Laying a Marketing Foundation

The use of data is paramount to the success of nearly any business today and should have resounding impact across all divisions and departments, all of which impact marketing spend. From a marketing only perspective, data should assist in driving consumers through each stage of the marketing funnel, or as we call it at our organization, our AER framework. After setting up the basics of the framework, the application of data-driven logic to help decide where to send consumers is the next logical step – or as we refer to it, Aer1.x logic. Finally, once you’re able to implement and leverage if/ then logic, you need to roll out the strategy through all your communications – what we refer to as our Growth Framework.

1)    AER Framework – The Chassis

Pronounced “air”, the AER strategy for our group is a framework we developed to help our group focus our marketing efforts. Often, I am asked whether or not AER is unique to our group or something that I developed out of thin-“air”. Although we developed the framework from scratch for our organization, the concept is hardly new as it’s simply an altered view of the marketing funnel. Our iteration has 8 stages to form the acronym WAAERRRW, W-welcome, A-awareness, A-acquisition, E-engagement, R-redemption, R-retention, R-referral, W-winback). Taking this a step further, the true purpose of AER is to develop data fueled strategies for each program, partner, or product. This includes building segmentations and targeting based on member data insights for each partner and service. In turn, this leads to personalized communications, behaviors, and experience. Finally, we can’t lose sight of what is good for the business. Some members may be a positive margin to our business while others may be negative to our bottom line. Because our organization includes points and cashback incentives, AER also focuses on insights and modeling dedicated to turning negative margin behaviors into positive margin behaviors.

 2)    Aer1.x – The Transmission

We decided to evolve AER to incorporate greater persona and value-driver insights to improve precision in our targeting and communications approach. Part of the reason we did this was to achieve deeper personalization in our communications, doing so by continuously sub-segmenting our audience to extract more specific insights. The new approach was simple and helped us accomplish a few things:

• Greater resonance with members through higher quality, more relevant content

• Better identify members who drive the greatest value to our business

• Better activate and engage with our existing member base

• Increase exposure throughout all of the elements of our existing AER framework beyond just awareness, acquisition, and engagement.

3)    Growth (Comms) Framework – The Engine

After reaching a point that saw us utilizing a customized marketing framework (AER), and injecting data-driven logic (Aer1.x), we created a Growth Framework to allow further customization and personalization across all organization communications and channels. The Growth Framework combines the data logic that had been applied to our AER framework, but now applied to the broader ecosystem of all our products (apps), programs, partners, and services, with accounts for what medium to communicate with a consumer on (email vs. mobile push vs. SMS vs. personal outreach, etc.), and data-driven logic from our Aer1.x development.

Each of these initiatives are heavily connected and each grounded by use of data. The data flows through our business intelligence unit that oversees our analytics, reporting, forecasting, modeling, data visualization, and empirical research. Their data-driven research and analysis fuels the frameworks above and is the backbone behind the actions for the marketing strategy and growth divisions. Data keeps our marketing design moving forward with a consistent feedback loop that optimizes our results.

-Alex

The (formerly) Dreaded First 90 day Question

A question often asked of candidates is what they would seek to accomplish in the first 90 days of a new role, and how they’ll define success at the 12-24 months mark.

My approach to starting anything new, whether a project or new responsibility, is to quickly take a step back and learn as much about a current environment or landscape before acting. This involves conversations with key stakeholders, asking lots of questions, and a great deal of research and study of internal and external practices and forces. Here are several of my major goals for the first 90 days:

Days 0-30

1)    Understand business processes and how parts function together

a.    Create a process flow diagram for the organization

b.    Understand the brand & conduct personal brand audit

c.     Who is the consumer base, breakdown of digital vs. non-digital

d.    Identify efficiencies

2)    Understand needs of other departments

3)    SWOT analysis – what’s working and what’s not

a.    What are the major issues?

4)    Survey current marketing landscape and marketing mix

a.    Owned vs. Investment, Core vs. Amplification

b.    Automation abilities // comms & growth framework

5)    Understand current business intelligence practices

a.    Strategy & Research

b.    Data, Analytics, & Reporting

Days 30-60

6)    Solid understanding of the industry, the company, and competitive landscape

7)    Identify gaps in the marketing flow, prioritize, and start addressing them

a.    Marketing Mix

b.    AER framework application

c.     Acquisition & Engagement Loops

d.    Bottoms-up plan

e.    Business Intel

i.    Build automation

ii.    Build data foundation that informs strategy

iii.    Growth and persona opportunities

iv.    Setup empirical/ quant/ qual research

Days 60-90

8)    Assess/ build team

a.    Determine needs

b.    Hire quickly if needed

9)    Start meeting the goals that have been put into action

a.    Marketing Mix

b.    Bottoms-up plan

c.     Business intel

10)  Adjust actions items

a.    Marketing Mix

b.    Bottoms-up plan

c.     Business intel

Defining Success at 12-24 months.

