Claudia Ring’s Post

Learn from my mistakes advent calendar... Day 8 / 12: Getting trapped at the base of the marketing hierarchy of needs ⭐ why is it working ^ what is working ^ when / how are we doing it ☠️ what are we doing Once you fall down it feels like that quicksand that took Artax from us. I found myself answering "what is marketing doing" because: - Someone on the exec team wants to understand how we are helping them achieve their goals (good intentions, wrong questions) - Of lack of ability to answer (no systems, data analysis skills lacking, terrible crappy data) - Execution flaws muddied the answer (not sure if it's strategy, tactics, or execution) Lessons learned: 1️⃣ Ask questions back to understand what they're really after People want to understand why we're doing something relative to their own responsibilities but often start with tactics. So summarize the "what" (we're doing a, b, c channels and creating x, y, z content to distribute) and then do some discovery. If it's your VP of Finance , try "are you asking because you are curious how we think about allocating paid search budget based on our pipeline target?" The higher order goal is whether marketing tactics are working and how we know what's working, because they want to see positive ROI on marketing spend. Apply to other functional areas like sales or product or CS. 2️⃣ Crappy data and lack of systems need a remediation plan We NEED to know why things are working. So any excuse for not knowing why needs a plan to fix it, and you can use really only use that once. Redirect the conversation from the "what" back to the "why" - then make a pitch for the budget or tooling or headcount you need to answer the question with confidence. Come ready to set expectations and a timeline for delivery on that ask. In parallel, you're going to need to isolate variables and form a hypothesis on the why, even if you have to do it manually with excel or through a qualitative feedback loop. That's a lot to juggle at once, but the good news is, if you can form a compelling hypothesis on why and your resource ask aligns to that hypothesis, it makes your case stronger. 3️⃣ Execution has to be great Not every element of your campaign needs to be perfect. The creatives and content almost never are first try. But how you deliver them and the timing and the cadences need to be planned and executed well. So launch the new content series, it can be 75% there but it has to hit 100% of your organic distro routes (email, all social channels, communities). If you're paying for distribution, make sure the targeting is focused. Good distribution ensures you didn't create a piece of content that no one saw. If no one sees it you can't know if it was effective. Make sure you have the impressions, clicks and conversions (leading indicators) to know you hit enough of your audience's eyeballs. Then you can start to isolate why it's working or not from top of funnel down. More to come!