guide to integrated brand marketing part 1...thankfully, omnichannel marketing data management and...

PART I CREATE A PLAN FOR SUCCESS

THE MARKETING LEADER’S GUIDE TO INTEGRATED BRAND MARKETING

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WWW.BECKON.COM [email protected]

CONTENTS

FOLLOW THREE KEYS TO HOLISTIC PLANNING 4

DEFINE AND ALIGN ON METRICS 6

OBTAIN MARKETING INTELLIGENCE TOOLS

REQUIRED TO ENSURE SUCCESS 8

COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE 10

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Great integrated campaigns don’t have time-constrained, geographical or

elemental boundaries. They are as complex as our consumer: creative, powerful,

demanding.

Marketing used to be fairly simple: identify the business challenge, develop a

compelling idea to drive sales, create a beautiful campaign and put it out into

the world through traditional media (TV, OOH, print, radio) and perhaps direct

mail if the database was significant. “Integrated” meant the same creative

campaign idea cut across all channels. After launch, you’d catch your breath

and wait until the sales data rolled in to analyze and measure success. After

analysis, the marketing team would deliver a report and begin to plan the next

seasonal campaign. Looking back, it seemed relatively simple.

Then, the digital world blew up. The mid-2000s were a blur. Consumers flocked

to new social outlets—Myspace, Facebook, YouTube. The online experience

became a series of digital rabbit holes. The world got faster and consumers

savvier. In addition, smart phones provided another outlet for brands to reach

the consumer, changing the way everyone consumed everything. It was as

though, to borrow a term from “antiquity”, the information superhighway

added a fast lane.

Today, we’ve reached a new level of marketing complexity and the landscape

is radically changing every day. Seasonal campaigns have shifted to quarterly

campaigns and, across some channels, monthly and bi-weekly campaigns. A

singular planning cycle is a thing of the past and the modern planning cycle

never ends. But, as marketers, we can’t opt out. It is our job to engage the

consumer and to magically capture mindshare and market share. We do this by

being where consumers are, surprising them at every turn and inviting them to

fall in love with our brands. Again and again and again.

So, where do we start?

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FOLLOW THREE KEYS TO HOLISTIC PLANNING

1. DEFINE OVERARCHING OBJECTIVES.

It starts with perspective and objectivity. We’ve all had successes and failures

that we’ve learned from. As the leader in our marketing organizations, it’s our

job to rise up to the 30,000 foot view and garner learnings and themes that

help inform future plans. We can’t get swallowed whole by the details of each

campaign, but must get the perspective needed to help paint the big picture.

A strong integrated campaign starts with smart annual marketing plans that

are designed to support the overall business objectives. The overarching plan

illustrates how omnichannel marketing will drive business impact. The plan

defines clear objectives that support the top corporate initiatives. Aligning

marketing objectives to corporate initiatives is critical. We need to ask:

• What are we trying to achieve?

• What are the drivers of success?

The plan serves as a North Star. With today’s complex marketing organization,

we may have multiple teams and agencies working together to bring a plan to

life. Brand marketing, retail marketing, digital marketing, brand communication,

consumer engagement, media, creative and digital agencies—it takes a village.

The overarching plan keeps everyone on track and aligned against the big goals.

The plan is then punctuated with seasonal and quarterly campaigns that will

drive unique business units and products across all channels in order to excite

the target segments. Here is where the real complexity begins.

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2. HINDSIGHT WITH YOUR TEAM.

Before we get tangled in a web of tactics, it’s important to critically assess

previous programs—learn from what worked and what didn’t. Collect the

program recaps and historical data from similar efforts, if possible. Gather

the team and have an honest discussion about what program components

were most effective in reaching your consumer and delivering strong metrics.

Break down these previous program components, turn them inside out and

upside down to understand definitively what worked. Then, collectively, draw

implications for the next program and apply the learnings to the development

of the next campaign. It’s important to get everyone on board, to learn from

mistakes and commit to making a stronger campaign.