At the 12-24 month mark there is a multitude of elements and indicators that should have gone into play in the initial year.  However, many of these elements are ever evolving and are moving targets. Here are a few of the elements and indicators that I have used in the past. 

Has the team adjusted to their roles and are they functional experts and mentors in their domains to the rest of the organization? It’s one thing for an individual to come into a role and provide value and feel comfortable with both the business and surrounding environment. It’s another when those individuals become curious teachers and mentors. I push my teams to be curious, to never stop learning, and to never stop teaching one another. This makes for stronger teams, better people, and long-term loyalty to organizations.

Have we identified bottlenecks and inefficiencies, and more importantly, what have we done about them? One of my mantras is for our team to question everything. If I develop an idea I expect to be pushed on my reasoning, and expect they’ll be ready when I push them on theirs. I encourage the team to take this line of thinking outside of our group as well. The advantage of this way of thinking is that it forces people to think through ideas and initiatives in greater detail, and leads to great collaboration and comradery. This method has helped my groups identify and take meaningful action on a number of bottlenecks to help create greater efficiencies – from organizational flow, to user experiences, to reporting, and to clearer marketing campaigns.

Have we gotten smarter and do we understand variable mixes and the predictability of how they influence one another? It’s a process with no end as there is always a new way to grow or leverage data. However, success should be measured on having become smarter and setting up foundational practices that allow us to continue to grow and learn about both our business and about our consumers. Part of this should be our ability to predict how changing certain marketing variables impacts sales and revenue.

 A simple example is understanding the CPAs of each individual channel – if I pour marketing dollars into social retargeting ads, I should have an estimate of cost of that acquisition channel, but should also be cognizant if I’m working with a channel of diminishing returns (I can only retarget people that have shown interest, so as I convert individuals form this pool, CPA would be expected to rise in time and be finite in respect to its exponential growth capabilities).

A slightly more complex example may involve additional layers of the marketing mix. I served you a banner ad that made you aware of our brand. I continue to serve you banner ads to build awareness and recall and eventually you come across an influencer you follow that talks about my organization which then leads you to visit my website where I collect additional information from you. Over the course of the next several weeks I’m able to serve you an email, targeted social ads, and a follow-up phone call to get you to come in-store. After several visits and interactions with staff you make a purchase. Each of these channels deserves credit/ attribution for the end purchase. This “slightly more complex example” within itself is not overly complex, but this is the extent of complexity that most marketers will come across. This is shocking as there are additional marketing layers that, when addressed, separate good organizations from great ones.

A complex example. Consider for a moment if the influencer you followed hadn’t been involved in the above marketing mix, and as a result your interest in my brand didn’t spike, leading you not to visit my site, and subsequently never making a purchase. The point is that the order and the mix in which marketing channels are deployed and hit individuals are important, but few marketers focus on the individual components and variables within the mix. Marketers may understand this conceptually, but putting this into action IS HARD. Additionally, everyone is different – the marketing mix that gets you to convert is different than the mix that gets me to convert. Studying behavior and trends based on what data you can collect from an individual is paramount to help one make inferences to help increase downstream conversion. Getting to a point where we’re collecting and identifying the data and trends that matter to this type of predictability is an important factor in being successful and moving in the right direction.

Have we identified the bottlenecks throughout the marketing funnel, have we decreased pain points and increased overall conversion percentages? Furthermore, do we understand why individuals are stalled in various portions of the marketing funnel? Knowing what variables we control and can manipulate (user experience, look & feel, interactions, etc.) and calibrating them such that we reduce pain points and increase conversion will be a strong indicator of success and moving in the right direction.

Has the database and market share increased? Ultimately one of the most important indicators for success will be increasing the database size, and continuing to carve out and increase market share.

How automated and turnkey are our processes now? Marketing campaigns can either be fun and impactful, or a drain on time and resources. Another indicator of success will be how turnkey and automated our practices have become (at least the ones that are able to be automated). Understanding how data informs strategy and how strategy gets executed efficiently (i.e. automation) should be a top priority and factor in evaluating success – make your life easy where you can.

Have we successfully built acquisition and engagement loops? Acquisition and engagement loops are processes that help organizations gain greater scale. For example, say the goal of a campaign is to grow a subscriber base to your organization’s email database. And let’s say one of the calls to action is to import their contact lists to be sent sign-up messaging. If 100 users sign up, on average ~30% will import their contacts (30 people). Of those 30, there is on average a 10X of the number of people who will receive a sign-up message (300 people). Of those 300, on average 40% will click the link (120 people), and 50% of those will sign up (60 additional sign-ups). In the end, creating an acquisition loop like this (if done correctly), should help grow 100 user sign-ups into ~166. These are easy wins that I think need to be set-up as part of the definition of overall success 12-24 months into the role.

Simply put, is marketing paying for itself? This will be a major measurement of true success. More specifically, will incremental revenue outweigh the costs of deployment and SG&A?

