How Smart companies win big with Performance Marketing?

How Smart companies win big with Performance Marketing?

I have generated 150 leads for my consulting business in the last 3 months.

I have spoken to most of them myself.

Now extrapolate this with 4 years of consulting career that I have been in.

Even if I take a conservative number, I would have spoken to at least 1500 businesses in the last 4 years.

99% of these businesses had a one-dimensional view on marketing efficiency.

Like this:

‘Our performance marketing agency has been under-delivering.’

or

‘Our internal ads person can only do so much, now we need external help to grow from here‘.

1% of the businesses refer to the same challenge like this:

‘We have tried diversifying our channel strategy but couldn’t sustain, maybe we miss something and that’s why we seek your help’

or

‘We have tried everything in our control to bring in the discipline, and synergies in our marketing teams but it’s not coming together’

There is a huge difference in the mindset and culture between 99% and 1% of businesses.

Inherently, I know I will have more fun and will be able to show results if I work with businesses that are part of 1%.

Businesses and founders that can put their expectations succinctly are the ones who usually see better results over time.

As a consultant I always tell my team, do not start working on the solution to a problem as soon as a problem is thrown at you.

More often than not, the actual problem is not the one that is thrown at you but the one that was never brought to discovery. Probe as much as you can to identify the true problem. Identify why a business has reached out to you ‘at the heart of it‘.

Once you realise the true challenge the business has then work towards building a hypothesis to solve it or start gathering information.

Smart Companies (or teams) are explicit in accepting the gaps and seeking help.

And some of the best work I have produced in my career is with such companies.

The structure we aim to follow to identify the root cause behind the gaps, building growth marketing capability, and showing results is broken down into 4 stages.

Today, for the first time I will give you the trade secret behind what it takes to create a case study material with such businesses.

While I break this down, remember:

If you are founder or a senior management resource in your organisation, it’s your responsibility to develop a culture and ecosystem where a team and consulting firm like ours can come together to make a difference.

If you are an employee, show leadership traits by pushing your team and your bosses to build such a culture. Because only when you make this attempt, you will be successful.

4-Step Approach to How Smart Companies Win Big with Performance Marketing?

Step 1: The synergy of Marketing Disciplines

a) Cohesion between Brand marketing and performance marketing: Gone are the days when brand managers can plan a campaign with the help of an agency and pass it to the performance marketing team to execute.

Smart Companies make brand managers responsible for achieving business numbers and build a culture to cross-learn.

If a brand manager gives a performance marketer a video of 1 minute to run as an ad, it is a failure for the brand manager, performance marketer, CMO, and entire marketing function.

Everyone in your team must know the importance of short-form content. And what it takes to crack the code with short-form content creation. No one is watching 1 minute long ads today, who are you creating it for?

A brand manager needs to spend time today with the performance marketing team to decide the entire campaign rollout, creative-communication plan, format plan, channel plan and so on. It is a collective responsibility today.

Smart Companies make sure these 2 key pillars of marketing- Brand and Performance marketing work together. If the performance marketing team in your organisation is just running the creatives as they get from the brand team, you have built for collapse.

b) SEO as the foundation: Today, SEO is a strategic channel in your performance marketing ecosystem to ensure content and offers reach the right audience organically.

I have always said this, SEO doesn’t begin when your website is LIVE.

SEO begins when you conceive the idea of building a website.

I have built 50+ high-quality websites in the last 3 years (I take up a few website projects only as I spend time getting things right with the website) and with almost all of these websites, the SEO foundation was laid from Day 1 of starting the project, from optimising the codes to images to creating a variety of pages to writing SEO optimised content.

Typically when I deliver a website, it is already 3 months ahead of its time because any SEO agency or resource has a strong foundation in place already, they just have to focus on scaling thereafter.

The best time to do SEO was yesterday, the second best time is today.

Start this today and hire a smart, updated team to deliver this.

SEO is evolving and you need to be at the top of your game to deliver results here. An SEO team need to synergies with the design, development, and content team from day 1 of your website building process and these teams also need to realise the importance of SEO and keep SEO updated on the progress of the website.

Businesses get stuck in the ping-pong blame game otherwise later between these different functions.

c) Marketing automation as a force multiplier: A team or agency is doing the hard work of getting the people on your website while running ads.

Another team is working on building strong creative communication, and another team is working on SEO but what’s the point of all this if no one is playing the role of a catalyst to drive incremental push to drive sales?

Marketing automation or effective planning on customer lifetime value has 2 major advantages:

1) Scientifically speaking, it can improve the conversion rate of the website by setting up automation triggers and

2) Repeat purchases to drive customer lifetime value.

A marketing automation resource needs to work closely with the developer and brand team to get the implementation of an automation tool done and to set the correspondence journey and triggers.

Not everyone who comes to your website is your customer but having this nudge can convert the relevant ones sooner and at a lesser cost reducing your dependency on Facebook, and Google remarketing.

Step 2: Structuring for success

a) Internal team dynamics: Build an ecosystem that fosters agility, faster experimentation and reduces interdependency.

Some of the smartest companies I have consulted come up with unique solutions to foster this.

For D2C businesses, they outsource tech and marketing to a single partner (like us) and ask us to run the machinery effectively.

If an SEO change is needed to be done on the website, it is my responsibility to get it done faster and better and not the brands’ responsibility therefore reducing the dependency and cost.

