The world has seen incredible change in the past few years. And now, more than ever, marketers can’t rely solely on their gut.
We probably didn’t need to tell you that – because if you’re a marketer for a top-performing organization, the value of data and metrics has been thoroughly instilled by leadership. However, approaches that focus on “improving your CPA” on a certain channel aren’t enough to give you a complete view of the incredibly complex and interconnected world of marketing.
Tracking your progress on various marketing metrics is only one piece of the puzzle. What you really need to know is how an assortment of media buys interact to cumulate into a successful campaign strategy that betters your bottom line. Such complex insights are hard to determine on your own – and that’s where Marketing Evolution comes in.
As an advanced, AI-driven marketing operations platform, Marketing Evolution is designed to fit your team like a well-tailored suit. Once deployed, It learns about your campaign history and your current investments, then outlines a plan to help you accomplish your future goals. However, by definition, you can’t get a perfectly tailored suit right off the rack – it needs to be designed for your unique needs.
That’s exactly what we aim to do during our “crawl, walk, run” process. Since our solution learns from your data and decisions, some calibration is necessary. At the same time, your team will need to familiarize yourself with the potential of this incredibly powerful solution – and that takes time too.
Wait – How Long Does “Crawl, Walk, Run” Take?
How long each phase takes depends on how quickly your team can round up data and start making decisions based on the analysis. Ideally, we can run you through all of these phases in three months. The exact timeframe heavily depends on factors like your data access or your team’s willingness to experiment. We’ll go with your pace.
With that in mind, let’s cover what will happen during each phase of the “crawl, walk, run” process.
Phase 1: Crawl
As soon as you’re prepared to start working with our team, we’ll begin walking you through the “crawl” phase. There are three main components behind this approach:
- We introduce the solution to your team and find key individuals to help carry out the initiative.
- Through experimentation, we learn which marketing tactics resonate with certain target audiences using small budgets and a small sample size.
- We begin to scale our campaigns to larger, high-value audiences.
First, we choose two stakeholders: An executive sponsor, and a cultural champion. The executive sponsor will monitor the solution’s development on a high-level to ensure it’s aligning with your organization’s overall marketing goals. The cultural champion, on the other hand, will work as a liaison between Marketing Evolution and your own marketing team, providing on-the-ground advice to help improve the solution’s analysis while teaching others how the platform works.
We’ll work with your champion to decide which data feeds are the simplest to implement. This often starts with feeds from API-powered channels (like Facebook or Google) but can include data from other media channels (like television) if the media vendor is willing to neatly package their data for analysis.
At this point, the solution will start churning out basic insights and recommendations. However, much of what we find during the crawl phase is what’s not working. For example, perhaps the solution notices that despite spending $5,000 on Facebook ads between 1 pm and 5 pm, you’re not converting a significant number of consumers. Then, it would be up to your executive sponsor and cultural champion to choose whether to continue your investment or try reallocating spend.
Our team is a huge proponent of starting small, so we programmed Marketing Evolution to understand how tiny changes in media spend impact results long-term. So, if you wanted to reinvest just $2,500 of that $5,000 into a later time slot for only one week, the solution would track how that change impacted overall conversions.
After eight to twelve weeks of small-scale experimentation, Marketing Evolution will have more than enough data to make accurate recommendations. And once your team is ready to expand to new audiences across new channels, we’re ready to move onto the next phase.
Phase 2: Walk
The “crawl” phase is all about laying the foundation. And once we’ve created something that we can stand on, we’re ready to enter the “walk” phase. There are three main parts of this phase:
- We work with you to start scaling your analysis to cover every aspect of your marketing plan.
- You’ll be empowered to start making bigger investment decisions with the data you’re given.
- Our team begins to step out of your way and allow you to take a more self-directed approach.
The first part of scaling your analysis involves raising the stakes and getting some more valuable insights. Your team will need to pull and standardize data from channels that require a little more legwork to integrate into a digital marketing platform – like direct mail, email, or your CRM. Eventually, all of your media investments will be integrated into the platform.
This will set the stage for your team to get more granular feedback for a wide range of KPIs, enabling you to dip into capabilities like multi-KPI optimization. Realistically, all that’s left to do is to keep experimenting with the insights from the solution and feed those outcomes back into the solution to further fine-tune its predictive capabilities.
During the “walk” phase, we’ll continue to work with your team to ensure that everything is progressing properly. But otherwise, we’ll start to get out of your way, and act more as an always available resource than as a hands-on guide. And once we’re confident that you can walk without any help, we’ll encourage you to run.
Phase 3: Run
Once we’ve moved into the “run” phase, your team will have all the tools, data, and knowledge necessary to guide your marketing operations. That contributes to the two primary goals of this phase:
- You’ll begin to fully understand who your customers are, how much value they bring, and how to best reach them.
- You’ll get firm insights to help you guide marketing operations without sacrificing your creative direction.
During the run phase, you’ll have access to consumer-level modeling where you can examine and target groups based on gender, income, ethnicity, lifestyle, and other traits. This will allow you to get an in-depth view of who is engaging with your media investments.
In turn, this helps your team understand which types of customers bring in the bulk of the revenue, and which markets have untapped potential. Additionally, you can expand your analysis to new markets – whether that’s a different demographic within your primary market, or a new, secondary market halfway across the world.
Finally, and most important, during the “run” phase you’ll completely understand the ins-and-outs of the platform. You know how to use the platform, and you know where your opportunities for growth are at a glance. Now, you can refine your marketing operations strategy based on the platform’s insights and lean on the solution when you’re allocating time and money to marketing activities.
In the end, this approach will turn Marketing Evolution into a balanced, single source of truth for impartial insights into your overall marketing strategy.
Final Thoughts
A lot is changing about the world as a whole – and when we take a step back and see how these seismic shifts have impacted consumer behavior, it’s no wonder that marketers can’t guess their way into the correct decisions. The time for marketers to rely on their instincts has passed – and now, they need an intelligent, impartial solution like Marketing Evolution to guide their decision-making process.
If you’re ready to learn more about how this solution can transform your approach to marketing operations, sign up for a demo today.
