The Key to Empowering your Marketing Team

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today I’m going to be talking to you a little bit about what holds marketing teams back from being able to accomplish great things inside of companies, and for external marketing teams that are on an agency or consulting basis, but really oftentimes internally.

So this, I’ve got here my six little friends. This one, this guy is kind of awkward. His back is a little out of whack. But that’s okay. He’s just a stick figure. He’s probably feeling just fine.

The challenge for these guys is that they constantly need their work reviewed. They’re kind of in the weeds, in the trenches doing marketing activities, building content, trying to get that content shared and linked to, trying to earn rankings and traffic, trying to buy advertising, trying to influence the website and the marketing materials, make the conversion rate higher, do all these things to promote the marketing funnel improving. Yet they’re constantly changing course, sometimes daily, sometimes even hourly. Boss comes in, it’s sort of like, “No, no, no, don’t do that anymore. Focus on this thing. No, wait, I know I told you to do that, but we don’t need that anymore. We need this other thing.”

They’re not empowered to make decisions, not even about their own work. They really have to get constantly reviewed. Someone comes and gives them feedback on everything they do. I’ve been this marketer myself before. Especially as a consultant, you’re oftentimes in this position. You don’t have that empowerment to make great decisions.

But there’s a way to fix this, and it’s an architecture I want to share with you that’s been really powerful for me and for a number of other companies that have adopted this and that have shared it too. So the idea is basically that what we want to do is we want to take all the things that the company wants to accomplish today, in the future, in the far, far flung future, and we want to connect that all the way down to what the marketing team is actually working on today, right now. But it takes a little bit of work, and it takes a lot of transparency, and it takes some thinking. If you don’t have this architecture yet, you should give it a try. Let me show you what I’m talking about.

A big company vision is a great starting point. I know many small and medium businesses don’t even really have a great big company vision. But if you can imagine one, if you can put one on there, “We want to be Cleveland, Ohio’s best marketing agency, and we define best as our clients are the happiest, we have the most clients, and we have the highest revenues in the city.” Okay, great, now you’ve got a company vision. Moz’s vision, for example, is to help people do better marketing. Tesla’s vision is to transform how the world is transported. NASA has an organizational vision to explore space. So you can get a company vision.

So let’s say it is, “Help people do better marketing.” From that flows things that you’re going to do over the next few years. It could be five years, it could be just two or three years, but the mission that you have. I’m going to go back to Tesla again because I love Tesla’s five-year mission. Tesla’s five-year mission is to “Power the transformation from gas to electric vehicles and to become the world’s leading car company by doing that.” So become the world’s leading company by powering the transformation from gas to electric.

Okay. Then, based on that mission, that thing that you want to accomplish over the next few years, you have a BHAG. A BHAG is Big Hairy Audacious Goal. I know it sounds a little funny, but this acronym is actually quite important, and so are all the letters in there. Big because you want it to be hard to achieve. My favorite thing that people say about a BHAG is,
“It’s out of reach, but not out of sight.” A goal that is out of reach, I can’t see us accomplishing it today. My God, it’s almost hard to imagine that we accomplished it, but not completely out of sight.

So perhaps Tesla would say that their BHAG is to be the world’s number one auto manufacturer in ten years or in five years. That means that they have to build so many cars and sell so many cars that they are the world’s leading car company through number of cars on the road. For Moz, our BHAG is one million people subscribing to our platform. For your Cleveland, Ohio consulting agency, it might be successfully keeping and maintaining 100 paying customers at $5,000 a month or more for a full year, nonstop. Whatever it is, it has to be definable, easily definable, easily measurable, and powerful, something that people can get behind.

I’ll go back to NASA again. That moon mission that they had, in the 1960s NASA had the moon mission and the BHAG for the moon mission was, “Put a man on the surface of the moon and return him safely to the earth.” Super measurable, super definable, incredibly powerful to get behind. If you’re doing marketing for that, you can see that big vision and that big goal very clearly. Then from there, from these two, I’m going to take our mission and our BHAG, and I’m going to define a list of strategic goals, things we need to accomplish in order to get these things done. But they’re going to be things that we do over the next 6 to 12 months, just 6 to 12 months, just the next little while. This is really powerful because those strategic goals should flow down to everything else that the company does.

So if, for example, I say, “Hey, in order to sell more cars, Tesla needs to open Tesla dealerships in 500 cities over the next 12 months, and here’s the list of cities.” Okay, that’s a strategic goal. Now we’ve got to go get that done. We need to figure out people who know how to open stores and people who know about real estate, and we need to have a bunch of investment dollars that we can put it in these things. We need to figure out how long it is before we open a dealership before that actually turns into sales for us. We need to hire all the salespeople. We need to build a process for that. Huge list of things that come from those, but the strategic goal is very simple. “Open stores in 500 cities.”

At Moz, one of our strategic goals is to increase the retention of our Pro subscribers. Build stuff. Make stuff in the product that makes people want to stick around and use Moz longer. Okay, these are strategic goals.

Then, from there, now we really start to get into the nitty-gritty with the marketing goals being tied to these company goals, and this is such a powerful architecture. It just removes all kinds of barriers, because now I can go and I can build a process like this, right here. So I take a goal that the team is trying to accomplish, and I translate that into what my actual marketing task is around it. Then I have the process and the people that I need for that goal. So actually, I’m going to use my checkboxes that I actually made.

I define my goal, I get the process and people I need, I figure out how we define success, what the measurable elements are. Maybe it’s, “Hey, we need to broaden our brand’s reach.” We want to have more people exposed to the Moz brand, and so therefore, we are going to define a goal as half a million people following our Twitter account and 100,000 people following our Google + account, and maybe a million people following us on Facebook and whatever those things are.

Then you have those metrics-based targets. So those could be website visitor statistics. They could be conversions. It could be an ROI number. It could be a cost number. Many times a strategic goal will be to reduce cost to a certain amount, and then you have these goals. “Hey, we need to reduce customer acquisition costs. We need to find channels that don’t cost as much.” Oftentimes, inbound channels don’t cost as much, things like SEO and email marketing, opt-in email marketing, community building, and content and those kinds of things, that’s a great way to reduce customer acquisition costs. It could be a marketing goal, and you figure out who the process and people are behind that. We may need a writer. We’re going to need someone who is a marketing analyst to do all the statistics work. We’re going to figure out how we measure success. That’s going to be measured through number of people acquired through these lower-cost channels. We’re going to have metrics-based targets. We’re going to say we want to acquire 20% of our customers through non-paid channels by the end of 2013.

Great. Now you have something so amazing. You have marketers that can see the big picture. They can see all the way. They know everything that’s connected here, and that means that they know how their work matters. I can’t tell you what a change in attitude you get when you understand how your work matters versus wondering why you’re pushing buttons. It’s just a remarkable change. Now, those same people can navigate project complexity without needing someone over their shoulder, looking all the time at their work, making sure that they’re doing the right thing, reviewing, because they can see that full connection.

You might have someone who reviews the work at the end of the cycle or is in a project planning meeting with them, maybe a manager or a senior leader or something like that, and that’s fine and that’s a good thing. But you don’t need to be in the weeds with your team anymore, and because they’re empowered, they can choose how they work best, figure out what makes them most effective, and then they can execute on projects.

I urge you to give this a try. It won’t take that long, especially if you’ve got some of these bigger things already defined, and it can really move the needle on how your marketing team works.

All right, everyone. Hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We’ll see you again next week. Take care.