Analogy of rounded roles in Cricket and Marketing.

Big day today. As a cricket fan, we have waited for this moment for 12 years and the way our team has performed this year, I have not seen any team in such form in any tournament.

If we look back at the journey of the Indian cricket team in this campaign, there are some really high-quality takeaways for all of us.

In today’s newsletter, I am going to draw a parallel between the roles of Indian cricket team players and a digital marketing team.

Even if you do not follow cricket, you will get the message loud and clear.

Believe me when I say this- this is not a pushed analogy. In fact, I will push you to think about the importance of clarity of roles, working in partnerships and celebrating the small wins.

Clarity of roles:

Clarity of roles- marching towards one common goal.

If you look at what our captain has done this season is true leadership stuff.

But if you look at the role Rohit Sharma has played as a batter, you will know it has been foundational in many ways.

Laying a strong foundation over which team builds up is what Rohit Sharma has done in this World Cup.

Scoring quick runs upfront and taking the pressure off batters number 2 and 3 is a selfless approach in many ways.

But that also tells us the clarity of his role.

Probably the team management of the Indian cricket team decided on the role Rohit Sharma had to play much before the World Cup campaign started.

And Rohit completely obliged it.

The takeaway here is- to define what an individual has to do in your team with clear KPIs and expectations. And align the individual with the responsibility they have to drive.

Only when one knows the role they have to drive with utmost clarity they can go in depth of the role to unleash the best version of themselves.

Define the roles of what a performance marketer has to do. They are responsible for looking at the data flowing to the website, app or CRM and making the corrective decision to increase the top line. Period.

Hence they need to know how ads work, how SEO works, and how marketing automation works. User data inflow can happen from either or all of these sources hence a performance marketer needs to own this responsibility with utmost clarity.

They can’t be just limited to running ads.

Or a Retention marketing expert needs to have a clear responsibility to drive a certain % of login-to-purchase rate and repeat purchases on a monthly basis. For that, if they want a specific offer, product, or category push, they should go ahead and drive it.

Working in Partnerships:

One of the biggest story this World Cup has been that of Mohammad Shami. What a champion.

Hardik Pandya got injured and Shami found a place in playing 11.

A blessing in disguise one may say but that also reflects our bench strength.

Yes Mohammad Shami has been phenomenal in this World cup because of his individual brilliance. But one of the important reasons behind his success is also because of tight bowling by Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammad Siraj.

Bumrah creates pressure from one end and Shami picks up wicket from the other.

Same with Kuldeep Yada <> Ravindra Jadeja

Same with Shreyas Iyer <> Virat Kohli

Tells us so much about the importance of working in partnerships.

If the team that is designing your campaign keeping certain target audiences in mind is not talking to the performance marketing team who are responsible to find the decided audience on different digital mediums, your campaign will never reach its true potential.

Great digital marketing teams decide the campaign idea and audience for it together. By the time brand and social teams crack the campaign thought and get the rollout plan ready, the performance team gets the right objective strategy, audience strategy and channel strategy in place.

This always must go hand in hand and needs to be well-planned.

A retention expert in your team must know the traffic expected on your website during a campaign so that they can define the right KPIs of traffic to the notification subscription rate. Traffic to sign-up rate. Sign up to the cart addition rate. Cart addition to purchase rate and so on. All these numbers vary with the launch of a new campaign.

Hence all these teams or resources need to work in partnership to make a winning combination.

Celebrating small wins

Off the field highlight of this World Cup has been the medal ceremony by our fielding coach T Dilip.

And the fact that it is published on the Indian cricket team’s social handles shows us the team bond our team has and also tells us about the importance of celebrating small wins.

It creates a sense of healthy competition within the team.

Such an important takeaway for leaders here: you have to create fair occasions to reward the people who have helped you achieve your targets.

It’s not about money every time. It’s about providing a stage and applauding the best performer. When you can, reward them with fair increments but in corporate culture, this can only happen once a year.

But as a leader, what you can do is: reward the efforts more frequently. Or at least recognise it.

It can be something as simple as an appreciation post on the Whatsapp group where you have all your team members. Or organize a small event quarterly to reward team members who have gone beyond to deliver.

For ex., I have huge respect for designers in the digital marketing team. It is not easy to apply creative thinking constantly, throughout the day and deliver creative on time. Many times graphic designers spend time beyond regular hours to ensure the ads go live on time or a particular piece of communication is not delayed.

But are they celebrated enough for this? Seldom they are.

Yes, you must reward those who have a direct impact on sales or revenue. But people who are enablers should not be ignored.

That’s it for today folks.

This team has played like champions throughout the tournament. Let’s support them with full energy and might today and hope for the best.

I hope you have signed up for the Bids 2 Bots event happening on 24th Nov where I talk about:

Leveraging AI: For performance marketing and SEO.

Plus a bonus 100 ChatGPT prompts mastersheet exclusively given to attendees of this online event.

I have put together a robust 3 hours deck for this session which you will love because all the concepts and use cases have been taken from my first-hand experience.

See you on the 24th.

Cheers,

Apurv