The deep work of transforming your marketing organization starts with knowing what you are before you know you what you’re going to be

Transformation at any company is almost always a top-down force driven by investor expectations, business requirements, and changing markets. Transformation is an internal concept that is often articulated in the language of finance, mergers and acquisitions, cascading KPIs, investments in different product lines, and of course, frequent organizational changes. In the midst of all this change, marketing and sales teams are faced with the perpetual task of reconciling these business requirements and customer needs. The customer doesn’t care that you’re transforming. 

So how do we begin, as marketers, to truly reconcile the triple forces of the market, our business, and the needs of individual customers in a rapidly and continuously evolving way?

Symptoms of painful and prolonged marketing transformation

Perhaps the most over-used tool of transformation is the restructure (possibly second only to bringing in a consulting firm or marketing agency). When we repeatedly restructure our marketing organizations, to the individual it feels like we’re rearranging the marketing house - the bedroom is now on the first floor, the kitchen is in the basement, all the bathrooms are next to each other, and the front door is now the back door. But if we don’t do the deep work of rewiring the electrical or reconfiguring the plumbing, we lose the essential infrastructure or the essential connections between functions that make the whole house work. 

For the marketer, this feels like barriers to execution. It can feel like an increased emphasis on one-off tactics rather than coherent, unified strategy. It gets harder to know how your work fits into the whole business. It can feel like irreconcilable KPIs and objectives between teams. It feels like it takes forever to do anything. It can take quarters for teams to work this out on their own, which ultimately results in fractured processes and workarounds that end up sticking. 

The power of a marketing framework

Too often we think about the marketing function at any given company as an org chart, a campaign strategy, a market analysis, KPI structure, the marketing funnel, and so on. But a true marketing framework is the basic structure underlying the whole system and all of its components, whether they are those KPIs, campaign plans, and org charts. 

This framework is the illustration of the marketing machine itself: the compilation of all the functions of people, processes, and systems into one view with all the relationships between its component parts identified. Another definition of framework describes it as the basic structure underlying a system, concept, or text. 

This machine is what you run your campaigns through, whatever those campaigns are. It’s the visualization of your marketing organization’s self-awareness: what are we and what do we do? Not who, not why, not even how. This framework outlines the taxonomy of the marketing function of your company: the classification of all the life forms that comprise your ecosystem, or the relationships between all the component parts of strategy, tactics, people, processes, and systems. 

Components of your marketing framework

Searching deep into the realm of marketing’s platonic ideals, you’ll find such concepts as understanding your customer, the funnel, the customer journey, maybe even the 4 P’s of promotion, product, place, and price. The concepts are universal regardless of industry and remain the basis of marketing strategy at every organization. 

Your marketing framework translates these ideals into a specific taxonomy that reflects your market expectations, business requirements, and individual customer needs. This taxonomy translates into the framework of what marketing is and what marketing does at your specific company: the marketing machine itself. 

Here are a few key components of your framework:

1. The Customer POV

   • What are the ways that your organization articulates your understanding of your customer? Likely through messaging, personas, the parameters defining your target audience. It also is reflected in the products you sell, their value proposition, features, and benefits. This might also be expressed in your understanding of your market at large, including trends, external forces, or the competitive landscape.

   • The Customer POV is the articulation of how market forces are manifested in individual customer needs. 

2. Customer Touchpoints

   • These are the specific points of interaction between your company and your customer. This expands far beyond marketing to the entire customer experience, but for the purposes of a marketing framework these touchpoints look like content, events, tools like chat, maybe giveaways, incentives, or discounts. 

3. Routes to Market 

   • What are the ways that your company transacts with customers? It may be through a sales team, or entirely e-commerce. Do you have distributors? Channel partners? Do you have a combination of several routes that marketing needs to support? Within marketing, do you have several approaches to building customer relationships? This could be digital marketing, account based marketing, shopper marketing, affiliate marketing, etc. 

   • Any route to market is defined by how it transacts with the customer, the scale of relationship with customer (is it a 1:Many or 1:1 relationship?), and how it’s executed (is it digitally driven like demand gen, or person-led by sales reps or account-based marketers?). 

4. KPIs & Investments

   • Your marketing organization’s KPIs and available budget are the exact reflection of the customer POV in terms of business requirements. Our leaders make bets on the areas within the market that they see present the biggest opportunities, and as marketers we align to those bets to acquire or retain customers through marketing campaigns and programs. 

   • KPIs and budget, or the investments you make as marketers whether in display ads, trade shows, content, etc., should tie directly to each other. Depending on the size and complexity of your company, its product portfolio, and its routes to market, aligning investments and KPIs can be very challenging. 

Any given company may include additional components like the role of its brand, which is critical especially in consumer products. 

Grounding your marketing framework in the customer journey

It’s one thing to understand your customer through messaging, products, and market analysis. It’s another thing to know how to directly drive revenue as a result of that understanding. The key to pulling all of the components of the marketing framework is grounding it in the customer journey, from awareness to consideration to decision. 

The customer journey is a series of touchpoints - content, events, emails, sales meetings, etc. - that progress a customer toward a purchase. As marketers, we plan and build customer journeys through each route to market - through demand gen, supporting sales, through a partner, etc. Depending on the route to market, we might plan these journeys to address as many customers as possible, or in the case of account-based marketing, we might plan a journey specific to one customer or account. 

