Category: omnichannel marketing

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The Digital Marketing Trap

Investing every dollar into digital marketing is a trap many startups fall into, but one that can be corrected with the right strategy. Gaining market share, aligning sales for success, and understanding how you differentiate is essential. Digital marketing should be part of your overall marketing strategy–not the only tactic.

In today’s ever changing landscape and rush to gain attention and buy-in for customers online, companies are aggressively investing into digital marketing. But at what cost? Having a strong digital marketing presence is important for any well rounded marketing plan, but putting all your eggs in one basket is not prudent long-term.

Marketing for any startup, technology solution, or product requires an omnichannel and well rounded approach. Casting a wide net on social media and digital venues can not only be costly, but it neglects to align your message and marketing to support your sales team.

At True Agile Marketing, we take a holistic approach to building go-to-market and marketing strategies. We explore your product roadmap, examine the competition, review your pricing strategy, and align marketing to support your sales team’s success. If you are solely focused on digital, you are missing most of the elements that can impact your brand and product’s success.

Marketing is about understanding your audience, your competitive landscape, the consideration set, your sales strategy, and aligning marketing approaches to build strong lead generation and solutions to support ongoing sales success.

Where we stand out is getting to know your business and tightly aligning with sales to unpack and understand where the key objections to landing sales contracts are creating traps for sales to fall short. Our team is also versed in the Rob Williams, “the SaaS Playbook”; April Dunford’s “the Sales Pitch”; and Steli Efti “Enterprise Sales for Startups” sales approaches. We are also Alexander Osterwalder “Business Canvas/Model and Value Proposition” trained via the Strategyzer method and Blue Ocean strategy. We get sales and are uniquely positioned to align with them.

You can hire a young, freshly out of school marketer to run your digital marketing-but that talent will not be able to sustain your business as you navigate building core strategy for investors, additional funding or to help propel your business to the next level. If you trade the full scope marketing needs of the business for digital quick wins, you will soon discover you have bigger gaps to fill for sales and sustained growth.

A Great Marketing Strategy Considers:
• Current Sales Data
• Current Sales Prospecting/Lead Attribution
• Current Pricing
• Competitive Landscape
• Sales Assets (demos, sales pdfs , pre/post demo follow-up)
• Active Sales-Focused Website
• Market Share
• Marketing Automation
• Sales/Marketing CRM
• Lead Generation
• Understanding Your Value Proposition & How You Differentiate
• Consistent Content Creation for Socials, etc.
• Brand Loyalty
• Brand Building & Reach
• Current Customer Base Satisfaction & Feedback
• SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) Analysis
• ROI of Digital Marketing Invest to Date & Opportunities
• Partner Alignment & Opportunities for Collaboration
• Trade Partnerships & Opportunities
• Alignment with Prospects Throughout the Consideration Set
• Identifying the Right Prospects and Markets to Sell Into
• Alignment with C-Suite KPIs and Metrics
• Aligning Sales with Production to Get Products to Market
• Establishing UAT and Beta Environments to “Test” Features

If your team is struggling to align sales with production, or needs a strong strategy to align marketing for future funding or investment, contact us today.

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Agile Marketing Copycats

“Building and leading an agile marketing organization is not just about changing the way marketing teams are organized. It’s about adopting new principles derived from the agile development methodology. Agile requires education and knowledge to execute. Those of us experienced in it’s application, study the process our entire careers. The cheaters are simply scratching the surface to get on the bandwagon.”

Agile is Becoming the Next “Paradigm”
About 10 years ago I remember the word “paradigm” was the hottest trend in describing change and innovation at the pivotal point of breakthrough. In nearly every conversation, it felt like the word had to be tossed out somewhere. I believe the word “agile” is starting to become the next buzzword. A catch-all generic term used to describe something that is flexible and efficient.

What Agile Really Means
To those of us who are believers in the agile methodology, agile is more than a generic term-it is simply a way of life. The agile methodology was the brainchild of a few software gurus who realized they couldn’t keep innovating when their processes were holding them back and slowing them down. Building software products needed a more flexible and iterative process to keep pace.

Agile was created to shift development from the waterfall approach to something that centered on a minimum viable product. In non-techie speak, it means the most basic of the product that is functioning as expected. By not releasing perfect products, the software industry could instead sell functioning solutions and test them with real users. They could add feature functionality to the core product without slowing down speed-to-market, and it was revolutionary.

Traditional Firms Aren’t Set Up for Agile
The current marketing model is broken. It’s a dinosaur centered on marketing methodologies from the 1960’s. Frankly, it just can’t keep up with how fast business has to move today.

Too many people are still touching and shuffling projects from team-to-team and person-to-person. The industry still uses large creative concepting meetings to create ideas. The approach centers on creativity that recreates the wheel for every new campaign. Firms dictate when projects are delivered and focus on their creative prowess as their key differentiator. The process is expensive, inefficient, and stalls responsiveness. Marketing agencies “definition of done” centers on a creative director–who releases projects when they are perfectly executed from his/her perspective.

A marketing team who has operated in this model is not likely going to be able to adopt the fast-paced philosophy of agile overnight. Agile in this environment would be a complete rewiring of inherited processes that are comfortable and routine. That’s why how-to guides for becoming agile in a few steps are ludicrous.

Those of us who are true agile marketers (note the reference), are students of agile. We are constantly learning, mentoring and training to be thought leaders and disruptors. We are adopters of a brand new way to market. We apply modern approaches that turn the current model upside down. We are an entirely new breed of marketer. One that is technically savvy, quick to respond, and can meet the demands of companies with immediate go-to-market needs.

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About the Author
Carrie Messinger started her first agile marketing team in 2014 and has devoted the last four years to vetting out processes. She established True Agile Marketing to bring agile to the forefront of marketing and disrupt today’s archaic marketing model.