-Alex

The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray

Our organization has a multitude of business components – a premier partner business with major brands, an affiliate partner business, a series of mobile apps, products and services, a card-link program to earn points, and our own MasterCard credit card. Individuals who participate in our partner businesses earn points with us once they register to be part of the program. 

Earlier this year, we decided that we wanted to make a large and concentrated effort to increase the number of participants of one of our premier partner businesses in a very large urban market.  An acquisition for our group is relatively simple and straightforward. As long as someone has both an account with our premier partner and an account with us, they earn points that can be used to purchase items on our platform. 

The plan for increasing this particular urban market involved a large, intricately layered, multi-channel approach to be launched around a major holiday. A local activation plan involved “hiding” over a thousand branded wallets around the urban area, each containing real dollar bills along with information on our partnering program and the specific premier partnership in order to drive buzz and create viral and organic content. This effort was to be supported through additional investment in professional influencer marketing to help get the word out and generate more buzz. Additionally, internal channel support through geo-targeted emails, mobile push notifications, and SMS messaging, in addition to social posts that were both from our organic channels and paid social, were also part of the plan. 

The strategy made sense, and it was backed by multiple reports and data sources that made both the timing and investment an easy sell. However, the handoff between strategy and implementation turned out to be nearly disastrous.

Despite months of planning, the timing of the initiation of the various campaign components was misaligned. The emails, mobile push, and SMS campaigns making the urban residents, who were the targets of the campaign, aware of the wallet campaign was scheduled to deploy 10 days before the wallets were “hidden.” Instead, they deployed a day after the campaign was already underway and wallets were already “hidden”, though residents had no idea they were out and around the city to be “discovered” by them. 

The timing error was due to too many cooks in the kitchen. Although this campaign was specific to a single premier partner, numerous teams representing other partners became involved. The result of the involvement of numerous teams slowed down the entire process as the original message was altered and added to and then passed to other teams to respond to one another. Each additional group wanted to add more verbiage and explanations to introduce other products and services that it was interested in marketing. By the time the messages went out to highlight the one specific partnership of the original strategy, other partner and product messaging had also found their way in, deemphasizing and convoluting the original message, making it overly complex and hard to follow. The original, simple focus on one partner morphed into a message that was long and unclear. It made for a bad consumer experience, and potentially hurt our ability to reuse some of our influencers in the future since it’s in their best interest to avoid serving their followers long and difficult messaging. 

To make matters worse -- although unrelated to the multitude of teams needing to be involved in campaign creation -- multiple different technical and analytics teams were involved in the most important aspects of the campaign – tracking and reporting on results and impact. Similar to the campaign creation process, the technical and analytics teams were unable to properly work together and resolve differences. Instead of producing immediate insights into the campaign, allowing us to immediately respond, results were not available until a week after the campaign went live.

There were many lessons learned from this campaign. First, a breakdown at one point can lead to failure in multiple areas. Second, the addition of too many teams or groups to a project can hamper a project or task in a multitude of ways, even if given the extraordinary amount of lead-time this campaign was given. And third, the ability to be agile, especially with campaigns that involve several moving parts and require a particular order and sequence of how components need to be executed, cannot be overstated. Problems will arise, but those that can be agile will typically be better positioned to deal with issues and still find ways to be successful.

Still, the campaign wasn’t a total disaster and we were able to salvage some of it. We were eventually able to extrapolate lift within the region and cross reference that lift with the timing of other campaigns. We were also subsequently able to correct the messaging on follow-up campaigns and compare the lift we witnessed between the longer non-ideal campaign vs. the better calibrated and ideal messaging campaigns. This analysis showed aspects of success and helped us understand what elements had a significant impact on user acquisition, and how to better calibrate campaigns in the area moving forward.

-Alex

A Note on Delivering Hard News and Moving Forward

A few thoughts on delivering hard news or having to let someone go.

• When delivering hard news, be both respectful of the individual and honest. I’m a huge proponent of clear communication, even if that feels like the more difficult route. You show respect for the person you’re engaging with and I think they end up respecting you more for doing it that way.

• It’s easy to mope and be down, but you still have to lead and move forward – God only knows how sad and heart-broken I am inside, but as a leader you need to keep moving forward for the team still around you, and you need to rally the troops and continue to march forward.

• Be honest and make time for those still with you. Survivor guilt is a very real thing. You should allow your team a forum or opportunity to talk about how they’re feeling and address it. That said, the team that’s still here has a large amount of responsibility and tremendous opportunity in front of it. They’re important and they need you to tell them that so they know it. 

Delivering hard or bad news is never fun. Respect those around you by being honest and as communicative as possible. You’ll get through it, so will they.

-Alex

What's For Breakfast?

Priorities. Determining and communicating what they are from the top down is critical to success. I know this sounds obvious, but having the right priorities and aligned priorities is often more difficult in practice.  And when they don’t align properly it’s akin to figuring out what’s for breakfast on the Titanic when there are bigger things that need to be addressed.

