marketing is a game-changing action. Once it’s created, it will also require diligence in its updating and enforcement. 

Using these principles to roll out your marketing Center of Excellence allows you to latch on to your business goals with a task force that enables you to do so across all aspects of the business. Each one is a critical element to establishing an effective COE. Building it right with the relevant area of focus is imperative to make sure your COE can help your company solve some of the key challenges around key talent and innovation in the long run.

It might be time for you to build your marketing Center of Excellence. Let’s talk about how you can start today.

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About Jeev

A serial entrepreneur with a rich history of launching disruptive online businesses and taking them to the top, Jeev owns dozens of “go-to” reviews and rankings websites. Jeev has invested more than 20 years researching human behavior and how to leverage different sales methodologies to effectively influence decision-makers.To find out how Jeev can help you, visit jeevtrika.com.

Categories
Digital Marketing

My Top On-demand Marketing Techniques

My Top On-demand Marketing Techniques

A new era of digital marketing is on the rise. Marketing is headed toward being on-demand — not just “always on,” but also always relevant and responsive to the consumer’s desire.

The way I see it, the continued evolution of technology along with customer expectations is fueling on-demand marketing. The more technology evolves to address consumer needs, the more there will be demand for the following:

  • Instant accessibility and availability
  • Effective integration of disparate activities in ways that create value
  • Personalized user experience based on available user data
  • Easy and convenient interactions with brands and businesses

To achieve this, businesses must mobilize their whole team to deliver high-quality experiences across sales, service, product use, and marketing. They also need to be familiar with tools for gathering the right data across the consumer decision journey.

Instant Experience

If you’ve been around in marketing for a while, I’m sure you recognize consumers’ desire for more urgency and ubiquity. Because of this, we marketers have gone beyond traditional and digital media to reach our audience. Cases in point:

  • We found ways to utilize virtualized media, which have become touchpoints with customers who are considering and evaluating products and services.
  • We take advantage of social media platforms to connect with our audience real-time.
  • SMS and push notifications are used to alert customers on transactions, promos, etc.

Digital information technologies are essential, as they integrate data on all customer interactions throughout the buyer’s journey. They also provide insights into the best influence pathways for the business and create new personalized experiences for consumers.

All these work together to provide consumers with instant access to products, services, and brands so that their demands are immediately satisfied.

Effective Integration

With the robust programming, data access, and interface opportunities we now have, we’re more equipped to make every digital interaction an opportunity to deliver something exceptional. In fact, digital technologies are now capable of integrating disparate sources of information at low cost and at scale for many different domains (think a smartwatch that can track a user’s health data).

The challenge for companies is to look beyond their current interactions with consumers and find effective ways to close the gaps that hamper customers’ digital experiences. This will require businesses to rethink the way they price and deliver their products. How can you effectively integrate disparate activities in ways that create value for your customers?

Precise User Experience

In the coming years, demands for more personalized experiences will intensify. With a single click, consumers can instantly personalize the offers presented to them, using information captured from their interactions online (data footprint).

Even though the privacy, security, and general trust implications are staggering, consumers still willingly provide more data when companies use the information they capture to provide truly helpful feedback, or to offer recommendations, services, and customization tools rather than just push intrusive messaging.

Simplified Interactions

The quest for simplicity has prompted leading companies to provide easy and convenient interactions with their customers. Yet many processes in a buyer’s journey still remain complex and disparate.

To address the demand for simplified interactions, companies must utilize evolving technologies to redesign complex customer experiences. Experiment with approaches that streamline processes and make interactions more inviting.

For instance, use simple gestures to allow customers to personalize their content and user experience. You can also utilize user information to provide secure access to devices and applications, and automatically customize interfaces.

Build Marketing Strategies and Marketers’ Capabilities

Soon enough, or even as early as now, consumers will demand instant and personalized experiences, effective integrations, and simplified interactions. As such, you must prepare your company’s marketing function to effectively navigate on-demand marketing.

Create Interactions Across the Buyer’s Journey

Any company that’s worth their salt is able to define and address their customer interactions across different channels. What we need to think about and create, however, is the entire process of how individuals encounter our brand and the steps they take to evaluate, purchase, and interact with it across the buyer’s journey. Marketing and customer research alone cannot give us the whole picture.

