How can “high-growth marketing” make my marketing less tactical and more efficient?
For the second article in our series examining how high-growth marketing helps companies address typical business challenges, let’s look at a familiar problem: how to elevate your marcoms beyond the reactive and the tactical.
The challenge
Companies with high-growth ambitions tend to run lean teams and budgets, with resource focused on building products and/or serving customers. Marketing resource tends to be streamlined, multi-tasked and over-capacity — if such a resource exists at all. Often external suppliers (freelancers or agencies) are brought in to fill in the marketing blanks — as and when a tactical requirement arises. The result is what we sometimes refer to as tactics-first marketing. Of course, it’s not the tactics per se that are necessarily the issue, it’s the lack of strategic cohesion behind them.
Why it’s a problem
A tactics-first approach is not conducive to efficient growth for many reasons. One effect is fragmentation — and the cost-inefficiencies of external marketing suppliers. There might be the web designer to make any changes to the site; the PR consultant to cause a splash among potential investors or new customers; the video production house to create the explainer; the freelance designers asked to work their magic on corporate decks. To name but a few.
Indeed, you may even have agencies and service-providers on retainer that you’ve had for some time that are simply no longer providing value. You probably know about this, but time and other priorities prevent you from making the change. Ultimately, this is all inefficient investment.
Even in-house resources can become fragmented and task-based — as organisations sign-off roles incrementally to fill specific gaps as and when the need arises. There could be the community/social media manager; the blog writer; the paid-advertising executive. Companies understandably wish to keep resources in-house where possible; but without strategic cohesion, it’s difficult to get it all working.
Before they know it, whoever is managing all these elements, whether they are an experienced marketer or not, finds themselves in a position where they are managing too many different suppliers and in-house resources. This can become incredibly time-consuming, almost overwhelming. Collaboration and performance optimisation are hard to achieve.
What can you do to change this?
Here’s five potential ways to change the outcome of your marketing by adopting high-growth techniques:
1. Find marketing partners who can do multiple tasks well, can change briefs quickly, and compare well to internal costs (including overheads). Agile full-service agencies that won’t break the bank do exist! This will enable you to reduce supplier- and resource-fragmentation and to be able to adopt responsive strategic plans (i.e. change-up your marketing quickly). For example, one small agency could provide your web development, video production, content creation, design, branding and influencer marketing needs. This could reduce four external suppliers to one, and free internal resource from managing so many disparate partners (and trying to get them all to work together). We know this is the case, as we work on this basis with several clients.
2. Reduce campaign cycles. By the time campaigns have been briefed, quoted, agreed, executed and evaluated, the business reality has progressed so as to make the work almost obsolete. Trying to adapt and evolve during a campaign is hard when everyone has their scope of work cast in stone. And external agencies, once their scope is agreed, rarely leave time to adapt or make changes. Find partners (often smaller ones) who can work far quicker, are experienced with the shorter timescales of high-growth and change course easily. Agencies who factor for the unexpected.
There is a reason why even the largest FMCG brands work with small agencies —you need tugboats to manoeuvre an oil tanker. Working with experimentally-minded agencies such as this allows you to pursue better results via iteration and get there much faster. For example, for one of our recent clients, an initial focus of influencer marketing was evolved following mid-campaign-learning to include events for potential customers as well as engaging potential resellers, to enable a shift in strategic focus for the client. Reducing campaign cycles enables you to learn faster and adapt to changing circumstances.
3. Stop adding new things, and start applying learning to existing things. Optimisation failures often hold companies back from growth. Inertia is often a factor. The difference between strategic and tactical can mean learning from what you are doing well and not so well. So how is your existing website working for you? What landing pages do you have and are they the right ones? What tracking & metrics do you have embedded into your business processes to help improve effectiveness? Instead of trying to do everything, try reducing what you do — but do it better. By creating continuous feedback loops, this approach can be far more effective. By stopping doing things that are empirically proven to be less effective, resource and investment can be freed up for new experiments.
4. Stop designing camels. While camels are interesting, horses are faster, better-designed for speed, and the ride is far smoother. In the same way, when a business has too many people involved in a decision-making and sign-off process, important decisions are diluted and performance suffers. “Management-by-committee” has terrible implications for marketing agility. It’s far better to strip down sign-offs and instead rely on a lean, test-and-refine approach where marketing is empowered to experiment and learns fast rather than delays launch while internal agreement on the perfect compromise is sought. Is your organisation one where everyone wants a say in every detail of every campaign? Do you need weeks to finesse every message across numerous versions? If so, it’s likely that you are wasting productivity in the name of consensus-building. Where high-growth marketing is most successful, it is a catalyst for simplification. Simplification of decision-making leads to clearer channels of communication, and simpler choices for customers.
5. Back to basics. Our fifth recommendation on how to become more strategic and less tactical might seem counter-intuitive: focus on the basic tactics and tools, and make sure they are up-to-date, accurate, measurable — and stand-up favourably versus competitors. It’s incredible how often the basic foundations of a marketing program are overlooked while everyone focuses on trying something shiny and new. Your brand, your key assets, your website homepage, your product pages, your customer communications, your core social platforms: do they receive a regular polish in terms of evaluating their performance and prioritising the right improvements?
For example, a client approached us wanting to invest in explainer-video content and digital advertising in order to generate more leads. It was clear however that there was a more fundamental issue that they had over-looked: their brand identity was a barrier to success as it had not been refreshed for several years. Updating their visual identity brought fast improvements to their business performance. Sometimes a strategic, external perspective can help you see the wood from the trees, and challenge internal received wisdom.
In the next article in this series, we’ll look in more detail at the pros and cons of updating your branding — something that is often dismissed as too difficult, too time-consuming and too expensive. With high-growth marketing, it doesn’t have to be that way.
The “What is High-Growth Marketing?” series:
Introduction: What is high-growth marketing — and could it work for your company?
1.What changes could make my marketing less tactical and more efficient? — THIS ARTICLE
2. Would improving my brand be really worth the time and effort? — COMING SOON
3. How can I use content to really generate demand? — COMING SOON
4. How can my business achieve tangible results from influencer marketing? — COMING SOON
5. How can I realise additional value from existing customer relationships? — COMING SOON
Follow the series to gain insight into our experiences of what high-growth marketing can really achieve.
Let us tackle your challenges too
We’d like to make this as real and specific as we can. So if you have a specific challenge you’d like us to tackle for challenge six, we’d love to hear from you — please get in touch with us at challenges@blockinfluence.com and we’ll publish our responses to the best ones here.
Want to read more?
- Read our how-to guide on doing your own ICO marketing
- Read how to choose the right London blockchain marketing agency
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Who Is Block Influence?
Based in London, England, Block Influence provides high-growth marketing solutions for high-growth companies from blockchain start-ups to established fintech companies to to rapidly expanding consumer brands. We deliver world-class acceleration tools, strategies and services to help your business achieve its growth goals. If you’d like to hear more about our products and services, get in touch.
