
The ability to do less with more, pivot at the drop of a hat, and be resilient in moments of crisis are all traits of best-in-class marketing teams, and the better your team is at being flexible, the better set up it will be for success.
But before a marketing team can truly be agile, it needs a strong foundation — one that is built on collaboration, leans on data, embraces experimentation, and has efficient processes in place. These are the building blocks you’ll need to run a highly-effective, high-performing marketing team, and to help you kick things into high gear, we’ve put together a framework to help you get started.
Set the right number of key goals
Your team’s effectiveness and ability to achieve goals are impaired when you’re overly ambitious and try to do too much in a short timespan. Think about what goals are most important to your team and to the business in both the short and long term.
The goals you set for the marketing team should support key organization-wide objectives and can be broken down by time: monthly goals, quarterly goals, and annual goals. By doing so, your team will be able to monitor performance on a monthly and quarterly basis and adjust its strategies to course correct as needed to stay on track. Additionally, you’ll be able to determine if your goals are ambitious enough or might be moonshot goals.
Identify metrics that matter
The goals you set for your marketing team should be clearly measurable. To do so, your team will need to set key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your goals against. And instead of using cumulative growth totals, you’ll want to focus on growth over specific periods of time.
The KPIs you use will often depend on the stage of growth your business is in. A startup may focus on metrics that provide business model validation, while a more established business will look at things like LTV (customer lifetime value) or marketing revenue attribution. What matters most is identifying the metrics that are relevant to your specific business so it can grow in the direction and at the pace you want.
Test, hypothesize, and analyze
After setting measurable marketing goals, it’s time to experiment. There won’t always be a clear path to your desired outcome, which is why embracing a culture of experimentation is so important. Set a goal, decide how you’ll measure it, and create a list of tests to run to help you achieve them.
Part of testing is nailing down a hypothesis for each test, and doing so with intention can help you determine what is and isn’t working in a given experiment. Your hypothesis should be a statement that can be proved or disproved and can be as simple as, “If we change the location of the call-to-action button, we’ll see a higher CTR.” And whether your prediction is true or false, you’ll be able to analyze performance and walk away with insights and learnings that can help inform future tests to help you inch closer to your desired marketing outcomes.
Iterate on past tests
Marketers should start with a broader set of testable theories in hopes to pare them down over time. And as your tests get more specific, your team will be able to glean learnings that inform additional tests to run. Being iterative is a best marketing practice that helps teams understand their users better and optimize performance. This can include running A/B tests, and the better your team gets at testing and learning, the more you’ll be able to quickly run new experiments and implement winning marketing strategies for your business.
Start the cycle again
Part of running a high-performing marketing team means setting up an environment where everyone regularly challenges the status quo. By asking questions and closely analyzing past performance, you’re able to understand where you’re really generating value, if there are gaps in your processes, and where there is potential room for growth. Marketing is an always-on effort, which means right after you tackle your first set of big picture goals, your natural next step should be to quickly move onto new ones.
The ability to do less with more, pivot at the drop of a hat, and be resilient in moments of crisis are all traits of best-in-class marketing teams, and the better your team is at being flexible, the better set up it will be for success.
But before a marketing team can truly be agile, it needs a strong foundation — one that is built on collaboration, leans on data, embraces experimentation, and has efficient processes in place. These are the building blocks you’ll need to run a highly-effective, high-performing marketing team, and to help you kick things into high gear, we’ve put together a framework to help you get started.
Set the right number of key goals
Your team’s effectiveness and ability to achieve goals are impaired when you’re overly ambitious and try to do too much in a short timespan. Think about what goals are most important to your team and to the business in both the short and long term.
The goals you set for the marketing team should support key organization-wide objectives and can be broken down by time: monthly goals, quarterly goals, and annual goals. By doing so, your team will be able to monitor performance on a monthly and quarterly basis and adjust its strategies to course correct as needed to stay on track. Additionally, you’ll be able to determine if your goals are ambitious enough or might be moonshot goals.
Identify metrics that matter
The goals you set for your marketing team should be clearly measurable. To do so, your team will need to set key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your goals against. And instead of using cumulative growth totals, you’ll want to focus on growth over specific periods of time.
The KPIs you use will often depend on the stage of growth your business is in. A startup may focus on metrics that provide business model validation, while a more established business will look at things like LTV (customer lifetime value) or marketing revenue attribution. What matters most is identifying the metrics that are relevant to your specific business so it can grow in the direction and at the pace you want.
Test, hypothesize, and analyze
After setting measurable marketing goals, it’s time to experiment. There won’t always be a clear path to your desired outcome, which is why embracing a culture of experimentation is so important. Set a goal, decide how you’ll measure it, and create a list of tests to run to help you achieve them.
Part of testing is nailing down a hypothesis for each test, and doing so with intention can help you determine what is and isn’t working in a given experiment. Your hypothesis should be a statement that can be proved or disproved and can be as simple as, “If we change the location of the call-to-action button, we’ll see a higher CTR.” And whether your prediction is true or false, you’ll be able to analyze performance and walk away with insights and learnings that can help inform future tests to help you inch closer to your desired marketing outcomes.
Iterate on past tests
Marketers should start with a broader set of testable theories in hopes to pare them down over time. And as your tests get more specific, your team will be able to glean learnings that inform additional tests to run. Being iterative is a best marketing practice that helps teams understand their users better and optimize performance. This can include running A/B tests, and the better your team gets at testing and learning, the more you’ll be able to quickly run new experiments and implement winning marketing strategies for your business.
Start the cycle again
Part of running a high-performing marketing team means setting up an environment where everyone regularly challenges the status quo. By asking questions and closely analyzing past performance, you’re able to understand where you’re really generating value, if there are gaps in your processes, and where there is potential room for growth. Marketing is an always-on effort, which means right after you tackle your first set of big picture goals, your natural next step should be to quickly move onto new ones.
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