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How to win at performance marketing AND save time
Executive Summary
It’s a classic scene for all marketing teams, everyone huddled around a real or virtual whiteboard, dreaming up all these creative ideas during a brainstorming session. New audiences, new products, new taglines, all come pouring out of the team onto some post-it note.
You’ve hit the jackpot and are all excited to see it come to life…
Months later, those new audience segments are not yet activated in the digital ad platforms, the new tagline is stuck with some higher-up executive for approval, and all the excitement has turned to disappointment and bitterness, leading to someone saying ‘let’s just push live whatever we can and stop talking about this.”
When work gets caught in bottlenecks it means lost time in any go-to-market strategy and to optimize results for in-market advertising. Whether you are an agency producing for a client or an in-house team, the longer it takes to execute on marketing campaigns or website updates or otherwise, the longer you wait to improve your results with better campaign performance.
Finally, the more you tie-up your core resources on production work, the less opportunity they have to do the work you really want them to be doing – the ideation, the strategy, the upsell. When you are paying full-time employees, especially senior ones that you need in order to fulfill your strategic mission, the last thing you want them doing is jumping into production work.
In this paper, we will highlight how digital marketing teams can deploy insight tools to enhance their performance marketing efforts more efficiently.
Where Bottlenecks Occur
There are essentially two types of bottlenecks that relate to the issues above. The first one is production bottlenecks. This is when you have more work to do than resources available to do the work. In other words, the types of situations that cause project and production managers the most grief.
The cause of this varies from both problems and opportunities. On the one hand, poor resource forecasting process, staff turnover and skill set gaps are all underlying root causes that can place you into this scenario. Conversely, a good problem to have, such as the sales team bringing in new clients, can cause this as well. A less noted cause of this is having too many projects partially done, where the mental bandwidth it takes to switch between 4-5 works in progress slows you down, this makes bringing on anything new tough.
Of course the biggest impact on your operations is the impact on speed of turnaround. In a category where speed to market is a key USP, production bottlenecks can undercut your team’s efficacy. Which brings us neatly to the next issue:
The second type of bottleneck is performance-related. Once the creative and content assets are created, audiences are segmented, and budgets are allocated, the work goes live! That’s great, but now what? With the amount of information available, testing and implementing iterations is an absolute necessity to stay on top of optimization and allow information to flow back up from executing teams to shape strategy.
So what causes this? A common underlying cause is the inability to share information effectively across teams, especially at scale. How does the data analyst communicate the results of marketing efforts to an account manager, a digital marketer, a designer and a developer and get them all aligned on next steps and action items? Even if they do, those resources also have the backlog of production tasks in queue to be done for other clients, so optimization and iteration is unfortunately often the first thing to get deprioritized.
It is unrealistic to think you can build a marketing team that is not susceptible to these underlying issues. Managing the peaks and valleys, and in turn keeping your clients and your staff happy, is key. So how do you approach building a team in a way that can handle this volatility?
Digital Marketing Insights at Scale
In analyzing how you can unclog bottlenecks it is important to know what type of work could and should be retained by your core team versus where support is more easily found. Maintaining quality on pieces of deliverables that matter most is vital, so picking and choosing what work is treated variably is important.
A great starting point is documenting all the type of work the team is doing, all the different tasks that come in. Get as granular as needed within disciplines, such as assessing workload for motion ads versus static ads, website development versus website maintenance versus landing page building, the list goes on. If timesheet data is available to help support this analysis, definitely use it, and if not, the team probably loves not having timesheets!
Then for each type of task the team does, allocate them to one of these buckets:
- What you will absolutely retain in-house because it is what defines you and makes you unique (for more thoughts on what makes an agency unique read this!)
- What can be automated so you don’t have to spend as much time and labor on it;
- What can’t be automated and can be done by others just as well as you (if not better)
Once you have this, allocate roles and responsibilities within the team to research and identify what alternatives are available to support those tasks that fit into options two and three. For thoughts on how to build-out a marketing techstack, check out this article.
Process Improvements
In addition to working through the task allocation framework above, there are some other tips to share around building processes to address underlying root causes of bottlenecks.
For resource forecasting, it is highly recommended that the sales team (or if it’s an in-house marketing team, your broader leadership team) is brought into the resource planning stage of conversations. No one likes disappointing a brand new client by not being able to deliver on time, especially the sales team. As a general rule of thumb, once a project looks ‘more than likely’ to land on the team, start forecasting for it and see how that volume of work would fit with the existing team and the existing workload. This also helps the sales team manage expectations upfront effectively on timelines.
As it relates to staff and skill sets available within the internal team, it is recommended that a skills matrix is done at least quarterly, or as team members come and go, to identify what are the existing strengths and weaknesses of the team. This will help guide the decision of what is best done by third parties, as well as inform future hiring decisions. It is really an eye-opening experience to document this in some colour coded/numerical way.
With respect to performance bottlenecks, having one centralized source of performance information and insights is key, so that everyone can easily assess and ideate. This is a place where technology can most effectively play a role. Then the team can leverage the shared information within group discussions and focus on implementing new and creative ways of solving performance issues that have been identified by the software. It is also helpful to allocate and assign estimated or proxy tasks and hours to the team for their on-going optimization time such that it is not constantly bumped for new production work. Remember it is easier to retain a client than win a new one, so prioritizing performance of your existing client base is key.