Do you have a Marketing Engine?

It’s that time of year when many of us are wrapping up our plans for the new financial year.  

Do you know what you are doing?  

Are your operations clearly aligned to your strategy?  Have you allocated enough resources to delivery? How will you know if you are on track (or not)?

Growing companies who are still developing their marketing practice, sometimes struggle to deliver marketing activity that is effective.

The challenge can sometimes be around identifying what activity they should be doing in the first place; or it can be that they are busy pumping out tactical activity that doesn’t really add value to the sales team or business direction.

One of the gaps I often see in scaling companies is that organisations haven’t actually thought about building a ‘marketing engine’ or ‘marketing machine’ and so their growth-focused activity is not in fact sustainable or repeatable. 

What Is a Marketing Engine?

I’ll use the term ‘engine’ here, but the terms machine and engine are often used interchangeably. A marketing engine is a set of systems, tools and processes which help you to run your marketing operation. In some organisations there are whole teams dedicated just to marketing operations, but that is not the reality for many with tighter budgets, or earlier on their journey.

The engine supports and streamlines your sales and marketing activities, increasing efficiency and effectiveness, ie saving you time and money.  It also means that when you start out on your marketing journey, you have a system that is repeatable and scalable.  This is important to remember, as first steps in marketing can seem quite daunting and time-consuming. 

Your engine can include things like a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system that tracks customer interactions, automates follow-up communications and supports the sales team with identifying hot leads. 

It includes content management systems (CMS) and social media tools which allow you to create, distribute, manage and monitor content.

I like to think of building a sustainable marketing function using the following framework:

1. Strategy & Planning
   Ensure we’re doing the right things to support the business objectives; talking with the right people, at the right time, in a language that resonates 

2. Systems & Processes
   Having the right tools and an agreed ‘way we do it here’ approach to allow for our growth to be sustainable and repeatable  

3. People & Resources
   To ensure we can realistically make it all happen, in the timeframe we want it to.  This includes building the ‘engine’ as well as delivering the tactics

4. Tactics & Activity
   It’s only here that we get to the actual visible activity that most people default to when referring to marketing; however if we only did this - we may not be doing the right things and we might not have something that is scalable and repeatable 

Priorities

So - where do you start?

Rome wasn’t built in a day and sadly, neither is an effective marketing engine!

Most of us live with the reality of a limited number of hours, people and budget. So it’s about prioritisation. 

What are you going to do?

And importantly, what are you not going to do (yet / at all)?

Check-in With A Marketing Audit

When working with clients, I have found a great way to get everyone on the same page and identifying priorities is to use this Marketing Audit.

It is a checklist under each of the 4 elements of the framework and prompts reflection along a very simple ranking:

• We haven’t done anything on this

• We are doing this, but it needs improvement  

• We are great at this and no further work is needed

I’m sharing the link here for you to download yourselves.

It's super simple and will take you less than 5 minutes to complete.

There are no right or wrong answers, but helps you to  reflect and identify where your marketing engine needs attention.

Solo or Team?

If you are a CEO/founder or marketing lead, you can fill this out alone and prioritise the tasks yourself.

Rather than flying solo, I’ve often found it really powerful to work with everyone in your ‘growth’ team and go on a journey together.  Either ask everyone to complete it, then come together and compare results, or  complete it as a team.

People often have different perspectives and levels of understanding and this often leads to valuable and enlightening discussions for the whole team.

I have found it very useful to help identify priorities, show the range of actions needed to be put in place and gain agreement across a team. 

Download the Marketing Audit to see for yourself where you need to focus this year.