In our world, we’re moving at lightning speed. The idea of taking time out for a

hindsight meeting may seem like a luxury. After all, the countdown to the next

campaign is haunting you. But, it’s your job to slow everyone down, get off the

merry-go-round for a moment and learn. Get smarter, get better and, in turn,

engage your team in ways that will strengthen their expertise and commitment

to the next campaign.

3. GET PARTNERS ON BOARD.

Cross-functional collaboration and alignment is wildly underrated. As the

leader, you need to get your team engaged and pointed in the right direction,

but equally as important is getting your cross-functional colleagues from

sales, product development, research and finance on board. Many teams look

inward, work together with marketing peers to get to the finish line, but ignore

the external partners that are impacted by the work marketing is putting

into the marketplace. The reason to secure partnerships is twofold: 1) You’ll

likely need data from them to ensure you’re effectively tracking against your

defined metrics (i.e. sales team needs to provide sales figures for time period

of campaign) and 2) It’s nice to have friends. Other functions tend to be wildly

skeptical of the marketing spend. Inviting partners to better understand how

the marketing engine works and how marketing activity drives real business

outcomes will help ease skepticism and get more people on board.

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DEFINE AND ALIGN ON METRICS

So, you have a brilliantly laid out plan with a sharp campaign objective, your

team is chomping at the bit to get going and you’re besties with finance and

marketplace intelligence, now what? Before you begin, define and align around

campaign metrics. As obvious as it seems, so many teams skip this step and

start making work. Everyone is excited to get the new work in front of the

consumer and the clock is ticking. But before everyone begins to scramble,

clear metrics need to be defined. Without them, an entire campaign can

fall flat and you may risk making the same mistakes down the road. With a

strategic approach, you can capture the business impact of everything that

your campaign does, as well as help predict the outcome of specific marketing

decisions. It’s like a crystal ball for marketers.

Here’s where it can be overwhelming. Campaigns are complex—where do you

start? Be thoughtful. Campaign to campaign, not all metrics are created equal.

Consider these questions:

• What are the KPIs that matter?

• What are the indicators of success that let you know you’re meeting your

business objectives?

• Is there a “must hit” sales target that delivers the ROI leadership is looking

for?

• Is brand equity or market share the campaign priority?

• Are you trying to get noticed by a new consumer segment?

• What do you hope to achieve across paid, earned and owned channels?

Start by prioritizing the channels and channel data that matters most. Don’t

try to tackle everything—be realistic. Ensure the data you’re obsessing over

is moving the dial for the business areas that support the primary business

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objectives. And most importantly, don’t forget to define your baseline so you

know what you’re striving to beat. Obtain a clear vision of the historical steady

state—across all channels involved in the campaign—prior to the campaign.

Then, take a look at a “gold standard” historical campaign or competitor

program (although data available may be limited), so you have a frame of

reference for success. Make sure your team is aware of the expectations.

Once you have metrics defined, align with your key partners on those key

metrics for success. Everyone is invested, everyone wants to succeed.

Everyone. If you set out to develop a campaign aimed at increasing your fan

base on Instagram and your sales partners rightfully believe that revenue and

sell-through is the campaign goal, no one will be happy when the results come

in. Get on the same page early on and be sure clear KPIs are your common

language. For more on defining the metrics that matter, see The Integrated

Marketing Analytics Guidebook.

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OBTAIN MARKETING INTELLIGENCE TOOLS REQUIRED TO ENSURE SUCCESS

At the end of the day, a campaign’s success depends on the flawless delivery

of the campaign to the consumer. In the not too distant past, once a campaign

was delivered the team sat back and waited. Did sales go up? Did foot traffic

to the stores increase? Did we receive positive coverage in the media? If you

were at a big brand, you may have had enough budget to do a bit of marketing

mix modeling (MMM) to gauge the effectiveness of the campaign. While they

provided useful information, there is a long time lag to get insight and they

work best for short-term, broad-based, sales-focused programs. The model

doesn’t help capture impact of longer-term activities that help boost brand

equity or help you better understand nuances across regions or demographics.