-Alex

1 Year In Somewhere New - Acceleration of Learning and Building Galore

I can’t believe it’s been a year at my "new" job already. It feels like I just left Monumental Sports a few weeks ago – wow how time flies. Incredible to think how much has happened over the last 12 months or so. Holy moly, the Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup -- thrilled for the organization and my friends still at the organization. Beyond that, at my “new” jobI have been pushed harder and further than I thought possible. With that, I feel fortunate to have learned and developed at a rate I did not think possible. Part of this is due to an incredible amount of responsibility and oversight, part of this is due to the opportunity to build an entire department from scratch, and part of this is due to the pace in which our group has been forced to iterate and develop strategies that are both adaptive and agile to the business environment around us.

Some notable highlights:

• Built a full stack marketing strategy team from scratch

• Capitals win Stanley Cup

• Pioneered a marketing strategy framework - AER

• Developed machine learning marketing automation programming – AER 1.X

• Hitting over 100k partner connections for a single partner in less than 6months and obliterating our 2-year goal

-Alex

1 Year Out of Sports... My Reflection Back

A year ago today I put in my 2-weeks’ notice at Monumental Sports. It wasn’t an easy decision to make, and I wondered greatly whether or not I was making 1) the right decision, and 2) how I would feel leaving the sports industry.

To the first point, hands-down the right decision, no doubt about it. The opportunity to challenge myself and grow at my current organization is unparalleled. From pioneering marketing frameworks to building three separate divisions from scratch with some of the best talent I have ever had the good fortune to be around, has been incredible.

To the second point, do I miss working in sport? The answer is somewhat more complicated. Would I work in sport again? Absolutely. There are certain aspects I miss – the comradery, sexiness to the product you were marketing and working for, the behind-the-scenes access, and all working towards winning a championship together. There are other aspects I don’t. Salary was horrific, and I mean horrific compared to what the open market would pay, the talent was at times hit-or-miss, and the politics of what is still, in areas, an old boys club.

Again, I would certainly be open to jumping back into sports at some point down the road if the opportunity was right, but I must admit I am surprised that I don’t miss the industry more. I feel fortunate in many respects to have come out of it, as I’ve been exposed to a much broader landscape of opportunities, opportunities which I now find just as exciting and “sexy” as working in sports.

I still have many moments of missing aspects of having worked at a sports team, but also feel incredibly fortunate to have been given an opportunity to broaden my horizon and skillset.

-Alex

Spotlight- AER Strategy, Building Our Marketing Strategy Foundation

Pronounced “air”, the AER strategy for our group is a framework to help our group focus our marketing efforts. Often I am asked whether or not AER is unique to our group or something that I developed out of thin-“air”. I developed the framework from scratch for our organization, but the concept is hardly new as it’s simply an altered view of the marketing funnel. Here is what it all stands for and means:

A - awareness

A - acquisition

E - engagement

R - redemption

R - retention

R – referral

Taking this a step further, the true purpose of AER is to develop data fueled strategies for each program, partner, or product. This includes building segmentations and targeting based on member data insights for each partner and service. In turn, this leads to personalized communications, behaviors, and experience. Finally, we can’t lose sight of what is good for the business. Some members may be a positive margin to our business while others may be negative to our bottom line. Because our organization includes points and cashback incentives, AER also focuses on insights and modeling dedicated to turning negative margin behaviors into positive margin behaviors – more on this in a moment.

AAERRR Funnel: Awareness, Acquisition, Engagement, Retention, Redemption, Referral

Let’s talk about the divide halfway through at the engagement step. A moment ago I pointed out that the framework accounts what is good for the business and focuses on turning negative margin behaviors into positive margin behaviors. This tactic starts at the engagement stage, because this marks the point in which a member is fully considered to be part of our ecosystem, and whose actions from this point moving forward will determine whether they are good or harmful to the bottom line of the business (positive or negative margin as a result of our organizations ecosystem being partially based on points and cashback discounts/ incentives). The behavior throughout the next three stages, Engagement, Redemption, Retention, are marketing funnel stages that require different tactics depending on how the member impacts the business.

In a nutshell, we take persona level data on our positive margin members and create look-alike models that feed back into our awareness and acquisition funnel stages. As for our negative margin members, the strategy is to break away from our core marketing practices and target to change the fundamental behavior and actions of our members through the methods in which we communicate with them and incentivize them to take actions that are believed to turn negative margin-based behavior into positive based behavior.

Finally the framework reconvenes at the final R – referral. Studies, as well as our internal data, show that a referral from a friend or colleague is nearly 5X more likely to connect and engage within our ecosystem.

