30 Jun Is Goal & Tactic Misalignment Sabotaging Your Marketing Growth?
Another sleepless night and no amount of caffeine is going to jumpstart you or your stalled marketing growth. You’ve spent a busy-brain night worrying about plateaued profits. Your competitors are plucking up new and talented staff, and worse yet, you discovered one of your best leads signed with your primary competitor. It’s time to get real about what’s sabotaging your marketing efforts and growth.
When I work with clients, I often hear what I call tip-of-the-iceberg comments—you know, the indicators of more foundational issues:
“Our sales department has no clue what’s going on in marketing.”
“I swear, I’m sick of revising everything I get out of the marketing department.”
“Our webinars don’t seem to get real traction.”
“Our niche? We try to cast a wide net and serve everyone.”
“Tracking? I honestly don’t know what’s important and what’s just noise.”
Any one of these comments red flags a need for diving deeper into what’s wrong. Common problems at the root of these comments include a misalignment between tactics and goals, structural causes of content paralysis and campaign failure, not knowing the needs of your target market or how to talk to that audience, and measuring success with tracking and analytics. Self-examination can be a painful process, but you simply must fix these foundational problems to boost profits and grow your marketing share. Not to mention, you’ll get some needed Zs. Let’s get started!
Start by answering these questions:
- Do you have good reasons for each marketing tactic you use?
- Can you draw a straight line between your marketing activities and your big-picture goal?
- Do you “do social” because everyone does?
- Are your sales and marketing teams working toward the same goal?
If you aren’t immediately clear on what your tactics are supposed to accomplish, it’s likely they are out of sync with your objectives, strategy, and goal.
Marketing tactics like email, blog posts, and social media are nothing more than activities that promote your brand, products, and services to a specific target audience. When these activities are carried out without an outcome in mind, you squander time, talent, and money.
Out-of-sync tactics are also an indicator that other critical relationships are misaligned—like sales and marketing. And when sales and marketing aren’t working toward the same goal, expect decreased revenues, longer sales cycles, and low conversion rates.
How to fix tactics and align your efforts:
Review your goal, strategy, and objectives to ensure you’re not wasting money on pointless marketing tactics. But don’t do this all by yourself—include your marketing and sales team stakeholders.
Don’t start with tactics—start at the top.
Revisit what you want your big-picture outcome to be. That’s your goal. And it needs to be a SMART goal; you know, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time specific. Work with your teams to go beyond dreams to something focused, like “This quarter we want to increase our sales revenues by 8% over last quarter.”
Review or redesign your strategy.
Have your teams get real about your plan to achieve an 8% revenue increase. When doing so, make sure…
- everyone in sales and marketing is included in the conversation. This creates buy-in and draws solutions from more than a siloed perspective.
- your company’s positioning and messaging strategy support your goal.
- your long-term strategy is aligned with the actionable steps you’ll need to take.
Prioritize those actionable and measurable steps—they’re in effect your objectives.
Know what you plan to do first, second, and down the road.
Decide on the best marketing tactics for each step.
Keep in mind your top-of-the-funnel tactics should be designed to build a brand awareness that clearly tells your target audience what solutions you provide and—more importantly–how those solutions solve their specific problems better than the competition.
Break down the barriers between marketing and sales.
The above process will help but remember—teams that haven’t played well together in the past will need a clear communications and accountability process. At a minimum, solve the simpler things. Sales wants more specific leads that convert, so have marketing prioritize those leads. Marketing wants to know they’re not sending leads to a black hole, so ensure a method that sales can use to easily report back on lead quality and outcome.
Solve the easy stuff, create the time and opportunity for cross-department communication, and keep everyone’s eye on the big prize.
