Marketing Transformation

Marketing Diagnostics in the Digital Age

The reality is that most B2B and many B2C companies are increasingly moving to more integrated sales and marketing models. Those that choose to be more focused on that migration, with an active focus on digital and social media engagement, are winning. They are winning because they understand the best practices for journey mapping, marketing score carding, and especially a focus on the world-class enablement of their teams. Digital and social media enables the best brands to integrate content journeys and messaging hierarchies in powerful and effective ways.

Companies, like people, often can tell that something is wrong, but they aren’t sure about the diagnosis. And without a good diagnosis, a business can spend a lot of money trying to cure a disease it doesn’t have – while the disease it does have continues to erode its health.

Our audit and “scorecarding” tools have proved highly effective in identifying hidden problems in communications and marketing, and in paving the way for effective solutions, turning decline or stagnation into growth and profitability.

Here are a few examples of what we’ve accomplished for our clients:

• A tier-two brand in a high-growth technology category wasn’t getting the ROI it needed from its marketing effort. The company initially thought it needed to change its messaging and maybe spend more money. But in just four weeks, an audit of the company’s two recent global initiatives found that the real problem was critical weakness in integration of activities and internal staff planning skills. Instead of wasting millions of dollars on more spend, and on the potentially confusing development of new messaging, the brand has focused more on integration. The result: a significant shift in performance around the volume of activities needed to create demand.

• A Fortune 100 brand with a global services division was unclear about why a new global campaign wasn’t effective either with its sales teams or its customers. A global audit showed the effort was poorly targeted and sales leads were either being ignored or insufficiently pursued. The campaign was revamped based on the findings and as a result saw close rates vastly improved in less than six months.

• A security and storage company was struggling with what appeared to be excessive over investment in product marketing with white papers and a range of content. Using the audit framework, but focusing specifically on content and consideration activities (in an accelerated two-week process) we were able to reduce white paper production by 75% and focus on just four content areas.

We use eight sophisticated testing elements to audit your marketing activity and “scorecard” it against industry best practices for a step-by-step acid test of your initiatives, campaigns and programs. Our partners have conducted more than 50 of these diagnostics in the last five years in ten major technology categories and have created industry norms to make the comparisons practical.

At the end of the process, clients receive specific, actionable recommendations and in-person workshops to focus on effective implementation. What problem can we help you solve?