e ways to align marketing with business outcomes

We’ve forgotten the most important thing: what are the business goals that marketing teams are trying to achieve? We see stressed out marketers who are unable to say no.

It’s time to stop the cycle if your marketing team feels overwhelmed by an unending list of requests. Here are three ways you can turn outputs into results.

1. Alignment with the marketing results you want to achieve

Most marketers will tell you that they do the work because a person with the title “VP” sent them a request. It’s a dangerous cycle, because people are no longer focused on the desired outcome. They start to throw tactics at the wall.

It is important to start by aligning the team with the stakeholders around a guidepoint. This is a North Star statement that explains what success means to them over the next few weeks.

In a recent conversation with a client, I heard, “But they want to get everything that they asked for!”

I replied, “You are still talking about tactics and not outcomes.” Instead, you should ask, “What results would you like to achieve from marketing in the next quarter?”

Now we’ve changed the topic. The pushback I get is, “We must support all stakeholders, and they want different things!”

It’s a problem that marketing faces often! They may need to talk to higher-level people who know what business outcomes or key performance indicators are most important to the company.

Even if your company is large, it takes some effort to reach the strategic level. Once you have achieved this, aligning your goals becomes much easier.

We suggest that after you have completed this step, you hold a Collaborative Workshop, where the team and the stakeholders meet in one room to discuss the Guidepoint, and brainstorm ideas for achieving the desired outcomes.

If you have a team that is already overwhelmed with work and innovation doesn’t matter to you, then a Collaborative Planning Workshop can be substituted for brainstorming. This workshop focuses on categorizing existing requests. MoSCoW is one method to do this. The acronym is:

• “Must-have”
• “Should-have”
• “Could-have”
• “Won’t have” (at this moment)

In either case, the key is that everyone who is responsible for strategy and outcome, and those team members who are doing the execution work together in the same shared space. This can be a physical room or virtual collaboration environment.

A Blueprint can be a valuable output after the session. This is an agreed-upon 3-month calendar at a high level. This does not list all the tasks the team intends to complete, but a number of high-level priorities that are directly related to the outcomes agreed upon in the Guidepoint.

2. Prioritizing tasks is easier when you have a clear system.

Most marketing organizations do not have a transparent intake system or one that allows flexible prioritization. Most often, a stakeholder will go directly to a member of the team and ask for a specific marketing tactic rather than an outcome. No one knows the volume of work that the team has to perform.

You must create a method for prioritizing your work if this is something you’ve experienced. This is what we call the Backlog in agile marketing. It’s a fancy name for “a single, prioritized list of future tasks.”

A client with whom I worked started an agile marketing program. They gathered all the work they had already committed to and found that it would be five years before they finished it!

This alarming discovery allowed them to gain a better understanding of the situation, and have difficult conversations in a transparent manner with all stakeholders. They were forced to make decisions.

More than half of what marketers used to do, because they were asked to do it, is no longer relevant or necessary!

Even if you don’t practice agile marketing officially, putting all your work in one place and realizing how important it is can save you tons of time.

3. Customer feedback is used to drive data-driven decisions

Traditional marketing is a model where we are expected to plan and execute without question. Agile marketing is a new way of working that involves testing small campaigns, learning from them and then scaling your efforts.

Companies of all sizes can use this method. In our small business, we practice what is preached. We used data-driven decision making to improve a recent LinkedIn outreach campaign.

First, I contacted a list with marketing leaders who were second-degree contacts and worked in companies that employed more than 1,000 employees. Guess what? After a week I decided to abandon the mission. It didn’t work. People weren’t responding. By doing and not waiting for perfection, we knew this.

After that I tried a new approach by launching a small outreach campaign and people responded! I decided that it was worthwhile to invest more time, so I created a Micro-Outreach Campaign with the Success Criteria below:

• Acceptance of connection is 10%
• Then, I would schedule five or more people to meet with me.

If the campaign is going well, then I will follow it up with something else. If performance falls below my Success Criteria then mission is aborted. Back to the drawing boards!

The conclusion of the article is:

Stop doing endless tactics. You can align your marketing team on the right tasks at the right time by aligning around business outcomes, using a transparent system of prioritization, and using data.

The original post Aligning marketers with business outcomes was published on MarTech.