These planned journeys are comprised of a series of touchpoints aligned around a specific message (what we say), targeted toward a specific audience (who we say it to), deployed at a specific time in their journey (when we say it), and expressed through content, digital experiences, webinars, etc. (how we say it). 

These journeys are planned and deployed through marketing campaigns, programs, and initiatives aligned to KPIs. By adhering to the customer POV, these campaigns remain globally consistent. 

The difference between the planned customer journey and the actual customer journey

The numbers of customers that follow your planned journeys will be exactly 0. Their actual journey includes whatever series of touchpoints they engaged with on their search according to their unique needs and timing. Their actual journey includes engagement with competitors and partners too. You won’t ever have full visibility into their actual journey. 

However, we can observe their actual journey with our company through our analytics and measurement tools. What we measure is the gap between our planned journey and the actual journey of our customers. When we can observe that gap, we can begin to optimize our campaigns to more prescriptively address customer needs and more intentionally drive the business outcomes we want as marketers. The goal isn’t to compel our customers to follow the journeys we plan, but to plan journeys that more closely align to their needs. 

Why is it so important to have a marketing framework?

Executive leadership cannot tell the story of marketing’s contribution to the business if we don’t understand it ourselves. In the middle of large, scaled, distributed marketing organizations with complex portfolios and routes to market, it is very difficult to understand how your work contributes to the larger strategy, let alone its impact on revenue. 

Add in the complexity of constant change and the critical strategic connections, let alone the basic infrastructure that makes teams work, becomes fragmented. You don’t know who to work with anymore to get the job done, or you suddenly don’t have a license to Salesforce, or it takes too long to get a new vendor approved. We often begin to address these symptoms and we call that transformation, but we run the risk of creating new problems if we don’t have a deep understanding of the marketing machine and how it manufactures the customer journey. 

Here’s four ways a marketing framework empowers transformation:

1. Telling one story

   • Without one consolidated, unified view of the marketing machine, our leadership can’t connect the dots between all the varied campaigns, programs, and activities driven by the marketing organization. 

2. Diagnostics and optimization

   • When we observe the actual customer journey against the planned customer journey, the marketing framework allows marketers to be specific about understanding which parts of their campaigns are working or not working. We can isolate variables, test hypotheses, and implement key learnings to improve performance. 

3. Prescriptive transformation

   • Similar to being able to optimize campaigns, we can look at the marketing framework and map how well the machine is working to produce desired results. Where are the biggest barriers to execution? Which areas are moving too slow?

4. Unified transformation

   • When engaging in change management practices, one view of the marketing framework provides the foundation for telling the story to the marketing organization about where they’ve been, and where they’re going. It helps thread together seemingly isolated changes into the bigger story, 

What do you do with the marketing framework?

You align your people against it. You update your systems to reflect it. You re-work processes to serve it. And you establish communications pathways internally to move the right information across the organization. 

The marketing framework establishes a shared language about what marketing is and what marketing does. This is the foundation for change management, leadership, and middle managers to cultivate a true shared understanding across the marketing organization. After continuous change, teams move farther apart and over time, we lose sight of the forest through the trees. We lose sight of all the pieces, so that when we address the symptoms of our challenges we do it in asymmetrical ways. Maybe one system is updated to reflect digital marketing, but then it becomes useless to field marketing because it doesn’t include their language and methodology. 

1. People

   • When you structure your marketing organization against a marketing framework grounded in the customer journey, then you create tight alignment for every individual and their role in impacting the customer. 

2. Systems

   • All systems, from CRMs/CDPs, analytics and measurement tools, CMSs, to budgeting and planning tools should use language that reflect the entire framework, not language that favors digital tactics over others. They should all speak the same language as defined by the marketing framework taxonomy. 

3. Processes

   • Marketing planning is the highest priority process that should emerge from the framework. Without comprehensive, integrated, quality plans, marketers can’t analyze and understand the gap between the intended outcome (planned customer journey) and actual performance (the actual customer journey). Without plans, we can identify results but we can’t understand them. 

   • Planning also simplifies the process involved in producing and deploying all the touchpoints in the customer journey. For those teams that build content, manage websites, plan events or post on social media, good planning allows them to manage these execution resources efficiently. 

   • The last critical process to establish with the marketing framework is the reporting process and cadence. This function should be grounded in systems that speak the framework language. Reports should be consistent in identifying performance, learnings, and changes implemented to campaigns. They should converge to tell one clear story about marketing’s contribution to the business. 

Isn’t the point of transformation that things are changing?

Your marketing framework translates these ideals into a specific taxonomy that reflects your market expectations, business requirements, and individual customer needs at a specific point in time. The marketing framework is constantly evolving due to the pressures of these external forces. It’s critical that the framework is managed by a steward tasked with continuously understanding and translating these pressures to evolve the framework in alignment with marketing leadership. 

Creating and maintaining a marketing framework represents the marketing organization’s self-awareness. It’s the view of the forest, not just the trees, that unlocks unified, prescriptive, and deep transformation by reconciling the forces of market expectations, business requirements, and individual customer needs into an operable model. This model enables both marketing leadership and individual contributors with a shared language and shared understanding of how they are agents of transformation.