Online marketing: Who needs to be involved in the organization?

Traditional marketing techniques are no longer optimal for business success by themselves

Let’s start out by defining “traditional marketing.”  According to http://www.marketingminefield.co.uk, traditional marketing techniques include:

1. Strategic alliances
2. Direct mail
3. Telemarketing
4. Print advertising (including billboards, postcards, etc)
5. Television advertising
6. Radio advertising
7. Leaflet marketing

Even in recent years marketing departments have added to traditional marketing techniques by getting involved with pay-per-click, banner, and email campaigns, etc. It’s a really good start but more collaboration needs to take place.

The real problem is that organizations have multiple departments that need to collaborate to have effective marketing success. A typical business model includes information technology, communications/public relations, and marketing departments. All of these departments roll up to an executive branch which can also be isolated and distant in understanding how it all ties together in a modern marketing world. Who is responsible for what budget when it comes to online marketing? Does information technology pick up the bill? Communications? What about the Web analytics that’s going to measure the success of the campaigns employed by the marketing department? Who’s paying for that?

There isn’t an easy answer unfortunately. There almost needs to be a new budget put in place that can cross-pollinate between departments for a more seamless collaboration. Maybe “almost” needs to be left out of the last sentence, however, every business has a difference size and organizational flow-chart so what might work for one might not work for the next.

In addition to the sales and marketing departments, Web marketing encapsulates and/or touches the following:  social media, information architecture, content developers, and brand management.

The sales department feels the pulse of the customers whether online or brick-and-mortar. The sales people know what offerings are moving and which ones are not. Sales and marketing have always had a close collaboration but it has to start stretching further than that and include more people in the organization.

The Web is the first point of contact of near 100% of an organization’s offerings to prospective buyers. This applies to all organizations from ones that offer higher education to those offering plasma TVs. Why is that?

People/prospects research what they’re going to buy with the proliferation of the Internet if it’s a “high-consideration” purchase. A high-consideration purchase involves selecting a college or buying a car. It doesn’t include items like mouth-wash and chewing-gum because the investment there is small enough in which it’s easy to recover.

If this is true, and it is, then a wider audience needs to have representation at the traditional marketing and sales strategy planning table:

• Social media experts: Many organizations have grassroots social media strategies right now, being employed by people without it in their job descriptions, because they either can’t afford full-time experts or they’re not convinced of the return-on-investment (ROI).
• Information architects: The people that manage the navigation of the site need to be present to understand the scope of how everything is going to fit together so that they can plan accordingly. Depending on the size of the organization the information architects might also be responsible for performing and analyzing Web usability engineering and analytics/metrics. Whatever the case might be Web usability and analytics personnel need to have a solid understanding of marketing campaigns so that they can plan for possible usability tests for task/persuasion analysis in order to capture the highest conversion rates possible. Perhaps  multivariate or A/B tests need to be planned as well.
• Content developers: The content developers do more than just write compelling text on a Web site. They’re the people that know every nook and cranny of the content and how it all maps together to form the overall message to the prospect.
• Brand manager: The brand manager needs to understand the full scope of the online/traditional marketing strategy so that the organization’s number-one asset is given consideration in how the marketing message is going to be perceived across all fronts.

Everyone listed above needs to have a time-line of planned marketing events so they can plan their respective resources accordingly. It’s only recommended that at least one representative from each category listed above be at the table.  Some organizations could send one manager in place of two or more categories listed above so long as there is solid representation. An argument could also be made that someone from application development needs to be there but it really depends on the complexity of what the marketing team wants to do.

Arguably, it is sometimes hard to draw lines in the sand of where one department’s responsibility ends and another starts within the organization. There is a lot of gray that requires good collaboration among all.

In addition to breaking traditional marketing models, or adding to them (however you like to think about it), the ultimate goal is cost accounting and marketing accountability.

When all of the pieces are tied together it is possible, with the help of a good customer relationship management (CRM) tool like Salesforce.com, important actionable data can start to flow throughout the organization.

When an organization has the right information readily available decisions can be made about the best marketing mix possible. If a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign costs $20,000 and a postcard campaign costs $25,000 we can break-down the cost accounting into marketing-cost-per-sale. If the organization can get 300 new customers from the $20,000 PPC spend and 450 from the postcard spend it can be understood that the marketing-cost-per-sale of each is $20,000/300= $66.67 and $25,000/450= $55.56 respectively.

I greatly simplified the math in the above example but hopefully the point is made. The calculation could further be reconciled with profits and other administrative expenses. Furthermore, the additional people at the marketing strategy table can be better prepared to adapt to offerings that are more profitable for the organization and offer checks-and-balances for marketing strategy accountability.

In return, everyone can be held accountable for improving the conversion rate which will decrease the marketing-cost-per-sale while improving the profit margin.

Ron Scott
Manager of eBusiness Strategy
ronscottjr@gmail.com

Tags: call to action, conversion rate, money, profitability, qualitative data, quantitative data, usability testing, user testing, web analytics