Five core elements to create world-class marketing standards

Although digital technology is constantly being optimized and upgraded, and more and more artificial intelligence is gradually replacing marketing, the essence of marketing has never changed, and marketing elements are always irreplaceable. This article analyzes in detail the five core elements of creating world-class marketing standards. Let's take a look.

With the recent hot discussion about ChatGPT, artificial intelligence technology has been pushed to the forefront, and digital marketing based on digital technology has once again received considerable attention. However, the essence of marketing has never changed. Today we will talk about the marketing elements that cannot be replaced in order to create world-class marketing standards, no matter how ChatGPT evolves or how advanced artificial intelligence becomes.

01 Always maintain close cooperation with sales and management

This is actually a major pain point for marketing personnel, and it is mainly manifested in two aspects. On the one hand, they are unable to maintain close cooperation with the sales team and become a marginal team in the large department. The marketing focus and sales goals are diametrically opposed. This is all caused by lax communication and insufficient integration of resources.

During one of my events, a student asked this question: The marketing department is using the Salesforce system to follow up and record customer transaction information, but the sales department is also very busy with their work every day. How can I convince them to cooperate with me and fill in the customer conversion information I need?

This is actually a problem that many B2B companies and industrial manufacturing companies encounter when managing marketing and sales activities. Sales focus on generating results, selling high-profit products, developing new customers, maintaining relationships with old customers, and processing orders and other trivial tasks. Their daily time is occupied by fragmented sales activities. If they also need to meet the marketing department's requirements to fill in information in the system, it may be possible once or twice, but it is difficult to sustain in the long run. Instead of expecting to convince sales, it is better to think about how to empower sales and create value for sales.

For example, it can bring high-value customer leads to sales and help sales screen customers who are likely to close deals with large transaction amounts. Currently, this can be achieved through a scientific digital marketing approach, namely, creating a data science algorithm model.

On the other hand, the sales department thinks that the marketing department is a spending department, but they do not fully realize the value of the marketing department. I think we need to strengthen the training of marketing work within the company, so that both sales and management can realize what marketing does, what value it can bring, and what specific methods can empower the sales team.

I also don’t think that the work of marketing is meant to make the work of sales redundant. After all, marketing does not involve direct customer contact that often. Instead, it should be based on close cooperation, integration of resources, and sincere empowerment of the sales team that is on the front line of customers and the market.

02 Deeply understand customers and their characteristics

A deep understanding of customers and their characteristics should be one of the important indicators for evaluating marketers. This examines the ability to see, which is usually the ceiling for marketers. The stronger the ability to see, the greater the possibility of developing effective marketing activities in the future. A deep understanding of customers and their characteristics should consist of the following aspects:

• What customers care about: What problems do they want your product to solve?
• What is their user profile like, such as location, age group, industry, education level, company position, etc.
• What kind of personality traits does the client have: extrovert, introvert, work-oriented or relationship-oriented? DISC is a good model to classify the client's general characteristics.

The above are generally the in-depth research work that sales will do before visiting customers. For points 1 and 2, the marketing department can conduct systematic analysis through labeling and other methods, and use digital marketing tools to systematically manage these customer behaviors and feature labels, thereby providing support for sales to make door-to-door visits and further follow up with customers.

03 Focus on refining value propositions and effectively convey marketing information

Refining product value propositions and delivering marketing information to target customers through appropriate channels is where the marketing department can generate core value. The work of refining value propositions can be divided into several steps:

1. Identify market segments and pain points of customer groups.
2. Conduct a SWOT analysis of the market segment that the product is in, list the competing products, what value propositions they convey, and what unique value points your product can provide to customers.
3. Interview stakeholders, such as management, sales, and carefully selected potential customers. What information do they want to convey, what practical problems do they face, and what channels do your customers use to learn about industry and product information? All of these can be used to grasp key information through field interviews.
4. Based on the results of market analysis, competitive product analysis and stakeholder interviews, refine more than two sets of value propositions and make them into marketing materials. Select some customers for A/B testing and evaluation. Finally, select one set as the core materials for go to market. Then, derive this set of core content about value proposition delivery in various forms and put it into all channels.

