Software development is influencing marketing a lot these days with the emergence of Agile Marketing and Test-Driven Marketing- Agile and Test-Driven concepts being two concepts that have dominated software development for the last 5 years.
The reason is not a fad crossing over, but rather a more fascinating and powerful phenomena. As the Internet has become pervasive in our lives Marketing has become testable, much like software, as well as more impactful due to the amount of reading buyers now do during the buying cycle.
Agile software development embraces change and measurement, allowing responses to “market” signals that are leading indicators of failure. Signals include early customer feedback, early robustness feedback from automated tests, and ongoing feedback from regression testing, which captures failures due to the landscape changing.
But so what, you might ask? Marketing has become testable. Whoop-de-do. I’ve been marketing for twenty years, and we’ve done just fine without testing.
My answer? Marketing mostly sucked from a customer perspective. And this was effective and professional because there wasn’t much other option. Marketing wasn’t sales, and sales was the group responsible for strongly targeting messages to buyers. Marketing was background support. Marketing didn’t have access to the customer mind, by message or by volume of content (diversity in customers makes available volume of content critical for targeted messaging), and as a result marketing was largely product focused.
That’s no longer the case. Where sales was once needed to deliver targeted content, buyers now look for the content themselves online. And if they don’t find yours, they’ll find someone else’s. Last generation marketing that was background to the targeted sales message is now leading in the foreground, and landing with a awkward thunk.
In the new marketing environment, we need marketing to work well or we’ll fail. The Internet has changed how we sell, and marketing does a lot more of the selling because that’s where the customers are- at their computers researching their own needs. Selling has become buying facilitation, and if marketing doesn’t step up and do more of this type of selling with relevant targeted messaging, failure is almost unavoidable.
The other massive influence in the new marketing environment is that we can now measure if marketing is working. Considering that we now need marketing to work, that is very good thing.
Inbound marketing, Internet lead generation and Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) all test marketing through conversion rates on multiple website goals such as newsletter signup, RSS subscription, Facebook fans, white-paper downloads, requests for a demo, successful multiple touches, purchases, and so on. There are literally hundreds of amazing measurements and tests that can be applied- either on existing data or on data created from intentional tests.
This is enabling marketing to be test-driven, and in complex markets, it’s providing the tools for marketing to become agile. This is exactly what happened in software- the focus on feedback from customers and tests enabled software development to become agile. Indeed, the concept of Agile Software Development was somewhat meaningless until the feedback mechanisms were there.
Marketing has become like software. You run it, test it, and it either works or it doesn’t.
The bottom line is that today we must sell with marketing, and we can now measure our marketing. These two incredibly strong influences have combined in a way that will fundamentally change the entire business world.
And that means we can start applying some of the same processes- agile responses to market signals, testing for user adoption, testing for relevance, and actually building our marketing collateral so that it is in fact testable.
If you think marketing automation and automated lead nurturing are a fad, you better have lots of brand equity to ride on. Because if you don’t, you are not going to be able to build it in this brave new world.
For more on this topic, I recommend checking out some of the new wave of marketing automation vendors- Marketo, Manitcore, Eloqua , MarketBright or Hubspot, as well as the Analytics vendors such as Google Analytics, Yahoo Analytics, and Omniture and see what they are saying.
And if you are convinced and want more details, or unconvinced but open to the possibility, subscribe to this blog via the Test-Driven Marketing RSS Feed or subscribe with the simple email subscription form over there on the right sidebar. Our next post, Is Sales Becoming Marketing Technical Support?, goes deeper into the changing roles of Sales and Marketing.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
hi folks:
I’m the coiner and definer (and owner) of the term Buying Facilitation(R). In your usage in this post, you actually mean buyer facilitation. My model is a change management model that is not to be confused with solutions, solution choice, or sales.
Please go to my site http://www.newsalesparadigm.com and http://www.sharondrewmorgen.com and get the definitions. There is a recent post on my blog called BuyER facilitation vs Buying Facilitation(R).
I look forward to clearing this up. Thanks.
SharonDrew Morgen
Marketing per se has been measurable for a very long time, just not as effectively (Nielson ratings, surveys/focus groups, etc.), and was obviously not designed specifically for the internet. There’s a plethora of data now, so it’s vital not just to track what is trackable, i.e. a view or a click is not a buy.
The same analogy applies if you’re comparing marketing to software development. For example, managing the number lines of code rarely leads to better software. You need to know what to really measure before you can manage. You need to measure the end-result whenever possible, not some intermediate proxy. Just because the internet makes it easy to measure many things now doesn’t make them all equally important. You need to really understand which of the “literally hundreds of amazing measurements and tests that can be applied” are actually relevant before you can become an effective marketer.
