Four steps to ensure your marketing succcess

The current recession has changed how marketers will be measured and hence how they will operate. In addition to the challenges in the marketplace – be these lower margins, elongated selling cycles or just fence-sitting customers, marketers are facing heat internally as increased scrutiny and smaller budgets provides little wiggle room. It is critical therefore for marketers to understand and strongly align with their organizations and leadership’s expectations.   

The best way to do this, is to put all that we have learnt about marketing, positioning and selling to customers, to work in communicating with our own teams first. In other words eat our own dog food. A good way to start is Zebu’s PAIR method namely, 

• Plan – Put down in four or fewer bullets what you reckon marketing needs to accomplish this year. Be specific – in a recession, (yes, Dorothy we are in one!) every dollar is going to get scrutinized and it is better we are ready to justify our actions before the bean counters unsheathe their machetes.
• Align – Before you present your plan, start by asking the CEO and other members of your team, what it is they expect from marketing and LISTEN. Even if you just went through your annual planning process, distilling what they expect, down to three or four specific bullets in plain English will help. This is a good time to ensure your four bullets from the planning phase are well aligned with what the CEO wants.
• Innovate – in everything you do. As the man said, “What got you here, ain’t gonna take you where you want to go.” Your conventional toolbox may no longer suffice, particularly with shrinking marketing budgets. Adding digital and social media to your tool mix is no longer optional. Don’t confine such efforts to only your customers but use it internally as well to get buy in from sales, execs and engineering.
• Refine – A strategy holds true only till such time that you begin executing it. Good marketers will measure everything that they do, and refine their plan repeatedly. The only strategy that matters is one that works and the only way you know its working is by measuring it and refining it.

The Plan, Align, Innovate and Refine (PAIR) method  is in many ways a marketing campaign, but one directed internally, to achieve goal alignment with the stakeholders inside your company, starting with the CEO.

Posted in Business
Tags: goals, marketing, PAIR