The Hungarian Marketing Association organizes a multi-day marketing conference every year, now known as the Marketing Summit. This year, the main theme of the event was Marketing IQ. But what is Marketing IQ?
I had the honor of being invited again this year to give the opening plenary presentation, together with my friend István Varga, after our presentation on last year's marketing trends at the 2018 Marketing Summit. But this year, we had to talk not about trends, but about the theme of the conference, Marketing IQ.
„Hmm? Okay. What the hell is marketing IQ and how will I be able to talk about it authentically?”
– that was roughly my first thought. I don't usually take on presentations that I don't feel comfortable with or where I don't define the topic, but István and I concluded that we would shape the topic in our own image. From the first Google searches, it was already clear that the term Marketing IQ doesn't really exist. Therefore, it was important for us that everything we present reflects not only our two ideas but also the stance and opinions of a broader professional community.
Before we started filling the term Marketing IQ with content, we laid down a few things. Let's involve the agency and client side, as well as educational colleagues. A questionnaire should be prepared – we ultimately agreed that we wouldn't test real knowledge, as a whole host of online test sites and several dozen fellow professionals wouldn't be enough for that, but we would create a self-assessment-based test. We won't ask typical exam questions, but leave it to the respondent to evaluate themselves.
A Marketing IQ test is linked at the end of the article, but if you don't have time to read through it, click on the TLDR part HERE!
TLDR (almost as long as War and Peace but I hope it's worth reading 🙂
By outlining different marketing personas, it became clear that there are roughly four types of marketing professionals. There are those who are very familiar with a specific job role, such as creatives, copywriters, and professionals responsible for performance spending. There are T-shaped professionals who are comfortable within a larger domain and excel in one or two specialties within it.
A good example is the online marketing specialist whose strength lies in developing SEO and SEO-based content production strategies.
There are those who are completely full-stack professionals, meaning that no part of marketing is a problem for them: they price, research the market, write text, launch a Facebook campaign, etc... but they don't really have deep knowledge of most specialties. Many such marketers operate in our country in the SME sector, where there is no opportunity to pay a separate specialist for every subfield.
And there are the leaders, the managers, who are best at bringing out the best in their employees and subcontractors, seeing the entire strategy, and providing direction. They are, for example, corporate marketing directors or brand managers working in multinationals.
After defining the marketing personas, it was already clear that the result of Marketing IQ could not be a number without explanation, as behind every marketing persona, there are great professionals, even if they have specialized in „only” one area.
After many hours of planning and discussions, we saw that we could roughly break down the marketing knowledge and toolkit into five areas, based on which we could determine the development opportunities.
Planning marketing activities and strategy
We believe that the foundations of our own knowledge or the basics of corporate marketing are in order. But is this certain? Does your company have a mission, vision, and defined corporate values? Do you have a brand book, a corporate identity manual? No, these are not just the privileges of large companies. These are the strategic foundations necessary for you to develop and grow.
1. Without these, you will be unable to let go of the steering wheel and you will condemn yourself to continuous micromanagement. You will approve everything because you will be dissatisfied with the quality or content of the work done. This happens when the foundations are not laid down.
2. When can you let go of micromanagement? When everyone is moving in the same direction, towards a common goal and along the same values. When the company's core values are defined. When you know where you want to go and how you want to get there. If you have a framework established in a brand book or a corporate identity manual. If you are surrounded by people who can identify with the company's core values. Behold, every workflow accelerates exponentially and improves in quality due to mutual agreement and trust.
3. It is equally important to precisely define (preferably supported by research) the target groups of your business, product, or service, the individual segments 4. customer journey5. -s, their motivations, with a special focus on customer experience research and its development.
6. Marketing innovation
7. Marketing is specifically continuous innovation. If you have seen an episode of Mad Men, you may have gained insight into the golden age of advertising. Slow decision-making, single-person creative gurus with a personality cult, untested campaign slogans, and creatives approved by the client's mother-in-law perfectly illustrate where we started from.
8. However, in the past just over 10 years, everything has turned upside down. 9. A large portion of marketing spending has shifted to the online space, 10. , smartphones have emerged, and Facebook has brought about the golden age of social media. Everything can now be measured from 11. mouse movements a 12. to funnels, 13. everything can be connected to everything, 14. , and for a few dollars, you can already 15. research the market.
16. So much 17. data 18. is continuously accumulating that it is already impossible to process it without technology. In the foreseeable future, DMP and CDP 19. platforms will be part of marketers' standard toolkit, and the platforms and the Account based Marketing gains ground among B2B marketers. The commonality of these tools is that they are all data-driven.
(If I have piqued someone's interest with all the abbreviations, but you haven't yet looked into the difference between CDP and DMP and how they relate to ABM, then read this overview in just one minute:
The DMP (Data Management Platform) is a tool for customer and advertisement segmentation using anonymous data. It can be best utilized when the anonymous data can be supplemented with data purchased from external sources. We pull data from multiple channels into a DMP, then the system „spits out” the target groups and also indicates how to address them, which can then be fed back into various advertising platforms, such as Facebook.