The Activation & Growth team is developing holistic cross-channel campaigns supported by data and behavioral insights across the entire ecosystem inclusive of partner, product, and services. It is the team’s responsibility to survey the landscape and develop horizontally designed strategies that sit across each partner/ product/ service vertical. (i.e. understand how all the pieces fit together). Using the comprehensive strategy framework we designed specific to our team, called the AAERRR (“air”) strategy. AAERRR helps strategy teams understand where in a fluid-based lifecycle a member is in relation to a specific partner or service (awareness, acquisition, engagement, retention, redemption, and referral).  From a health-of-business perspective, AAERRR separates what attributes facilitate a positive vs. negative margin member in relation to each of these touchpoints (A-A-E-R-R-R). In action, we leverage this data for targeting to not only keep positive margin members positive, but also to change the behavior of negative margin members so that they ultimately become positive margin to the business. The last piece is utilizing a positive margin look-alike model to then use for acquisition targeting. This strategy is being created out as the foundation to each and every one of our products, partners, and services. This creates custom targeting and insights based on member behavior and engagement.

This is an incredibly detailed and complex matrix of data. Not only do we look at each member in relation to each stage they engage with, we also use cross program data to build out theories and messaging to create more retention and in turn higher MNOPs. Our ecosystem is unique in that it isn’t a single “brand”. We have the ability to gather data insights from our partners, build daily journeys for our members, and impact behavior changes. The Activation & Growth team looks beyond just acquisition, as our strategies allow us to view the ecosystem holistically, end to end, across an entire lifetime of a member and how we can earn that member’s trust and affinity to become a brand ambassador and utilize referral to then grow our brand. This is the 1:1:many halo effect central to other leading strategy departments at organizations such as Google and Facebook.

Beyond the strategy itself, AAERRR impacts other major components central to the Activation & Growth team, and SYW strategy at large. One of the biggest pieces that gets developed based on this strategy is our comprehensive “bottoms up” plans. These plans create the week over week campaign and omni channel plan to hit our goals, stay in budget, and grow ROI. We develop a plan around internal vs. external marketing channels and integration into our organization as a whole. We can forecast investment, acquisition, and build out CPAs. As part of this foundational strategy to our marketing, our growth team acts as the innovative arm of our group to enhance every touchpoint. The growth team develops gamification, community activation, local activation, influencer & networks, and behavioral economic strategies to externalize and amplify our communications and marketing messaging.

Finally, everything we design, create and externalize is backed by our Strategy & Research division. This team develops the data insights and visualizations that give us the full backing to understand how to develop our strategy, test our strategy, and optimize campaigns. We rely on them to provide full insights and theories as to what results are and why they happened, so that the rest of the activation team can then utilize those insights in the next iteration of their strategy.

The AAERRR strategy is our foundation to grow a successful and sustainable business. We use a complex matrix of data to understand our members and customize their experience. It is the A&G team’s goal to give our members a seamless personalized experience every day, to grow affinity, engagement, and MNOP across our team as a whole and across all the individual programs, products, and services.

Some final thoughts. The reality of our AER framework is that it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Ultimately we need to build a strong foundation to our data and marketing practices, and this is where we need to start – get really good at this, and add additional layers of insights, automation, forecasting, and modeling into the equation to build a better member experience that provides both value to them and to the business. 

Today we’ve built AER version 1.0. Tomorrow we’ll look to build AER version 1.X – more on this once we get there.

-Alex

You Control Your Attitude and Spirit - Set Example and Tone for Others

There are a lot of things that are out of our control in any given day. That said, you control your attitude and your spirit. There will be things that test these along the way, but as a leader, you must keep in mind that you set both an example and tone for those around you.

-Alex

Spotlight- Digital Communities (A Growth Division sub-department)

So let’s start with a couple questions for this one.

What is a community and how do we define it?

Simply put, it’s a group of people who communicate, share ideas, and develop relationships around a common interest.

What’s the difference between an online community and a social network?

Online Community:

• Members usually do not know each other in “real life”

• Most communication is based around a common interest or characteristic (fitness, cooking, sports, etc.)

• “Nested structure” with sub-communities, threads, etc.

• Social Network:

• Formed around pre-existing interpersonal relationships (family, friends, coworkers)

• Interaction is much more diverse, not always based on commonalities

• “Webbed structure” where each person has their own social network that can overlap someone else’s (i.e. mutual friends/followers)

Following so far?

Sitting under our Growth Division, our digital community’s department focuses on the communities already within our organization’s ecosystem. These are individuals who communicate, share ideas and build relationships around a common interest. For example, we have millions of members who belong to our DIY (do-it yourselfers) digital community, who share tips and ideas on a variety of home improvement and building projects.

The objective for our digital community department is to grow and sustain these integrative communities that provide a unique and inclusive member experience, encourage participation, and ultimately build brand identity, loyalty, and advocacy for our programs, products, services, and affiliates.

Our goal is to give members a way to communicate and build relationships across our ecosystem in a more conversational environment. Aggregate consumer feedback and insights. Create a sense of belonging for members, resulting in stronger brand awareness and advocacy. Provide a place to integrate partner programs, journeys, and other ecosystem related entities to unique target audiences.

