The Impact of Implementing a Systematic Approach to Marketing Inside a B2B Company

What we’ll cover in this article:

• What is Systematic Marketing?

• Reasons to Consider Implementing a System 

• Why You Probably Don’t Have a System for Marketing

• Who is Going to Help You Install a System?

• Important Factors to Consider When Installing a System for Marketing

What is Systematic Marketing?

In summary, systematic marketing is simply a documented, step-by-step process your team follows for creating and distributing content. 

If you want to get more from your marketing, installing a system for how your team thinks and acts is a critical component. Let’s look at why.

Reasons to Consider Implementing a Marketing System 

I think the benefits to installing a system might surprise you. 

Let’s start with the least obvious. 

1. A system for marketing reveals the actual behavior of your target audience and guides content creation. Content created without a focused approach generally tends to be more haphazard and misses the mark for impact with your audience. 

When your team is creating content on a whim or “just trying to get a new LinkedIn post up” their work becomes very inefficient and doesn’t leave time for studying the audience or the impact. 

With a systematic approach, team members are forced to think about each step and it's context to the desired outcome. This usually leads them to ask the questions, “why are we doing this and will this actually have impact?”.

2. A system allows your team to create less content that is higher quality.

This naturally happens because they are forced to slow down and make each piece of content have more purpose. 

For example, if you are sending cold emails to new leads, the person creating the email will tend to spend equal time crafting the email as they will loading it into a sequence and deploying it. Why? Because there is a lot of work to do to launch a cold email campaign and everything tends to run together.

If an emphasis is placed on the outcome they want to achieve with the person receiving it versus working with the tools to actually create and send it, the impact will be greater and the total time spent will create a higher return on investment for their work. 

This is only possible with a systematic approach. Steps to follow guide a team member through the process of how to think about impact and how to act in accordance with that thinking.

A systematic approach allows your team to focus on creating content that matters to your audience.

3. A system clarifies team member responsibilities and creates accountability. I see teams all the time flying by the seat of their pants. They are behind in all their work and aren’t being held accountable for it. Why? Because there’s not a clear path to what they should be working on at any given time and therefore no clear measure for accountability.

The only measuring stick is when management looks at MQLs or Engagement and says one of two things - this looks great or this isn’t working. 

That approach is not helpful and gives marketing teams no direction for improvement. They need a road map to follow and inside that map they can experiment to find ways to drive toward the outcome.

A systematic approach to how you take your product/service to market gives your Head of Marketing a better way to measure team performance and optimize impact.

4. Most marketing teams are operating with a complete disconnect from the sales teams. This is an age old problem that doesn’t make any sense to me why it is STILL a problem with most companies. 

Sales people gain important insights and can give critical feedback so that marketing can adjust their approach and have a huge impact. The opposite is true from marketing, too. The main reason these two teams are not working in sync is because neither of them approach their work systematically. 

If sales and marketing sat at the same table with pre-determined modes of engagement respective to each other, they would reach a place that is sure to exponentially improve the company’s position. Until marketing starts following a system, sales won’t have anything forcing them to give up those invaluable insights (and vice versa). 

There are other benefits associated with installing a systematic approach to marketing but for brevity, let’s move on.

Why You Probably Don’t Have a System for Marketing

If you asked your Head of Marketing to map out their team’s process for creating and distributing content, what would they show you? 

There’s a really good possibility that there wouldn’t be much of a process at all. If fact what they might show you would be more in line with what each team member does versus how it gets done. 

Most companies I meet with haven’t spent much time on systems in general and marketing isn’t even on their radar. I’ve found that a lot of CEOs leave it up to the department head to make their part of the ship run efficiently and the break down comes in an interesting way - personality.

An Ops person is more likely to think about systems and efficiencies and therefore you’ll normally see those in place in those departments. Marketing people generally have a more creative bent and systems aren’t part of the way they think or operate.

Who is going to create a marketing system for your team?

This is a perfect opportunity for an outside person to come in, evaluate what your team is trying to accomplish and help them assemble a system that lifts their performance and drives outcomes. 

An outside perspective, especially from someone who has worked at all levels of marketing is the right call here. Someone who can map your company goals with actions to execute and tie it all together with a step-by-step process will help you win.

Four Important Factors to Consider When Installing a System for Marketing

1. The number one factor to consider when building a marketing system is your audience. 

Re-examine how you are engaging your audience and make sure you are going to market with the right message. 

How well do you know who you are targeting? Time invested learning more about your audience is never time wasted. 

2. If your message is clear and impactful, next look at what kind of content you need to create to have the most impact. Do you need to create disproportionately more video to get engagement with your audience or is it heavy on written or audio content? Knowing this will help you start to build a calendar of content to create by type. 

3. The type of content you are going to create will dictate the kind of team you build. Do you need copywriters or videographers or both? How many of each do you need and at which skill level to create the content with the most impact on your audience?

4. What tools are going to allow your team to efficiently create and deploy content in front of your audience? What tools will you use to measure the performance of your content? And which team members are tied to each tool? 

There are other factors to consider but this is a great place to start.

Final Thoughts

As a Business Growth Consultant I’ve seen a lot of companies underperform in their market due to inefficiencies. Systems are a valuable part of a successful business and they aren’t only relegated to the operations side of the business. 

Hopefully this article has given you some ideas of how to get your marketing team to think more critically about how they spend their time taking your brand to market. 

If you would like to connect and talk further or have us conduct a marketing assessment, send us a note on our contact page.