Tag: communication

Reporting marketing

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It’s a responsibility as marketers to make marketing accessible to the rest of the organization. We are the ones good at communicating, after all.

It starts with reporting on your KPIs.

If you have 20 slides with tables filled with character size 12 numbers, covering all the regions, all the channels, all the assets, all the stages of the funnel, you are doing everybody a disservice. Nobody will understand what you are up, and by not understanding it, they will not be excited about the next thing you will present or ask money for.

Pick three numbers. Make them about awareness, conversion, and pipeline. Report on them with three slides, splashing the big number on one side and an explanation of the number on the other (what you did, what happened, why it matters, what’s next – keep it character size 30 at least). Do it every month or every quarter and let readers ask their own questions about regions, channels, assets, and so on.

That’s a way to build credibility and interest around the marketing function.

Learnings and insights

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There are different ways to share learnings and insights.

Many keep them for themselves, at most sharing with a close circle. They see learnings and insights as an advantage in a competitive environment, and they leverage them to achieve status.

Some share them all around, perhaps doing some sort of selection based on interest. They typically do that once and then assume that everyone is in the loop and will act accordingly.

A few manage them, ensuring they are properly discussed, distributed, and acted upon. They take the time to understand who can benefit from them, they organize a space to exchange opinions, they put together the right context to do some testing, they track results that inevitably lead to further learnings and insights – starting the loop once more.

Of course, this last approach is ideal. But you can’t follow that with everything. That’s why it matters to know what is important.

Come together

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Three things to consider when you write new marketing content.

  1. It needs to be relevant to your audience – “me” is not relevant.
  2. It needs to be different from what is out there.
  3. It needs to be distributed in a channel where your audience hangs out.

All of the above needs research, so writing marketing content never starts with a blank page and very rarely starts with a brilliant idea. It starts with questions, data, insights, and the right expectations about how long it takes to make it all come together.

Stakeholders

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Commit to your own work.

And think about how it affects others. What others expect from it, how others can make it better, why others should care.

Since this is extremely difficult to do in abstraction, the surest way you have to make it happen is to actually interact with those who have a stake in your work. Do it frequently, do it methodically, do it with your ears and mind wide open.

The best work happens in the dialogue with others.

A little brand test

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If you are having any doubt that your brand is not working, try this little test.

  1. Open Word.
  2. Write down the key claim or message from your website.
  3. Pick 5 competitors.
  4. Go to their websites and write their key claim or message on the same document.
  5. Show the document to a colleague, a friend, your partner. Ideally, a customer.
  6. Ask them to identify your claim or message.

It does not matter if your competitors are lying, if you are the only one who could truthfully claim what everyone is claiming, if your technology is better, if you have a more accurate vision for the future, if your founder has an incredible track record.

The customer does not care.

You are not trying to make an argument in the court room. You are competing on the market.

Note: if you pass the test, it does not mean your brand is working. A message is easy enough to imitate and brand is a combination of multiple items that should reflect the way you see the world. But if you don’t pass the test, then your brand is definitely not working.