So what does our digital community group focus on day-to-day?

• “Seed” communities by posting relevant content

• Engage with active members to encourage discussion

• Community moderation – make sure everyone follows the rules

• Track community trends and sentiment

• Increase awareness, participation and loyalty

-Alex

Forget the Raft, I'm on a Boat in the Middle of an Ocean

If you read my earlier post on what it was like to come into my new role, I suggested it was similar to being a raft captain who had been thrown overboard in the middle of a rapid, only to then climb back in the front of the raft in the middle of pure chaos

I’ve been thinking a lot about this and now I’m not sure the analogy still holds water (see what I did there 😉 ). Safe to say I’m at a point where I feel like I’ve made it to the back where I could captain us out of immediate danger. However, now I’m left facing a totally different boat related problem analogy. Okay, hang with me here …

You’re on a boat. A big one this time, and you’re the Captain in charge of all crew and operations aboard. You’re in the middle of the ocean. Still with me? Okay cool, here’s the deal. Your rudder is out. To make matters worse, your engines are out too. You’re in trouble, but that’s not the worse part. You guessed it, there’s a hole in bottom of ship and you’re taking on water… but here’s the kicker, you’re a good captain and you’re not going to bail on your ship because you like a challenge (remember, you like challenges!) and this is what you signed-up for.

Alright Captain, what’s the play here?

Okay, enough fun with weird analogies, although I have used this exact one with my team at work to put some things in perspective. I’m not quite the Captain of the boat per-say, but call me the guy who’s in charge of getting the engines back up and running. The rudder is our analytics and insights teams across the organization, and the product experience (our various apps, partner experiences, etc.) is the hole in the boat. In order for us to make it out (and turn this company around successfully), we’re going to need to believe in the product team fixing the hole, and the analytics team getting the rudder going (get it? insights lead you in the direction that’ll make you successful… like a rudder… never mind). And that leaves us as a marketing department to get the engines up and running (i.e. what is going to get us moving and moving fast once we know the direction and have something that works).

So here we are, May 24, 2018, in the middle of fighting the good fight and getting internal portions of the organization aligned and running properly. It’s an exciting time to be here, and I look forward to continually turning on portions of the marketing engine more and more as time goes by.

Oh Captain, My Captain!

-Alex

Spotlight- Influencer & Networks Marketing (A Growth Division sub-department)

Nestled under our Growth Division, our influencer & networks department focuses on the concept of 1:1:Many (one to one to many). Most know this as social media influencers who have established credibility and authenticity with their following that allows them to influence or persuade their following to change a type of behavior. But allow me to explain a bit further. If I send you a marketing email, that is a form of 1:1 communication – one marketing message targeted to and hitting the inbox of a single individual. But how do I get either that single individual, or anyone for that matter, to take my marketing message and tell their friends, family, network, etc., about it? That effectively would be going from 1:1:Many – or the crux of what we’re after in marketing amplification and marketing performance tactics.

The objectives of our influencer & networks department is to effectively reach a desired target market, to build a greater sense of credibility and trust within the industry, and to strengthen brand awareness.

Our goal is to strengthen and amplify our brand within the social media marketplace through impactful influencer campaigns and collaborations with our highest valued members to successfully establish top-of-mind awareness and strong member loyalty within our organization’s ecosystem.

-Alex

Spotlight- Local Activations (A Growth Division sub-department)

Local activations, positioned within our Growth Division, are our in-market physical footprint/ presence at events at national, regional, and local levels. They incorporate what many refer to as grass roots marketing initiatives and tactics. This type of marketing focuses on providing sensory and emotional values to the consumers and aims to create synergies among meaning, perception, consumption and brand loyalty.

The objective is to curate impactful and content-rich experiences that are related to our story, not only to draw audiences in, but to also facilitate a more meaningful connections with our members, to our products, services, affiliates and partnerships that will go well beyond a promotional period. The goal is to execute hyper-targeted programming to increase Familiarity, Acquisition, Purchase Intent, Overall Impression, Advocacy, and Return Purchasing.

-Alex

Spotlight- Business Intelligence Division

The third division of our group is our Business Intelligence division, which includes all of our analytics, reporting, forecasting, modeling, data visualization, and empirical research. Their data-driven research and analysis fuels the marketing strategy team and is the backbone behind the actions for the Activation & Growth team. Data keeps our marketing design moving forward with a consistent feedback loop that optimizes our results.

Our data analysis efforts cover our reporting, forecasting and modeling efforts – breaking down trends, insights, and impact of member behavior on AAERRR strategy (more on what this later, but for now think of it as our core marketing framework in which we operate and design strategy). Our data visualization efforts provide interactive data storytelling around member research and campaign performance. Finally, our member research efforts focus on queries and pulls member behavior and demographic insights on members acquired through each channel and campaign.