Another business I consulted had a dedicated front-end developer for UI and SEO updates that used to report to the SEO lead and not the head of technology.

Building such team dynamics that foster faster decision-making while being agile is usually a successful model.

b) Proactive vs Reactive approach: Some of the best founders I have worked with are always paranoid about competition and about being reactive to a new update.

They always want to stay ahead of the game by being Proactive and trying out new ways of bringing in efficiencies and if they have set up the internal team dynamics to be agile, the system itself pushes them to be proactive in trying out new things.

One of the businesses I worked with in 2021 was one of the early adopters of AI-led chatbots which led to an overall increase in the conversion rate by 20% of the website.

And it took them 7 days to implement this chatbot because of top-class internal team dynamics.

Step 3: Mindset and strategy diversification

a) Innovative mindset: There cannot be any innovation (at the micro or macro level) if the organisation is not receptive to taking risks.

Not everything that your team will try out will be successful but that should not take away from the fact that innovation breeds sustainability.

Especially in marketing. At the micro level, you have to be innovative in content creation ideas.

Content creation for a brand is a tough nut to crack and only if you try out different thematic content pieces over and over again, you will find the sweet spot.

The same goes for email marketing, notifications, audience testing and so on

b) Diversifying Sales Channel: Mitigating the risks involved with reliance on a single channel cannot be undermined.

As a CMO or a senior marketing professional, you have to constantly provide room for your team to experiment and open up new channels or probably a unique marketing funnel for yourself.

I have seen businesses in the US using TikTok as a conversion channel today.

They not only create the discoverability of the brand with TikTok but constantly post innovative promotions in the form of videos to drive sales

Another Indian business we are consulting has built a lead funnel of using Meta ads primarily to get people to take actions on the website which are not directly sales.

Actions like a product or content view or add to cart and for conversions, they use marketing automation as a channel.

Casting a wider net of traffic and converting them with marketing automation journeys. Diversification in today’s time is the key.

When I start working for a new business, I spend a lot of time looking at retrospective data and user behaviour to arrive at approaches to diversify sales channels.

Step 4: Building an Analytics Culture

a) Data-driven decision-making: Data always has a story to tell. One needs to know how to decipher the story.

When I start working on a new business, I typically ask the brand to do an onboarding session for us, where they are required to take us through their recent wins and losses, their market and campaign understanding and the rigour of data-backed decision-making.

Most businesses say that they make data-backed decision making but mostly they do not even capture the data correctly to make a data-backed decision.

Building a culture of nuance in data observation is difficult culture to build as you need a well-trained workforce who knows the importance of looking at the right data and is also updated on how these data points influence decision-making in the world of AI.

Most of the organisations are still stuck at what data to look at from Meta ads dashboard, Google analytics, marketing automation tool etc. 1% of the organisations have moved beyond this to build user journeys and identifying the gaps if things go south.

For ex., one of the businesses I work with has become so efficient that if they see a drop in conversion rate on their e-commerce store by 10%, they can do the analysis of the reason behind the drop in 10 minutes.

It took me 6 months to build this ecosystem but once built, you will be able to catch hold of gaps or challenges in no time which enhances your capability for faster decision-making.

While 99% of companies straight up blame the media agency or performance marketer if sales go down.

And in my experience, that is not even 10% of the reason. Usually, the reason could be something else, it could be merchandise, sorting, banners, shopping experience, stock availability, technical challenges with the website, expectation mismatch and so on.

b) Leveraging Big Data and AI: AI is truly disrupting different functions of businesses. Most of it is for good.

I am not referring to the use of ChatGPT here.

That’s the most basic way of using AI. I am referring to the use of AI for specific marketing objectives.

For a business we are working on, my team is integrating an AI chatbot with a marketing automation tool.

All the key instances under this chatbot will be passed to the marketing automation tool which will help us to create effective segments and get more personalized with our communication approach.

For another business which is one of India’s top conglomerates, that has a database size in crores, we are setting up systems to use this data more effectively using Big data and predictive analysis and passing this information to a marketing automation tool and automated messaging.

For ex., if you bought Colgate toothpaste from an offline store, this data should be stored on a central cloud system layered with an analytics tool and if the usual cycle of buying toothpaste is 30 days then a notification or email or WhatsApp is triggered to the customer to come back and buy again or checkout other options.

Leveraging analytics, Big data and AI is a deadly combination in marketing today.

Smart Companies combine the above 4 steps to fully leverage what digital can do for their business.

And a Smart Performance Marketing team leads this initiative.

Today, Performacne marketers need to apply both explicit and implicit approaches to get results.

The unfortunate part is that 99% of the businesses just focus on weekly reviews with media agencies and push them to control CAC and RoAS.

The reality they come across sooner than they realise is that they cannot grow beyond the point while following this methodology.

Businesses are not built on the back of Meta and Google ads.

These are mediums to facilitate.

Businesses are built with building internal synergy of marketing discipline, structuring for success, mindset and strategy diversification and building an analytics culture.

If you like today’s newsletter, you will love the fresh curriculum of the Dream Performacne Marketing Masterclass.

If you want us to help you build this 4-step approach in your organisation. Hire us as strategic consultants by filling out this consultation request form.

Have a great Sunday ahead.

Cheers,

Apurv