The goal is not just to grow, but to grow exponentially while supporting maximum results. Marketers across the country are under tremendous pressure to do more with fewer resources. And all while delivering optimized campaigns that get noticed and achieve the desired outcomes. Scaling up can help you do that, but it also brings its fair share of challenges.
Most notably, as you scale up everything gets inherently more complex. If you don’t take action now, you’ll lose effectiveness and stall progress. So, before you scale up, take time to get lean with these five checkpoints.
According to McKinsey and Company, successful agile transformation can increase customer satisfaction by 10 to 30 points, financial performance by 20 to 30 percent and operational performance by 30 to 50 percent.
Streamline Where Possible
Scaling can be a bit of a double-edged sword, bringing If not done carefully, scaling can make processes more complex. It can put roadblocks up, preventing effective and efficient collaboration. Ultimately, it can slow your team and disrupt smooth operations. That's why it's so important to streamline everything you can before you scale up and incorporate more agility into the mix.
To start, evaluate your processes to determine what can be trimmed. Examine the data to figure out which efforts are creating a positive return on investment and which efforts should be scaled back. If you think you’re ready, make sure you know exactly what makes your brand stand out and the elements that attract new customers while retaining existing customers — that's the foundation that should be a springboard for growth.
Prep Your Team
Is everyone ready and able to cope with an increase in marketing efforts without having it negatively impact their current workload and clients? Having the right people on your side is always paramount, particularly as you start ramping things up. Evaluate everything your team is doing. If you have team members who support other departments too, you may need to streamline their responsibilities or hire new staff to balance out the workload.
Additionally, it's essential to evaluate your team's expertise. Will they be able to successfully launch campaigns in new areas or industries? If not, it might be a good idea to hire additional staff or contract with some experts to fill any talent gaps you may identify.
Delegate Like a Boss
CMO Council and Deloitte released a report revealing the changing role of the CMO. Many tackle revenue generation and growth strategy in addition to brand ambassadorship. Of those surveyed, one in six said that they spent significant time working on business strategy with other leadership executives, something that 66 percent of respondents identified as one of the areas they'd most like to spend their time. Another 58 percent said that they wanted to devote time to innovating and implementing new strategies and products. Instead of being able to do the activities that matter most, more than four in 10 respondents spend most of their days in meetings.
As a leader, you need to reserve your attention for your top priorities, delegating everything else when possible. If you have a solid team behind you, you'll be able to trust that they're making good decisions and executing as instructed. In turn, that frees your time up on innovating and implementing strategies to propel marketing operations forward.
Automate for Improved Agility
At the heart of effective marketing efforts, it all boils down to crafting the right message and getting it to just the right individual at the perfect time. That’s something that gets increasingly difficult to do as you scale your operations and everything gets more complex. As you're launching multiple campaigns, it gets more difficult to keep up with the volume of data needed to get that perfect message out there at the perfect time. Leveraging the power of the right technologies, and incorporating automation into your operations, empowers you to better track and analyze data to get the most out of your efforts.
Embracing automation supports effective scaling. There are also other benefits that make streamlining and incorporating agility a compelling first step. In addition to making scaling more efficient, incorporating more agility into your operations can increase performance across the board. According to McKinsey and Company, successful agile transformation can increase customer satisfaction by 10 to 30 points, financial performance by 20 to 30 percent and operational performance by 30 to 50 percent.
Measure, Measure and Measure Again
Before scaling, you should optimize all your processes and efforts for a smooth path forward. But if you're not measuring your marketing efforts and focusing on metrics, you can't make the right improvements. Be sure to focus on the metrics that deliver actionable data and the user feedback you can leverage to drive your company's growth. Use data and metrics to discover which of your current marketing efforts are creating value. Don't forget to measure campaign results, the effort that goes into those campaigns and advanced metrics like your MQL to SQL ratio, lead conversion rate and unengaged subscribers.