The CDP (Customer Data Platform) operates in a non-anonymous manner, meaning it does not only work with cookie-based identifiers, but primarily works with its own data and builds the database per user. It organizes them into segments, and the use of this data mainly occurs through inbound channels. For example, if someone has visited your website four times and read three articles, then I can address them with deeper content on the same topic. This facilitates later sales.
ABM (Account Based Marketing) is nothing more than automated communication tailored to the customer based on the data from the CDP platform.
Of course, this is just a rough simplification of these services, but I hope the essence is understandable).
A data-driven, business analysis-based, artificial intelligence-based marketing technology era is coming, where using these tools will provide a competitive advantage. Because their reach will be more accurate, they can optimize their spending better, and they can formulate more relevant messages.
Project implementation
The implementation of projects brings up what I mentioned in the introduction. Here, the type of marketing professional you are is significant. This is further nuanced by your work experience: do you work in B2C, B2B, or B2G markets? Do you have experience with double-sided markets? Of course, it also matters what type of marketing tools you are proficient in.
As I mentioned, every role and every type of professional has its place in the market. The key is to know which group you belong to, understand where there is room for growth, and where you want to go.
Wherever you start, try to increase your efficiency. This could be a digital project management software, marketing automation, or involving another subcontractor in the value creation process. It is worth considering the use of these, as they allow you to implement more projects, produce higher quality, target better, or filter out what you need to deal with and what you do not.
Measurements, reports, KPI definition
Measurements, reports, and the definition of KPIs always start with pairing appropriate goals with suitable measurement methodologies. I often see marketers reporting on completely irrelevant things. Everyone tries to mention the largest numbers possible. „Ten million people saw our advertisement on TV” or „The total reach of our Facebook campaigns.” If you see something like this, take a moment to pause and think about how important this is in terms of achieving the ultimate goal. At Codecool programming school we measure all kinds of metrics related to our marketing activities. This includes more than 50 measurement points. Yet, only three things help navigate through this multitude:
The first is defining the most important measurement points. Do we measure the effectiveness of our campaigns, the number of visitors to our website, the conversion rate of applicants broken down by campaigns, etc.? However, the best indicator for us is how many people we have already hired and are waiting to get into the school. If this number is too high, the customer experience will be poor because they will have to wait too long. If the waiting list is too short, we cannot be sure that we are working with appropriate capacity utilization. Therefore, this number shows us whether we need to turn the imaginary knob up or down in our marketing activities. Interestingly, this indicator is not even prepared in the marketing department, but in the admissions team. So if we weren't thinking about what our most important performance indicator is, this would never have emerged as a result among marketing metrics.
The second important help is visualization. Data comes from many sources: Analytics, Hotjar, Mixpanel, Facebook, Adwords, etc. – it's good to see everything in one place. If you have no other option, then import everything into an Excel sheet, but otherwise the Klipfolio or Google Data Studio can also provide great reports if you consolidate the data in one of them.
The third aspect is that while we continuously examine the most important business or marketing metrics, we still need to measure everything! Without this, we will not understand the processes and changes that influence the most important metrics.
Organizational processes and corporate culture
Marketing has been increasingly approaching sales for years, more precisely, it is taking over many roles from sales. It prepares, generates leads, and ranks them, of course, it also sells. We have known this for years. But what is a new process is the convergence of marketing and HR. On one hand, there is a labor shortage in almost every field, and HR professionals can no longer just post a job ad. They need to start dealing with marketing tasks as well. Or vice versa: marketers need to handle HR tasks...
I will mention just a few of the areas that lie at the intersection of marketing and HR: such as employer branding, organizing workshops that establish corporate culture, or measuring employee satisfaction. Marketers have already come up with many things that can now be transferred to HR. Based on customer journey planning, employee journey planning can be done. Instead of a customer experience blueprint, an employee experience blueprint can be designed.
But let's look at a few completely different aspects. By 2030, 75% of employees will come from Generation Z.. Do you know who they are? What do they like, what motivates them, what is their work culture like, what soft skills do they need to have? Or if you belong to this generation, then conversely: there is a lot of knowledge in the generations before you, do you know how to work with them? This is a huge challenge for companies now, to understand how to create a work environment that makes multiple generations and employees with completely different motivations feel good, agree on common workflows, and move in the same direction while considering the company's interests.
But this also includes marketing documentation, which is important from several aspects: on one hand, if someone leaves the company, it is easy to see the workflows they managed. On the other hand, if we do not document, for example, what campaigns we have tested, then after a while we will unnecessarily duplicate previous test results. Thirdly, without documentation, we find it harder to see the connections. Fourthly, documentation helps in automating processes. Automation can greatly increase our efficiency.
These 5 areas define marketing IQ at both organizational and personal levels. The level of marketing IQ is somewhat an indicator of success. To be successful, rethink everything. If nothing else, you need to prepare for change as the only constant thing.
If you are interested after this in how much Marketing IQ- your business has, then click HERE and you can measure where there are still opportunities for development!
