A complex sales environment can be challenging for marketing operations professionals, but it is also a premier setting for experimentation and innovation. When this is your day-to-day at a start-up, you have the added opportunity to test for scalability during rapid growth.
Jaclyn Adams knows this landscape well. As the Senior Marketing Manager at Papa, she works across B2B and B2C audiences to tailor her marketing operations for growth.
Join us as Glenn and Jaclyn discuss:
- The value of integrating physical assets with a strong digital presence
- Marketing Ops start-up life as an opportunity to step back and build seamless processes that drive rapid growth
- When A/B testing works best in your pipeline and when it doesn’t
The value of integrating physical assets with a strong digital presence
When starting a mission-driven business, passion is key, according to Jaclyn. While there are many tools, systems, and processes that can help drive growth, particularly from the standpoint of marking operations, passion is a prerequisite for change and impact.
Once this passion is established across the start-up, marketing ops can step in to fuel the fire of explosive growth. Jaclyn has found that one way to add value is through the integration of physical assets in hand with a solid digital presence.
“When you're building something new, you need to understand what your target audience wants to hear, what their need is- and then understand how the current processes might be able to be optimized.” — Jaclyn Adams
Physical marketing can be instrumental in helping move clients through your pipeline. But movement tracking is of significant importance whenever integrating physical marketing assets.
According to Jaclyn, integrating physical marketing assets that lead back to digital marketing or support can create more customer touchpoints, helping them move toward sales. But, these assets should be designed to meet customer needs where they are.
One way Papa does this is through its tradeshow swag and physical marketing, each of which leads back to a specific email that allows the company to track where the client came from and what pipeline stage they are in.
While physical marketing may not always be necessary for organizational success, it can help foster relationships.
Marketing Ops start-up life as an opportunity to build seamless processes
One major way that marketing ops can drive rapid growth is by developing seamless processes that ease customer experience from beginning to end. To create this stability regardless of organizational growth, scalability should be a top concern during process development.
“When you're starting from scratch, it's important that you are thinking about scalability. Otherwise, you're constantly just going to be redoing everything. ” — Jaclyn Adams
According to Jaclyn, when you don’t consider scalability during process development, the organization risks having to re-design, re-teach, and re-train systems and processes every few months. This isn’t only annoying to employees; it costs companies in numerous ways.
For rapid growth, it’s crucial to know exactly what you want to capture from your contacts from the very beginning, be able to categorize them, and then reengage until they're ready for sales to speak with them.
To do this well, marketing operations need to build seamless processes.
Papa utilizes a multi-touch attribution system that captures important defining information, allows each customer to be assessed and categorized, and then provides the opportunity to nurture them in a way that accurately reflects where they are in the pipeline.
With each client interaction, their lead score gets updated. Once the score reaches a certain threshold, they can be passed on to speak with the sales team.
Creating this seamless process is essential for ensuring that clients are adequately informed, provided with a genuine relationship, and do not reach the sales team until they are ready.
A/B testing: When it works and when it doesn’t
When building and implementing processes through marketing operations, it’s essential to understand what works and what doesn’t. A/B testing allows a business to reveal which marketing efforts are making the most impact on conversion.
For Jaclyn, understanding a customer’s first and last touch, where they come from, and how they develop through each step is critical in understanding what is effective and what’s not.
“What I found is most valuable for our team to know, and be able to optimize on, is both first touch and last touch, lead source, and campaign source.” — Jaclyn Adams
A/B testing is one of the only ways marketing operations can quantitatively gather and analyze data.
At Papa, marketing operations utilize A/B testing in ads, landing pages, content pieces, and more. For example, they have found that certain prospective customers convert at a higher rate when there is a form at the top of a landing page, while other prospects convert at a higher rate when the form is at the bottom.
Without A/B testing, there is no way to have gathered this information and, therefore, no way to utilize it in targeted marketing efforts.
When scaling rapidly, understanding customer preferences and habits is essential to long-term growth and conversion. Therefore, whether A/B testing is the tool of choice, testing should be used to find what works best for each customer category.