-Alex

Spotlight- Growth Strategy Division

Our Growth Division is the “amplifier” of our core Activation Strategy. By extending our marketing communications to on-the ground experiences, education and sharing across community networks, and building relationships with influencers, we create a true multi-touch approach that reinforces our message and builds affinity and unity across our member base.

The core strategic components of the growth group are Social Media, Local Activations, Gamification, Digital Communities, Influencer & Networks.

• Social Media: Engage with our members on the platforms they utilize most with unique and impactful content

• Local Activation: Curate impactful experiences to facilitate a meaningful connection with our members

• Gamification: Challenge our members to develop habits leading to brand affinity, loyalty and desired actions

• Digital Communities: Grow and sustain interactive communities that provide a unique and inclusive member experience

• Influencer & Networks: Strengthen and amplify our organization within the social media marketplace through impactful influencer campaigns

-Alex

GSD Team

GSD, or as we refer to it around the office, the Get S*** Done team. The idea is to empower a group of individuals to operate nimbly in an environment that might not ordinarily lend itself to nimbleness. The idea behind creating or referring to a group as such is to push and empower individuals to move faster and more efficiently in accomplishing tasks or certain projects. This may mean breaking rules or breaking processes from time to time.

-Alex

Spotlight- Activation Strategy (i.e. Marketing Strategy) Division

The Activation group is the core marketing strategy group for my department and its partners, programs, and services. Using data as its backbone and the Growth team as its amplifier, we have developed a marketing design that is strategic, integrated across the organization, omni-channel, and hyper targeted and personalized for our members.

The core strategic components of the activation group are the AER framework, Data & Insights, Targeting, Personalized Messaging, and optimizing the Channel Mix.

• AER Framework: Marketing strategies for each stage of a member’s journey

• Data & Insights: The backbone to all decisions. Data develops targeting models and data feedback loops to develop insights

• Targeting: Focus on segmentation and personas for programs

• Personalized Messaging: Personalized messaging based on behaviors, actions, and engagement

• Channel Mix: Hitting the right people, at the right time, on the right medium

-Alex

Teaching Communication Between Divisions and Groups

Communication is a funny thing. It sounds easy in practice but usually ends up being much more difficult to effectively execute. I’ve gone about solving it in a number of different ways depending on the situation at hand – whether it be between colleagues, direct reports, indirect reports, etc. However, one universal truth I know is that it has to start from the top down – whether that’s you with your own team or from your own leadership. I suppose, In some ways, this is akin to leading by example.

Okay, so that sounds simple enough -- make sure as a leader that you are communicating effectively up, down, to the left, to the right, and any other direction between. But we know that it isn’t that simple. I bet that if you were to ask most people about their communication habits, they would say that they personally do a fine job of it. I’d assume you’d see similar skewed results when people are asked whether or not they are above average drivers – the majority of those asked say they are above average, but of course this cannot be since half need to be above and half below whatever that average is. So where does this leave us? This leaves us with needing to understand that we can all probably do something to improve our current communication habits, but that many of the problems or roadblocks in communication today have probably not even been identified.

So now we’ve arrived at the fact that most people don’t even know they’re bad at communication! Ugh, what a pain this can be to get through and improve, and brings me back by needing to lead by example whenever you can. Over communicate, talk to those around you about your trying to improve communication, look for examples you can point to as to where communication has broken down. Do whatever you can to bring awareness to the fact that communication can almost ALWAYS be improved, and lead by example – be an engine, not a caboose as my mother always said.

Now you’re humming along and firing on all communication cylinders … but for those of you that are already ahead of me, this can be riddled with issues and problems. For example, have you ever been in a meeting, only to realize you didn’t listen to a single word of what anyone was saying? Or how about sitting in a meeting that you actually paid attention throughout, only to realize none of it pertained to you, or even worse, the 45 minutes could have been summed up in 5 minutes had the person across the table been more concise and prepared to communicate? If any of this sounds familiar, it’s the problem of communicating incorrectly or inefficiently.

Honestly, I’m not even sure which of the above is the biggest problem or the biggest time suck. I feel like I’m always hearing about things after-the-fact, or that I’m looped into a million meetings in which are a huge time suck and could have been condensed to a few minutes with a little foresight. My advice is tackling all of them at the same time the best you can. Yes, it’s a cop out answer, but the reality is that they can and should all be worked on simultaneously.

Speaking of being concise, I probably could have used bullet points and made this post about a tenth as long, but you came here for interesting content and witty writing, not bullet points.

-Alex

Spotlight- Activation & Growth Team

I have had the awesome opportunity to build a full stack team from scratch – the activation and growth team at a Fortune 150 which is a fancy way of saying marketing strategy. So what exactly is meant by ”activation and growth” and what is it comprised of? The group is divided into three major divisions, each made-up of their own sub-departments. I’ll outline each more specifically in their own dedicated posts, but here’s a quick overview to start with.

