PART I CREATE A PLAN FOR SUCCESS
THE MARKETING LEADER’S GUIDE TO INTEGRATED BRAND MARKETING
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CONTENTS
FOLLOW THREE KEYS TO HOLISTIC PLANNING 4
DEFINE AND ALIGN ON METRICS 6
OBTAIN MARKETING INTELLIGENCE TOOLS
REQUIRED TO ENSURE SUCCESS 8
COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE 10
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Great integrated campaigns don’t have time-constrained, geographical or
elemental boundaries. They are as complex as our consumer: creative, powerful,
demanding.
Marketing used to be fairly simple: identify the business challenge, develop a
compelling idea to drive sales, create a beautiful campaign and put it out into
the world through traditional media (TV, OOH, print, radio) and perhaps direct
mail if the database was significant. “Integrated” meant the same creative
campaign idea cut across all channels. After launch, you’d catch your breath
and wait until the sales data rolled in to analyze and measure success. After
analysis, the marketing team would deliver a report and begin to plan the next
seasonal campaign. Looking back, it seemed relatively simple.
Then, the digital world blew up. The mid-2000s were a blur. Consumers flocked
to new social outlets—Myspace, Facebook, YouTube. The online experience
became a series of digital rabbit holes. The world got faster and consumers
savvier. In addition, smart phones provided another outlet for brands to reach
the consumer, changing the way everyone consumed everything. It was as
though, to borrow a term from “antiquity”, the information superhighway
added a fast lane.
Today, we’ve reached a new level of marketing complexity and the landscape
is radically changing every day. Seasonal campaigns have shifted to quarterly
campaigns and, across some channels, monthly and bi-weekly campaigns. A
singular planning cycle is a thing of the past and the modern planning cycle
never ends. But, as marketers, we can’t opt out. It is our job to engage the
consumer and to magically capture mindshare and market share. We do this by
being where consumers are, surprising them at every turn and inviting them to
fall in love with our brands. Again and again and again.
So, where do we start?
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FOLLOW THREE KEYS TO HOLISTIC PLANNING
1. DEFINE OVERARCHING OBJECTIVES.
It starts with perspective and objectivity. We’ve all had successes and failures
that we’ve learned from. As the leader in our marketing organizations, it’s our
job to rise up to the 30,000 foot view and garner learnings and themes that
help inform future plans. We can’t get swallowed whole by the details of each
campaign, but must get the perspective needed to help paint the big picture.
A strong integrated campaign starts with smart annual marketing plans that
are designed to support the overall business objectives. The overarching plan
illustrates how omnichannel marketing will drive business impact. The plan
defines clear objectives that support the top corporate initiatives. Aligning
marketing objectives to corporate initiatives is critical. We need to ask:
• What are we trying to achieve?
• What are the drivers of success?
The plan serves as a North Star. With today’s complex marketing organization,
we may have multiple teams and agencies working together to bring a plan to
life. Brand marketing, retail marketing, digital marketing, brand communication,
consumer engagement, media, creative and digital agencies—it takes a village.
The overarching plan keeps everyone on track and aligned against the big goals.
The plan is then punctuated with seasonal and quarterly campaigns that will
drive unique business units and products across all channels in order to excite
the target segments. Here is where the real complexity begins.
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2. HINDSIGHT WITH YOUR TEAM.
Before we get tangled in a web of tactics, it’s important to critically assess
previous programs—learn from what worked and what didn’t. Collect the
program recaps and historical data from similar efforts, if possible. Gather
the team and have an honest discussion about what program components
were most effective in reaching your consumer and delivering strong metrics.
Break down these previous program components, turn them inside out and
upside down to understand definitively what worked. Then, collectively, draw
implications for the next program and apply the learnings to the development
of the next campaign. It’s important to get everyone on board, to learn from
mistakes and commit to making a stronger campaign.
In our world, we’re moving at lightning speed. The idea of taking time out for a
hindsight meeting may seem like a luxury. After all, the countdown to the next
campaign is haunting you. But, it’s your job to slow everyone down, get off the
merry-go-round for a moment and learn. Get smarter, get better and, in turn,
engage your team in ways that will strengthen their expertise and commitment
to the next campaign.
3. GET PARTNERS ON BOARD.
Cross-functional collaboration and alignment is wildly underrated. As the
leader, you need to get your team engaged and pointed in the right direction,
but equally as important is getting your cross-functional colleagues from
sales, product development, research and finance on board. Many teams look
inward, work together with marketing peers to get to the finish line, but ignore
the external partners that are impacted by the work marketing is putting
into the marketplace. The reason to secure partnerships is twofold: 1) You’ll
likely need data from them to ensure you’re effectively tracking against your
defined metrics (i.e. sales team needs to provide sales figures for time period
of campaign) and 2) It’s nice to have friends. Other functions tend to be wildly
skeptical of the marketing spend. Inviting partners to better understand how
the marketing engine works and how marketing activity drives real business
outcomes will help ease skepticism and get more people on board.
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DEFINE AND ALIGN ON METRICS
So, you have a brilliantly laid out plan with a sharp campaign objective, your
team is chomping at the bit to get going and you’re besties with finance and
marketplace intelligence, now what? Before you begin, define and align around
campaign metrics. As obvious as it seems, so many teams skip this step and
start making work. Everyone is excited to get the new work in front of the
consumer and the clock is ticking. But before everyone begins to scramble,
clear metrics need to be defined. Without them, an entire campaign can
fall flat and you may risk making the same mistakes down the road. With a
strategic approach, you can capture the business impact of everything that
your campaign does, as well as help predict the outcome of specific marketing
decisions. It’s like a crystal ball for marketers.
Here’s where it can be overwhelming. Campaigns are complex—where do you
start? Be thoughtful. Campaign to campaign, not all metrics are created equal.