As you dive into this, everyone in your organization must be on board and gain a shared understanding of the consumers’ journey. You’ll be able to implement your marketing strategies more quickly and effectively if the whole team has a shared sense of engagement.

Analyze Data and Leverage It

To win over on-demand customers, you must understand them, their expectations, and needs. Then reach them with the right message using the best touchpoints. Data is essential to achieve this. In particular, you need data to do the following:

  • Define and contextualize trends — Having a clear view of the broad trends in your brand, category, and market is essential. If you want to leverage data trends, track what people are looking for, what they’re saying, and doing.
  • Measure the effectiveness of activities and investments at key points in the buyer’s journey — My experience in marketing taught me that it’s important to have a complete, integrated picture of where your budget goes, which interactions actually take place, and what their results are. In the world of on-demand marketing, multiple interactions happen along multiple journeys. Deploy tools that rapidly track each customer contact with your brand and push every customer-facing function to work together and form an integrated view of a buyer’s journeys.
  • Understand how and why individuals move along their customer journeys — Capturing customer data is key if you want to understand them better. You can use their data to personalize their experience with your brand, which is also an effective way to show customers that you care. They expect brands to be good stewards and users of their personal data, and their expectations for what a brand should know only increases. Information about a customer is the thread that keeps all of their brand interactions immediate, valuable, relevant, and easy.

Optimize Your Marketing Team

To navigate on-demand marketing and deliver new experiences to consumers, marketing teams should be equipped with the right skills and ready to work with other functions within the organization.

Changes may have to be introduced in ways that will transform how campaigns and communities are managed, how performance is measured, and how customer support is provided.

On-demand marketing is inevitable. Across the entire buyer’s journey, every touchpoint is a brand experience, and those interactions just keep multiplying with more marketing channels emerging. To effectively navigate and overcome the challenges of on-demand marketing, companies must:

  • Bring team members from every involved business unit to understand buyer’s journeys, predict where they may lead, and design experiences that will meet the consumer’s demands.
  • Utilize and leverage end-to-end data across trends, performance, and people to invest wisely and create relevant and valuable solutions for customers.
  • Challenge the delivery process behind every customer touchpoint. Are you making the best use of your data and interaction opportunities? Are your marketing efforts timely and do they meet brand expectations?

Ultimately, staying ahead of the design, data, and delivery requirements of on-demand marketing goes beyond compliance — it’s also a crucial basis for competitive advantage.

How effective are your on-demand marketing strategies? Let’s talk about how we can make it better.

SEND A MESSAGE

About Jeev

A serial entrepreneur with a rich history of launching disruptive online businesses and taking them to the top, Jeev owns dozens of “go-to” reviews and rankings websites. Jeev has invested more than 20 years researching human behavior and how to leverage different sales methodologies to effectively influence decision-makers.To find out how Jeev can help you, visit jeevtrika.com.

Categories
Digital Marketing

Four Strategies to Achieve Omnichannel Success

Four Strategies to Achieve Omnichannel Success

Modern entrepreneurs, myself included, have grown to realize the value of having omnichannel presence for their business. Making this move is essential to compete in the modern retail landscape and to create a sustainable business model that meets the needs of customers.

When you successfully integrate online and offline sales channels to create a cohesive customer experience across different touchpoints, your business becomes optimized for growth. You’ll also be in a better position to overcome unforeseen commerce crises, such as black swan events like a global pandemic.

Now when I say “omnichannel,” I’m not just referring to the practice of selling in multiple channels (which is what you should definitely be doing). It’s also about meeting customers in their platform of choice and making sure that you deliver a consistent brand experience.

Managing different facets of your business across every touchpoint can be challenging. It requires a holistic approach to sales channels, marketing and advertising, operations, and shipping and fulfillment — the pillars that make up the omnichannel success.

1.   Identify Your Sales Channels

Sales channels are the platforms where consumers interface with your brand. That could be through ads, website forms or chatbot, e-commerce sites, social media, or offline channels (eg. retail and pop-up stores).

When I develop an omnichannel sales strategy, the first thing I do is identify the channels where my customers are present. Then I figure out the best ways to market through those channels so I can set my business up to gain more traffic, sales, and loyal customers.

