System of Excellence in Marketing
Supporting Commercial Excellence and Operational Excellence through the Marketing Office requires a complex set up which spans responsibilities typically residing in different functions or departments in the Multi National Company. Below is an “overview” and subsequently a description of the constituents which need to work together seamlessly to ensure marketing excellence.
Stakeholder Profile, Journey & Behaviors to Change
A necessary step in defining any marketing strategy and program is understanding the Stakeholder Profile/persona, Customer Decision Journey and associated Behaviors to Change which are necessary to trigger in order to ensure the target commercial outcomes.
In Vertic’s experience, most companies have done (numerous) projects to map and document the above, however a structured, continuous updating of personas and their journeys is generally inadequate and constitutes a pervasive root cause of failing marketing ROI.
Process: Content & Messaging Development/Optimization
Understanding the Marketing objectives, Customer profiles and the competitor landscape means an insights based, channel agnostic content strategy can be defined. A content audit identifies the gaps between the content requirements specified in the content strategy and the existing, available content. The outcome is understanding of what content should be re-purposed and which content needs to be created from scratch.
Content Factory
The next steps is content creation. Historically, most content has been created for a single channel (e.g. print), often in the context of a campaign focused at the top funnel of the journey and without a central, global overview and storage. This leads to the reproduction and duplication of content and extends Time to Market inordinately. Rather content needs to be created in modules and matched against each stage of the customer decision journey with a view to supporting all available channels and formats as well as documented and stored centrally.
Content Localization
Dependent on similarities across countries as regards marketing objectives, competitor landscape and stakeholder decision journey, the process of localization can take place. Vertic most often defines the journey and associated behaviors to journey based on global research across countries to define common global denominators against which global “Master content” is created. In our experience, approximately 80% similarity can be expected across major affiliates. Focusing on similarity structurally improves Operational Efficiency and Commercial Excellence practically as most affiliates will not have the bandwidth to drive more targeted marketing than what is offered through the deployment of the global master content locally.
Channels & Traffic drivers
As content is localized it needs to be published and promoted in the relevant channels and traffic drivers. The publication should be carefully orchestrated in Customer Flows which drive the stakeholder across channels and the stakeholder decision journey. Needless to say, this requires an available, somewhat integrated multi channel technical infrastructure.
Program Management
The Program Management undertakes the constant review and analysis of the performance of content, channels, traffic drivers across the different customer flow spanning the different stages of the customer decision journey.
It is all very simple …
… well not necessarily. Even if the resources, capabilities and technical infrastructure are available to run the above System of Excellence for Marketing, as mentioned earlier, the responsibilities invariably sit within many different functions. This is why select of our partners work with us on a Marketing as a Service model, where Vertic gets the mandate to orchestrate all functions in a Marketing as A Service model (MAAS).
For more info on MAAS and the System of Excellence for Marketing, feel free to reach out.