Part 4: Understand the size of vertical markets and customer groups

Before launching a marketing campaign targeting a specific vertical market or customer group, it is necessary to estimate the capacity of that market and customer group, as well as the sales potential that can be generated in the future, so that you can be confident and have everything under control.

If the market is large enough, even if you gain 5% more market share, it will be very impressive. On the contrary, if the market itself is not large enough, then even if you have no competitors in the market, the future growth potential will be limited and you will encounter bottlenecks sooner or later. Therefore, before mobilizing corporate resources and launching large-scale marketing activities, you must understand the size of the vertical market and customer groups. You can obtain this information in the following ways:

1. White paper on the industry in which the research is conducted: including the overall existing market capacity, market competition and future development trends
2. It is important to clarify which stage of the life cycle the market and product are in, whether it is the introduction stage, growth stage, maturity stage or decline stage. This will also determine the direction of marketing activities. For example, if the product and market are in the introduction stage, more work on market education is needed in the early stage. If it is already in the maturity stage, then what you need to do is to defeat competitors and grab more market share. If it is already in the decline stage, then do not spend resources on marketing investment in this vertical market.
3. Study whether the customer base is large or small, and whether the customers are large or small: The marketing actions taken are different depending on whether the customer base is large or small, and whether the customers are large or small. If there are many customers, they are scattered, and the average order value is relatively small, then you should adopt a multi-frequency, large-scale reach, and large-scale conversion strategy, which is somewhat similar to the to C-end strategy, and the marketing funnel is turned downward.

For those customers with a small number but high demand and average order value per customer, we need to be more targeted and adopt a customer-based marketing approach, which is the popular account-based marketing approach. We first analyze each customer thoroughly and in depth, and then replicate the analysis to other customers with similar user portraits.

Part 5: Measure, analyze, then generate insights and adjust behavior

The focus of the marketing department is to effectively quantify and analyze marketing activities, generate effective insights for the next marketing activity, and timely adjust the marketing department's behavior and the way of co-building with sales.

When a budget is approved by the CFO, the CFO is most concerned about the ROI that the activity can bring. The difficulty for the marketing department lies in how to quantify all visible marketing activities. For example, how much retention can be brought in by an exhibition? This is still simple, but how many of these leads are actually converted into business opportunities in the end? Because the conversion cycle is long, it is impossible to realize it in a short time. Therefore, it is necessary to treat the value of marketing activities with a longer-term perspective. For the assessment of ROI, it is recommended to start from two points:

• New customer value : how many new sales leads are brought in from a single marketing campaign? Based on past historical conversion data, estimate how many of these leads can actually be converted into business opportunities, and what is the average value of a single business opportunity. This way, the value of the actual sales revenue brought by a single marketing campaign can be estimated to solve the problem of requiring a longer conversion cycle and not being able to bring timely and effective ROI measurement.
• Value of existing customers : For potential customers who are already in the lead pool, they have not yet been converted to the next step and are not being closely tracked by sales, but are part of the company's data assets. In this case, marketing activities can be seen as good marketing content to activate existing customers and inform these potential customers of what actions the brand is taking, such as major events, new product launches, etc. Once these customers are successfully activated by a single activity, then according to the first method, the value of this part of the existing customers can be easily calculated through the historical conversion rate data.

The sum of the two parts of customer value equals the actual value of a single marketing campaign.

By estimating the ROI of marketing activities and taking inventory of some details in the marketing activity management process, we can find out what needs to be done, what will help improve ROI, and what should not be done. We can summarize and sort out these things systematically to settle down corporate assets and archive them to accumulate experience for future marketing activities and other similar marketing activity executors.

To summarize, the five core elements for creating world-class marketing standards are:

1. Always maintain close cooperation with sales and management
2. Gain in-depth understanding of customers and their characteristics
3. Focus on refining value propositions and effectively convey marketing information
4. Understand the size of vertical markets and customer segments
5. Measure, analyze, then generate insights and adjust behavior

Regardless of the size of the company, the industry it is in, how high the marketing department's budget is, or how many people there are, marketing leaders can plan the department's marketing strategy according to the above standards.

Author: Zhu Jingyu, WeChat public account: Jade Digital Marketing