The activation and growth team (i.e. marketing strategy) consists of three major pillars, each containing its own series of sub-departments. The Activation Pillar concentrates on our core businesses through its Product, Program, and Partner marketing departments. The Growth Pillar oversees marketing amplification efforts, including departments dedicated to Community Engagement, Influencer Marketing, Social Media, and Gamification. Finally, the Marketing Intelligence Pillar is grounded by its Segment Strategy and Data Strategy & Research departments.

Activation Strategy Division

Think of this as a really fancy way of saying marketing strategy. The activation strategy division is made-up up of a group of core marketing managers that are responsible for the end-to-end strategy development for our different products, partners, services, affiliates, license businesses, and white-label products. Anything that ends up going to market for these areas of our business must first be cleared and implemented by these managers. Think of them as the mini CEO’s or GM’s of the businesses they are assigned.

• Products (our various apps)

• Partners

• Services

• Affiliates

• License Business

• White-label

Growth Strategy Division

The growth team covers and plans our amplification and performance marketing efforts across the department, and works hand-in-hand with our activation strategy managers to implement their practices holistically across the ecosystem. But what exactly do I mean by amplification and performance marketing? For our group, they are tactics that reach a much broader audience through either less effort or in a shorter amount of time.

• Local Activations Department

• Influencer & Networks Department

• Digital Communities Department

• Behavioral Science/ Gamification Department

Business Intelligence Division

Incorporating sound data practices is in my DNA and at the core of any sound marketing practice in my opinion. Our Team here covers all of our core reporting, analysis, and data insights related to marketing efforts, and also has a sub-department in Strategy & Research dedicated to qualitative (focus groups), quantitative (surveys), and empirical research.

• Analytics, Reporting, Insights, Forecasting, Modeling Department

• Strategy & Research Department

Although each of these divisions sound simple and straightforward on paper, it’s much more complex to wire them together so that they are each communicating and working efficiently together. Fortunate for our group we have a trio of incredible leaders, one at the helm of each division, that have allowed us to build and operate correctly. So how does it work?

PROCESS FLOW

These three divisions need to work seamlessly together in creating, developing, and executing holistic marketing across all of their various components. From a high-level, these divisions need to develop strategies that touch on applicable marketing channels (i.e. email, mobile, web, social, ground teams, etc., etc.). This execution will be passed from the Activation & Growth team to the Brand & Channel Management team after fully developing the strategic approach. These channels are all geared towards engaging our members.

A LAYERED APPROACH

At the foundation of what we create is our data strategy which sits in our business intelligence pillar. Everything we create needs to be grounded in the rules and parameters set by the business intelligence team. Segment strategy (positioned within the activation pillar) is governed by a sound data strategy approach, that helps identify elements such as what success looks like across different member segments and experiences. Our top layer strategy comes together through a blend of verticals (product marketing, partner marketing, program marketing) and horizontal (community engagement and gamification) capabilities. The combination of these layers results in the packaged strategies that are then handed off to the Brand & Channel Management team.

VERTICALS & HORIZONTALS

A closer look at our top layer of strategy. Currently we have heads of Products and Partners (i.e. the activation pillar). Local Activations, Influencer & Networks, Communities, and Behavioral Science/ Gamification (i.e. the growth pillar) elements sit horizontally across (they do not necessarily overlap in every scenario). Be sure, not every strategy we create as a department will necessarily overlap or impact every element or “box”. This is to simply illustrate the through process that needs to take place to make sure we aren’t missing possible collaboration intersects.

DATA STRATEGY

How data feeds back into Activation & Growth teams and how iteration on strategies takes place. There are two major components relating to our data strategy. Scorecard for every member – each member should be assigned a unique score that is based on activity and engagement with our ecosystem. This kind of scoring will ultimately power segmentation and strategy across the entire department. Reporting on the activity, campaign, and member level. These are the main reports that will give us insight into the performance to our strategies.

-Alex

Hire the Right People

One of the neat aspects of my job is building out the team around me. Hiring individuals for some people is stressful, but not for me. I enjoy it. It’s a great opportunity to discover great people who can help make a major difference, and to identify individuals who may be diamonds in the rough. Some quick thoughts on it.

My philosophy is to buildaround skillsets and chemistry. I think the latter is often forgotten about, or thought about secondarily, and I think that’s a big mistake. I think building for and not disrupting team chemistry is just as important as hiring people who have the right skillsets. The hiring process might take a little longer, but the results pay dividends.

I’ve made mistakes in hiring that I’ve learned from. I’ve hired the best “available” candidate in the past rather than waiting for a better field. I’ve hired individuals with tremendous skillsets but who acted entitled or were not great team players. Needless to say, hindsight is 20/20, and why I cannot overstate the importance of considering both skillset and chemistry.

So far we’ve been extremely methodical in building the team here, and it seems like we’re on the right track. I’m excited to see how it continues to develop and grow.

-Alex