4 Things I've learned from the Army about Marketing Automation
My active days in the military are long gone but still, I can benefit a lot from what I learned in service. Especially if it comes to teamwork and organization in a fighting situation. It might sound a little bit martial at first but be assured: the tactics I will discuss here can safely be applied to your peaceful marketing team.
1. Use Specialists & Teams
Numbers may vary between nations and across time, but a basic infantry squad is consisting of 8-12 people. In my case, it was 10 soldiers. Every single one fulfilled a particular role. The squad leader, the designated marksman, the machine gunners, the anti-tank specialist, and so on. Everyone was trained and equipped to meet his particular role while the whole squad always worked together to leverage the special individual skills by teamwork to fulfill the given tasks. Instead of training every single soldier to do every single job, the principle was to create a team from different roles. Sounds pretty obvious and teams in the business world don't do it differently. But as soon as it comes to digital skills, this seems to be easily forgotten.
When I occasionally browse through job ads, I often come across those positions that are seeking allrounders who can do everything slightly related to the internet. Skills wanted are SEO, SEM, Social Media, HTML, CSS, good writing skills, being experienced in the usage of every online tool ever in existence, and more. All in one person. Because, hey, it is the internet. So basically all of this is the same stuff anyway, right? Wrong.
If you want to do marketing automation correctly, go for the specialists and try to mold them into a squad. Marketing automation covers such a wide field of expertise that it is impossible to find the one unicorn that can do it all. You will need people who are experts in generating traffic the one or the other way. You will need people who know how to design the processes or leverage your data. You will need people who know how to write content. You will need people experienced in creating websites or email templates and you will need designers. Don't go for that one "online marketing dude".
As in combat, where a single specialist is dependent on the cooperation and support of the others in his squad, in automated inbound marketing you can only tackle the complex tasks you need to get done by a team playing together very well.
2. Define your standard situations and practice them
Combat is a lot about not thinking but acting. That's why soldiers are trained over and over to internalize particular routines and standard behavior. Combat is a very complex situation and you can only react as fast as necessary if you act out of instinct. In a squad, you need to rely on your comrade to also know exactly what to do. It is a fragile clockwork of human decision making and the more decisions are predefined and well trained, the quicker you can react.
Marketing automation rarely threatens your life if you execute a task too slowly. But marketing automation is also very dependent on many different and complex processes acting together. In a marketing team, you also want to rely on your colleague doing the right thing. You also need predefined decisions based on experience and best practice to avoid reinventing the wheel every single time and by so wasting a lot of manpower on developing your automation programs and funnels.
It is easy to get lost in the complexity and the endless possibilities marketing automation can give you. So make sure you document all your learnings and translate them into common knowledge for your team. Identify what those learnings mean for every single role and let these experiences improve your processes. Don't forget to train the whole team even when the changes made impact only one member. Everybody must know what everyone else is doing and why. Define those standards and practice them.
3. Gather Intelligence
Maybe the most important factor of combat is intelligence. To know as much as you can about the situation, the enemy, the weather, your fellow troops, and so on. A lot of effort and sacrifice is put into gathering intelligence by the military. This is for a reason.
The same is true for marketing automation. You need to measure important KPIs, you need to bring them together and you need to be able to interpret them the right way. It does not make sense to gather data you never use. Focus on the right data. The one you will base your management decisions on.
4. No plan survives actual combat
As a soldier, you can train as hard as you want and practice every situation until it is wired into your very nerves but as soon as chaos breaks out and the bullets are flying, your plans go AWOL. Your training and your instincts help you not get lost completely. But forget all about your plans.
In a complex system like marketing automation where so many elements need to act together, your initial plans are likely doomed to fail also. Your ads campaign is maybe not generating the traffic you have hoped for, your landing pages are not converting as well as they should, your nurturing program is made out of content nobody cares for, or your sales guys hate the leads you are generating. But don't worry! If you followed learnings 1 and 2, you will have a good team with experienced specialists who know exactly how everything works together and now they will be able to act under fire and take the right micro-decisions to finally lead your strategy to success.
Now it is up to you to form the perfect inbound marketing squad.