Additionally, campaign components such as engagement marketing, sports

affinity marketing, social and mobile marketing (to name a few), all vary in

terms of the time-specificity of exposure, so the picture you hope to capture

isn’t complete in a classic mix model.

As campaigns grew to be more complex, so did the data management,

reporting and analysis tools. Marketers know that slow, expensive, infrequent

and high-level analyses aren’t an option. We must have our finger on the pulse

of today’s consumer and need limitless, real-time tools that help us dig deep

into the data across all program components, obsess on the information that

matters most and provide omnichannel analytics. We need ongoing campaign

tracking to ensure the consumer is engaged and coming back for more.

Thankfully, omnichannel marketing data management and intelligence

tools now make integrated analysis possible. User-friendly tools capture

omnichannel data, crunch the numbers (so you don’t have to), and generate

real-time dashboards that tell you what’s happening. A concise, omnichannel

scorecard organized around the consumer’s journey is critical for helping to

both understand and communicate performance of your integrated marketing

plan. It’s the snapshot that makes it all make sense. It’s what the senior leaders

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of your organization want to see. They don’t care about the stack of data that

your team has diligently collected; they want the top line that lets them know

how the campaign is driving business results.

Today’s tools are 20 steps ahead of you, so you can obsess about the business

impact and lead your team to success—not sit behind your desk and crunch

numbers. It is an investment in technology, process and people—an investment

that helps marketing organizations make better decisions that drive the

business forward.

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COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE

From planning to execution, it takes many individuals and teams—both internal

and external—to bring an idea to the marketplace. One of the biggest jobs of

the fearless marketing leader is to ensure lines of communication are open and

information is flowing from team to team, individual to individual. Silos can be

killers of a great campaign. The heads down approach leads to independent

work streams that can drive a wedge between channels. In an instant the

beautiful, integrated campaign plan can break into bits. Don’t let it happen!

From the start, encourage weekly status meetings with your team to ensure

the campaign development is on track and initial objectives don’t waver.

Cross-functional teams need to be in lockstep. A small change to a tactic in

one channel can have massive impact on a tactic in another channel. If you

are using a marketing intelligence platform, log into that each week (your

team and your agency partners both) and have that be the insight “hearth”

that you all sit around and glean stories from. What’s working? What’s not

working? What could we do better? Make a new plan and reconvene next

week to check progress against the new plan. Encourage close partnership and

communication from the beginning and execution through to post-campaign

analysis will be smooth.

Let’s face it, the world of marketing is not slowing down. Every day,

technologies get faster, platforms expand and consumers demand more.

Consumers have the ability to transcend traditional conventions, rules, and

patterns to create meaningful new ideas. We have no choice but to try to keep

ahead. But, before the first creative brief is delivered, gain the perspective,

support and analytical framework required to ensure your campaign’s success.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Karen has over 18 years of experience in marketing strategy, planning,

operations and development for global brands including Converse, Levi

Strauss & Co. and Gap, Inc. She has deep expertise in using marketing

insight to develop growth-focused marketing strategies, consumer-validated

advertising and integrated brand planning. Under her leadership, she and her

team executed some of the most iconic integrated brand campaigns of the last

decade including Levi’s “Style for Every Story”, Docker’s “Wear the Pants”,

and Converse’s ”Shoes Are Boring. Wear Sneakers.”

In 2005, Karen was named by Advertising Age one of the Top 30 Marketers

Under 30. Today, she’s an entrepreneurial marketing consultant and advisor

obsessed with developing the ultimate consumer experience through

innovative marketing mixes that drive demand and create brand advocates.

KAREN RILEY-GRANT

GLOBAL MARKETING

STRATEGIST, BECKON ADVISOR

ABOUT BECKON

To grow your brand, you need integrated, unbiased data and insights you

can trust. You need Beckon, The Source of Truth for Marketing™. Beckon’s

rock-solid data management and real-time marketing intelligence power

better, faster decisions that let you do more with every marketing dollar.

LET’S TALK

Want to learn more? Get in touch at [email protected]—we’d love

to connect.

guide to integrated brand marketing part 1...thankfully, omnichannel marketing data management and...

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