Just as in software development, you also need to be careful not to optimize just what is easy to measure. You get the most benefit by the big paradigm changes, not minor tweaks (in software development, the analogy is to coming up with a better algorithm, rather than trying to optimize existing code).
Marketing has always been measurable – the challenge was (and is) getting people to care and take the time to set up the test, capture the results and analyze the results so that informed recommendations could be made.
My marketing career began more than 25 years ago, and my first job required me to understand what efforts were attracting potential buyers to the business, and why some bought when others didn’t.
This taught me simple ways to measure key marketing and sales metrics – cost per inquiry, cost per qualified lead, cost per new customer, average order size, order frequency, annual purchase …
And this experience taught me about audience segmentation so we can select the most appropriate media, messages and offers so costs were managed and results improved.
I still do this – for the few companies that understand that spending $1 needs to generate more than $1.
Thanks for the comments Edward and Pat. Good points.
I think marketing measurement was only viable to large B2C companies, only for certain aspects of marketing, only at great expense, and only over longer time periods. So you are right, but I think it’s fair to say that marketing as a whole wasn’t testable in comprehensive manner- especially for smaller companies.
According to Mark Jeffery in Data-Driven Marketing, 80% of Companies don’t make data-driven marketing decisions, raising the question Why Don’t Marketers Test More. You raise the key points why that is- access to meaningful data, and the analytical skills to make that data meaningful to decision making. In my post I should qualify that an amazing metric is a relevant one
.
Avinash Kaushik’s Analytics blog is a great resource for focusing measurement on outcomes, and he makes the humorous distinction between analysis ninjas and reporting squirrels. Two themes he visits often are that looking at web metrics without factoring in outcomes and goals (e.g. reporting versus analysis ninja) gives you insight the size of a pea compared to the possibility of a dinner plate, and that even if you have the great data, you need to translate it into a presentation format that matches your audience (e.g. executive team).
Similarly, Hubspot makes the distinction between web analytics and marketing analytics to emphasize the same idea.
I think Ed’s last point is particularly important. Avinash Kaushik makes the point that after a few months, you won’t get any benefit taking action on your top ten metrics or top ten data points per metric. You need to look at the metrics buried in the middle of your data and look for trends and opportunities there. Many companies optimize for their current traffic, which isn’t where the growth might be. They need to look for long-tail keywords, and keywords they aren’t optimized for but provide value for.
In my many years in B2B software, I often came across customers who were far into an evaluation and were very surprised to find a new vendor they had missed.
Good article. Here is the key point. Testing is important today and testing has been important from “way back”. If you got along before without testing, you must have been very lucky. Testing is as important today as it has always been.
Thanks for the comment Mark!
Measurable marketing has been a staple of direct marketing for decades. See building a mail-order business by Cohen for a description of how to test offers. (My copy is an older edition, and is in storage at the moment.)
Thanks for the comment George.
The most impactful part of “Ogilvy on Advertising” for me was his discussion of what he learned from direct marketing. That lead me to “Scientific Advertising” by Claude Hopkins.
The great thing about the web is you can apply these techniques more broadly, at lower cost, and at lower volumes then historically with direct marketing or the application of those techniques in traditional marketing.
I’ll look up the book you mentioned.
Nick,
You are right on the money. We live in the age of transparency. Buyers can and will learn everything they need to know about you, your products, and your reputation online. Buyers also have the freedom to ENGAGE companies, brands and people online as part of their research process. So you are right, selling and marketing has moved towards buying facilitation and away from advertising and pitching.
In my book, People Buy You, I discuss how Sales Professionals must learn how to connect with their clients and customers emotionally in a way that allows them access to problems that can be solved with their products or services. This engagement, or buying facilitation, occurs because the connection and subsequently a level of trust exists.
Marketing must learn the same lesson. In her book Age of Engage, Denise Shiffman offers excellent examples of how marketers should change how they view potential customers. The live web, which is driven by social media has afforded marketing an incredible opportunity to become an active part of the buying facilitation process.
Marketing has the real opportunity to build emotional connections and trust with potential customers. However, marketers must lead the way in providing even greater transparency to products and services and more authenticity to brands.
Whatever term you choose, engagement, connecting, problem solving or buying facilitation (no disrespect to Sharon who apparently added these two words to the dictionary), it is important to understand that buyers, at the core, still make decisions based on emotions; though, how we shape those emotions as sellers and marketers is changing.
Jeb Blount
CEO
SalesGravy.com
Author of People Buy You
Thanks for the comment Jeb.
Congratulations on your recent book. It looks interesting.
There is certainly a great deal to learn about this subject.
I like all the points you made.
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