7 Ways to Build a Marketing-Driven Company Culture
Want your company to gain unstoppable momentum? You need a way to bring your marketing mission and vision to life for your entire team.
The most widely talked-about businesses are those that can deliver a remarkable experience all the way through the marketing process -- from prospect to customer to loyal evangelist.
This type of experience demands a marketing culture that is built into every corner of your business. It starts with an inspirational leader, and a story that employees and staff alike can connect with.
Ultimately, creating a remarkable customer experience can become part of any firm's core strategy. It's something that every single member of your staff can deliver, using a systematic progression of touches and contacts that never fail to meet your customers' expectations.
Of course, this kind of marketing-driven culture doesn't happen overnight, and it certainly doesn't happen by accident. Here's an action plan your company can follow to achieve it.
The Reason Why
One of the most attractive features a company can possess in an effort to create a marketing-driven culture is a strong sense of purpose or "reason why." People often go the extra mile in an organization where they connect with what they feel is a single-minded, higher purpose.
This doesn't mean the reason why has to address some large social issue. It can be a desire to provide incredible service, elegant design, simple solutions, or relief to a customer segment that is suffering. The key is that what the business does can actually feel secondary to the desire to serve this higher purpose.
The Role of Simplicity
The most effective marketing is simple. In other words, people get what the company stands for; they connect with its brand and can communicate the firm's unique point of view or innovation in just a handful of words.
Simplicity is often harder to achieve than it appears, as it requires subtlety and a commitment to simplifying every aspect of the business. When you see it, you know it and feel it -- and it runs deep in the organizations that master it.
The Epic Story
Building a marketing-driven culture requires a story that attracts people. It also requires a leader capable or building this story into the organization's culture.
Most often the story serves to illustrate the "reason why" or the higher purpose addressed in my first point. Like any good story it takes people on a journey that gives them a glimpse of a better self. It's a journey worth taking -- and a story worth telling -- over and over again.
Creating Value
Marketing-driven cultures develop a value mindset that shifts how employees think about an organization's product, service, and process development.
The key question here isn't how to sell more. It's how to create more value, build deeper relationships, and grow with our customers.
The answer to this question often lies outside of traditional product roadmaps. It may, in fact, depend upon your ability to create a service that seems unrelated to your organization's core product or service.
Closing Touchpoint Gaps
Every time a member of your organization comes into contact with a customer or prospect they are performing a marketing function. It doesn't matter if they reside in a region on your org chart that lies far beyond the marketing department.
Marketing-driven organizations get this. They chart every customer touchpoint and strive to deliver a remarkable marketing experience -- no matter what the objective of the customer contact happens to be.
When your organization maps its own collective marketing, operations, and finance touchpoints, you can discover both gaps and opportunities to deliver a branded marketing experience over and over again. Quite often it's these little touches, and certainly the final touches, that determine how a customer feels about your brand.
The Results Review
The ultimate purpose of marketing is to deliver a result -- either by virtue of a product or a service. The only real way to be sure that is happening is to measure the impact a customer receives.
In most cases, this is simply a matter of following up with a systematic results review process after you have delivered the goods. No matter how this review process unfolds it creates a clear cultural expectation within your organization that nothing matters until the customer feels the results.
The One Way to Fail
Although this step comes at the end of the article, it could just as easily be job one. The simplest way to fail is to keep your marketing plans, objectives, strategies, and tactics a secret. Conversely, keeping everyone involved and in touch with your marketing strategy is the simplest way to succeed.
You need to create orientation and routine marketing education sessions that include the entire staff. Also consider rotating everyone in the organization through customer service, and put them into a position to share marketing wins and losses. You'll stand a much greater chance of helping everyone understand how and why their daily tasks connect with the organization's overall success.
If everyone comes to understand they actually work in the marketing department, everyone will start to view the world through the eyes of the customer. And that's how you build a marketing-driven culture.
John Jantsch is a marketing consultant and author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine and the founder of the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network.
