Ideal marketing – when the buyer perceives the business as a trusted expert to help make decisions. We considered the strategy for:
- personalizing communications;
- technical architecture;
- setting the flow of experiments;
- building a team.
But what’s next? Is personalization and marketing automation part of the overall trend for businesses and organizations?
We believe that yes. Analytics, AB tests, automation platform are just tools, and even the best tools are limited. Effectiveness is determined by people and how they are organized – culture and business processes. In the final letter, we will reflect on the possible next steps in development – combining marketing with sales and product, and then the overall business transformation.
Table of Contents
The boundaries of direct marketing are blurring
When experiments are put on stream, it comes to the understanding that there is no difference between direct and indirect marketing. The customer is one across all channels, and the knowledge we have gained in direct marketing is equally applicable in less targeted marketing, such as TV advertising or billboards.
Marketing merges with sales
The next step is to speed up feedback, transfer responsibility to marketing from attracting a customer to revenue from that customer or LTV.
Feedback to marketing is often slow: marketing automation for b2c, different people are responsible for the volume of traffic and conversion to orders, while in B2B, the marketing department generates leads, but brings them to the sales department. In order to increase the efficiency of buying traffic and lead generation in these situations, you need to combine them with sales: at least in terms of metrics, and even better – organizationally, putting them in one room.
Marketing teams up with the product team
As marketing is responsible for revenue and customer understanding grows, hypotheses change from marketing hypotheses like “red button will increase click rate” to business ones. Marketing begins to think not only about how to present a product to a specific audience segment, but also how to change the product so that it is more relevant.
Business is divided into autonomous product teams
The final stage is when the team, which includes both the product and the marketers, generates revenue on its own and becomes an independent business unit. Such a team gets to know their client even better, understands how their product differs from other products of the company, adapts more flexibly to their client and creates more value for him. Becomes able to set and achieve revenue and profit goals.
The complexity of the approach is that when all links of the production chain are transferred to one team – product, marketing, sales, logistics – the team physically cannot cope with all the company’s products. Therefore, several such teams are created – each is responsible for its own product or audience segment. Previously, there were separate departments of production, marketing, sales, now there are autonomous product teams with their own P&L. This requires a change in culture and strategy: management system, financial accounting, organizational structure, crm platforms .
It is important to say that dividing the business into product teams is not a panacea, but rather a direction in which it seems that most companies should move forward. Where to stop and find a balance between team autonomy and centralization is a daunting question that each organization must find an answer to through its own experience. In the modern world, companies are increasingly competing not with products, but with business processes and organizational structure.
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