Consider these questions:
• What are the KPIs that matter?
• What are the indicators of success that let you know you’re meeting your
business objectives?
• Is there a “must hit” sales target that delivers the ROI leadership is looking
for?
• Is brand equity or market share the campaign priority?
• Are you trying to get noticed by a new consumer segment?
• What do you hope to achieve across paid, earned and owned channels?
Start by prioritizing the channels and channel data that matters most. Don’t
try to tackle everything—be realistic. Ensure the data you’re obsessing over
is moving the dial for the business areas that support the primary business
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objectives. And most importantly, don’t forget to define your baseline so you
know what you’re striving to beat. Obtain a clear vision of the historical steady
state—across all channels involved in the campaign—prior to the campaign.
Then, take a look at a “gold standard” historical campaign or competitor
program (although data available may be limited), so you have a frame of
reference for success. Make sure your team is aware of the expectations.
Once you have metrics defined, align with your key partners on those key
metrics for success. Everyone is invested, everyone wants to succeed.
Everyone. If you set out to develop a campaign aimed at increasing your fan
base on Instagram and your sales partners rightfully believe that revenue and
sell-through is the campaign goal, no one will be happy when the results come
in. Get on the same page early on and be sure clear KPIs are your common
language. For more on defining the metrics that matter, see The Integrated
Marketing Analytics Guidebook.
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OBTAIN MARKETING INTELLIGENCE TOOLS REQUIRED TO ENSURE SUCCESS
At the end of the day, a campaign’s success depends on the flawless delivery
of the campaign to the consumer. In the not too distant past, once a campaign
was delivered the team sat back and waited. Did sales go up? Did foot traffic
to the stores increase? Did we receive positive coverage in the media? If you
were at a big brand, you may have had enough budget to do a bit of marketing
mix modeling (MMM) to gauge the effectiveness of the campaign. While they
provided useful information, there is a long time lag to get insight and they
work best for short-term, broad-based, sales-focused programs. The model
doesn’t help capture impact of longer-term activities that help boost brand
equity or help you better understand nuances across regions or demographics.
Additionally, campaign components such as engagement marketing, sports
affinity marketing, social and mobile marketing (to name a few), all vary in
terms of the time-specificity of exposure, so the picture you hope to capture
isn’t complete in a classic mix model.
As campaigns grew to be more complex, so did the data management,
reporting and analysis tools. Marketers know that slow, expensive, infrequent
and high-level analyses aren’t an option. We must have our finger on the pulse
of today’s consumer and need limitless, real-time tools that help us dig deep
into the data across all program components, obsess on the information that
matters most and provide omnichannel analytics. We need ongoing campaign
tracking to ensure the consumer is engaged and coming back for more.
Thankfully, omnichannel marketing data management and intelligence
tools now make integrated analysis possible. User-friendly tools capture
omnichannel data, crunch the numbers (so you don’t have to), and generate
real-time dashboards that tell you what’s happening. A concise, omnichannel
scorecard organized around the consumer’s journey is critical for helping to
both understand and communicate performance of your integrated marketing
plan. It’s the snapshot that makes it all make sense. It’s what the senior leaders
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of your organization want to see. They don’t care about the stack of data that
your team has diligently collected; they want the top line that lets them know
how the campaign is driving business results.
Today’s tools are 20 steps ahead of you, so you can obsess about the business
impact and lead your team to success—not sit behind your desk and crunch
numbers. It is an investment in technology, process and people—an investment
that helps marketing organizations make better decisions that drive the
business forward.
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COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE
From planning to execution, it takes many individuals and teams—both internal
and external—to bring an idea to the marketplace. One of the biggest jobs of
the fearless marketing leader is to ensure lines of communication are open and
information is flowing from team to team, individual to individual. Silos can be
killers of a great campaign. The heads down approach leads to independent
work streams that can drive a wedge between channels. In an instant the
beautiful, integrated campaign plan can break into bits. Don’t let it happen!
From the start, encourage weekly status meetings with your team to ensure
the campaign development is on track and initial objectives don’t waver.
Cross-functional teams need to be in lockstep. A small change to a tactic in
one channel can have massive impact on a tactic in another channel. If you
are using a marketing intelligence platform, log into that each week (your
team and your agency partners both) and have that be the insight “hearth”
that you all sit around and glean stories from. What’s working? What’s not
working? What could we do better? Make a new plan and reconvene next
week to check progress against the new plan. Encourage close partnership and
communication from the beginning and execution through to post-campaign
analysis will be smooth.
Let’s face it, the world of marketing is not slowing down. Every day,
technologies get faster, platforms expand and consumers demand more.
Consumers have the ability to transcend traditional conventions, rules, and
patterns to create meaningful new ideas. We have no choice but to try to keep
ahead. But, before the first creative brief is delivered, gain the perspective,
support and analytical framework required to ensure your campaign’s success.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karen has over 18 years of experience in marketing strategy, planning,
operations and development for global brands including Converse, Levi
Strauss & Co. and Gap, Inc. She has deep expertise in using marketing
insight to develop growth-focused marketing strategies, consumer-validated
advertising and integrated brand planning. Under her leadership, she and her
team executed some of the most iconic integrated brand campaigns of the last
decade including Levi’s “Style for Every Story”, Docker’s “Wear the Pants”,
and Converse’s ”Shoes Are Boring. Wear Sneakers.”
In 2005, Karen was named by Advertising Age one of the Top 30 Marketers
Under 30. Today, she’s an entrepreneurial marketing consultant and advisor
obsessed with developing the ultimate consumer experience through
innovative marketing mixes that drive demand and create brand advocates.
KAREN RILEY-GRANT
GLOBAL MARKETING
STRATEGIST, BECKON ADVISOR
ABOUT BECKON
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