4 Lessons I’ve Learned This Year Through Marketing Projects
Hi! My name is Irene Garcia and I’m a Marketing Data and Automation Manager at Version 1. I joined Version 1 in October 2018 with the acquisition of my previous company, Presidion, where I worked for 7 years.
Over the past 8 years, I’ve worked in very different Marketing areas such as partner management, events, digital marketing, data management, technical integrations, processes and automation management. Whether my tasks are business-oriented or more technical, my focus is always to improve efficiency by getting the right insights, creating processes and automating manual tasks wherever possible. I’ve learned a few things since I started my new position as a Marketing Data and Automation Manager in Version 1, but there are 4 ‘big’ lessons that I would like to share in the following blog post.
Lesson 1: Documented Processes are Essential
I used to be the only Marketing person in my former company. While I never called them structured processes, I had my way of doing things and they worked, at least for me. This was easy as only I had to follow them, and I’m a very process-oriented person.
About a year ago I started working as a Marketing Data & Automation Manager in Version 1, carving out a new area for our team who had recently completed a significant CRM integration project and was in the middle of a marketing automation one. During one of my first days in the role, I remember I was trying to get a report related to web pages on a specific topic and… I just couldn’t figure out what was related to what. That was the moment I realised there were no documented processes and, when working as a team, you can’t just have ‘your way of doing things’ because that might affect how other people get their jobs done.
There are always things you can improve in any team or company. My focus is to improve Marketing and Lead Flow Processes by automating as many manual tasks as possible. My goals are to make our team as efficient as possible so that we can focus on what is really important, and to have a ‘cleaner’ CRM with accurate and up to date data that will deliver better insights for us, and the greater organisation.
Lesson 2: Whatever You Build (Processes, Tools or Solutions), Consider Who Will Be Using It
To address the lesson learned above, one of my first projects was to implement a consistent way to create URLs and name campaigns, lists, documents, etc.
I’m quite a technical person and I like codes, having things organised, and I always look at ways to improve and/or automate tasks to make our life easier and our jobs more efficient. However, we aren’t all the same, which is a good thing by the way.
My first idea was to add some kind of short-code to the URLs indicating the type of content and the topic, which would enable me to create workflows and reports based on that. This had worked for me before, but in the Marketing team we have technical and non-technical people, so I knew that we needed to implement something that everybody could easily understand and use.
Working together, we found a solution that was comfortable and had benefits for everybody; a specific set of recognisable keywords to add to our campaign URLs that enabled me to automate workflows and generate reports. I put together a ‘Naming Convention’ generator for the team to use to help them come up with unique URLs that were compliant quickly. Prior to implementation, we consulted with SEO experts, considering Google’s opinion, to ensure this solution wouldn’t affect our positive website ranking. Currently, we use this ‘Naming Convention’ not only for URLs but for all the components of the marketing campaigns such as campaign names in the CRM, marketing lists, etc. Having consistency across everything related to a campaign makes things a lot easier for everybody in the team.
Lesson 3: Don’t Assume Tools Will Work Specifically How You Think They Will — Research & Test Everything Early On!
As a Marketer, if you have worked with tools like Marketo or Hubspot and then start using a lesser-known automation tool, I’m not going to lie, it’s challenging. You probably have all this functionality in mind that was just out of the box with the more common solutions, and you might find that it doesn’t exist or, at least, not in the way you expected, in the lesser-known tools. But you know what? Challenge accepted! I’m a problem solver. You have to embrace the opportunity to use your knowledge and available resources to improve, both yourself and the processes, and that’s what I did. However, I did learn some lessons along the way around making assumptions!
So, this is how it all happened.
Lead scoring is the process of assigning points to contacts based on their demographics and their interactions with marketing content (emails, web, events and so on) to be able to prioritise contacts based on their engagement or sales-readiness.
In collaboration with the Version 1 Business Support team, we started setting up workflows and rules using the lead scoring functionality in our Marketing Automation Tool (that we are calling MAT).
Everything was ready to go. Contacts were already being scored, they were going to be assigned to the right people when they reached the threshold, going through the funnel and then ‘recycled’ when necessary. This is where my assumptions based on using different software kicked in! For some reason, MAT built the functionality so that contacts can accumulate points forever and ever until the end of the days, something I hadn’t seen before, and did not see coming!.
The Total Score default field was editable, but only on our side, and it was eventually overwritten by the information stored in MAT’s server. In plain words with an example, if someone had a score of 500 and they unsubscribed, we would reset the score to -200, indicating that the contact is no longer engaged, but if tomorrow they visit the website again, MAT would pick it up where they left it and set the score back to 503 (500 + 3 new for the visit) instead of -197. Why? I’m not sure, but again, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
That functionality didn’t really serve our needs, so we decided to build our own lead scoring model. We created our own workflows and rules fully customised to our needs. This model is a lot more flexible and more controllable, and it will allow us to run Phase 2 of the project, which will include additional behaviour scoring and demographic score.
Lesson 4: Think Big, but Start Small
In my case, this meant to start with a small team with only part of the software functionality projected. Doing things in an ‘Agile’ manner has value.
All the information we were getting about marketing interactions and how contacts were engaging with us was great, but nobody had visibility except our team.
We started conversations with the different Sales departments across Version 1 to find out what would be useful for them to see to have more informed conversations with current customers and prospects and to be able to prioritise who to contact based on their engagement.
We started to create amazing global reports and dashboards showing the latest content engagement, newsletter subscriptions, webinars and event registrations, etc. But here it was the first challenge. A Sales team may not organise their work by a specific region for example, but by a list of specific accounts across regions and industries, with a certain technology stack. We needed to find a way to help our colleagues see the information relevant to their accounts. However, this wasn’t an ‘out of the box’ capability of our MAT.
It took a bit of time and research to find some workarounds. We decided to start with a small team for testing and we found a way to allow each Sales representative check the engagement of their contacts, as well as being able to filter by different fields in the global dashboards and reports. It wasn’t exactly what we wanted, but it got the ball rolling.
I ran a webinar for our colleagues to show them the new functionality and all the information they had available and they loved it!
Phase 2 of this project will run for the next couple of quarters and see us scaling our new functionality and automation capabilities to more teams, as well as the addition of more functionality such as notifications when important interactions happen.
In conclusion: Document your processes, think about who will be using them, get them on board early, don’t make assumptions and test everything early on. Finally, try to have an Agile mindset when creating new scalable processes.
About the Author
Irene is a Marketing Data & Automation Manager at Version 1, focusing on improving efficiency through processes, automation, connecting sales and marketing, and using data and technology to drive results.