My experience as an entrepreneur has taught me firsthand that putting all your efforts in one sales channel at the expense of others isn’t wise. This can cause problems for your business when that channel suddenly becomes unavailable. However, that being said, spreading yourself thin over every possible sales channel in an effort to diversify is also not the best solution.

Instead, train yourself to choose the right sales channels for your business — this is the foundation of a strong omnichannel strategy. With the right mix of channels, you can expand your customer reach, increase awareness for your brand and offers, and ultimately, increase your revenue.

To make sure that you’re choosing the right sales channels, you need to know who your target customers are. Analyze the data you have from your existing channels (eg. your website, online store, and social media pages) and look for common factors among your audience. These could be details like the time and day when they engage or buy more, which platforms your audience spends a lot of their time and money on, and what products or services they purchase most often.

1.   Develop and Implement Marketing and Advertising Strategies

Marketing and advertising play an important role in driving brand awareness and sales to your business. In fact, 87% of shoppers now begin their product searches online. This consumer behavior is something you can leverage for your business.

Omnichannel success is more attainable when you deliver what your target audience needs at their current stage in the buyer journey, and you meet them in the right touchpoints. You can achieve this through strategic marketing and advertising.

One of the most valuable things I learned from my business is that I need to make an effort to create a specific marketing and advertising strategy for each sales channel I have. So this is the same advice I’ll share with you. Be purposeful and intentional in what you deliver, as our goal is to meet the specific needs of the consumers we’re targeting.

Take note that the more marketing channels you have, the more complex your campaign management and budget allocation can become. You also have to consider the ever-changing algorithms of the platforms you use. That’s why it’s important to have a dedicated marketing and advertising team, and to invest in the right tools that will help you reach your goals.

2.   Optimize Your Operations

An accurate, reliable, and connected operational process is key to an efficient, end-to-end omnichannel approach. Your product catalog data and inventory should always be aligned, and each sales channel must reflect these accurately, along with the shipping information (turnaround time and cost).

If you want to have efficient and optimized operations, you need to automate your systems, integrate your processes, and create a streamlined workflow for your business.

Invest in software solutions that allow integration and give you complete visibility over multichannel inventory. Take it from one entrepreneur to another — it really makes your business easier to manage.

For instance, using a listings solution, you can automate your product publishing to new sales channels, optimize the product content you show for each channel, and unify order management. With an inventory and order management system, you can manage complex workflows around order routing, inventory, shipments, and procurement, as well as support third-party logistics solution integrations.

3.   Strengthen Your Shipping and Fulfillment Capabilities

To complete your customers’ experience and succeed in your omnichannel efforts, ensure that your entire operations is able to properly support every step of the buying process, including shipping and fulfillment.

If you think that shipping logistics are challenging, you’re not alone. One study revealed that 53% of retailers identified shipping and order logistics as a significant challenge.

If you’re leaning towards providing in-house shipping and fulfillment, make your work easier by using a shipping software that provides customers with delivery options and takes care of calculating shipping costs. There are also third-party logistics solutions available for outsourcing which handle everything from inventory management, warehousing, and fulfillment.

Other omnichannel strategies worth looking into are:

  • Creating an excellent mobile experience for your customers
    • 57% of consumers say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly-designed website on mobile
  • Providing self-service options for your customers — Organizations realize the advantages of automated customer self-service, so they’re now investing in virtual customer assistant (VCA) or chatbot technology across engagement channels.

As you plan for and navigate the omnichannel sphere, always keep in mind that your goal is to deliver a satisfying customer experience. Remember, a seamless and convenient customer journey leads to conversion.

Expanding to new channels drives growth for your business, but to ensure that you manage them all well and gain ROI from each one, you need a comprehensive plan that addresses each omnichannel pillar. The four tips I shared with you will help you create a unified channel strategy that meets the needs of your customers at the right time and place.

Always be Prepared

Let’s talk about how we can use omnichannel to bring even more success to your business.

SEND A MESSAGE

About Jeev

A serial entrepreneur with a rich history of launching disruptive online businesses and taking them to the top, Jeev owns dozens of “go-to” reviews and rankings websites. Jeev has invested more than 20 years researching human behavior and how to leverage different sales methodologies to effectively influence decision-makers.To find out how Jeev can help you, visit jeevtrika.com.