Becoming the Golden Child

Part Two: 4 Steps to Maximize Results from your Marketing Self-assessments

As the “baby” of eight children, a sense of humor is a survival skill.  Every family reunion, my much older siblings and I like to torment our parents with a favorite tradition of physically lining ourselves up and ranking ourselves on which of us is the smartest, best looking, most musical, funniest and so-on.  My brother, Bob will forever be awarded the overall Golden Child trophy as overall, he’s just everyone’s favorite.  But the rest of us are all still able to compete at some level, and are able to move up or down the rankings based on our behaviors each year.   Even Brian, who has notoriously been at the bottom of the totem pole because of his sharp, un-leashed wit, has managed to use his influence to move up – by marrying a saint; which has thankfully helped tame his biting tongue.  It gives us all reason for hope.

I’ll spare you the details on my strange family dynamics, but my point is that knowing where you stand, setting realistic goals, and effectively using the resources available to you can help change your trajectory of your success. At a high-level, this is no different with any goal whether it be family competition or with your Marketing plans. Below are some tips to help execute on your Marketing goals.

4 Steps to Maximize the Results from your Marketing Self-assessments 

Let’s assume you read the prior post and took both the marketing appraisal to see how modern your marketing efforts are; as well as the assessment to compare yourself to peers.  Although this is a good first step to assess current state, it doesn’t provide the full picture on getting you to where you want to be.  Below are the four steps you can follow to continue your journey:

1.) Goal Setting: Realistic can Still be Radical

Setting goals is about change.  You may be patting yourself on the back if you’ve moved away from the old batch-and-blast email campaign strategy, but are you reaching your customers on their preferred channels?  Are you tracking their interactions with your brand in real-time?  Are you monitoring behaviors in AI to help promote the Next Best Offer based on these behavior signals – and in the meantime saving you time on data analysis?

If Customer Loyalty / Customer Experience is one of your top three overall strategic categories, then you may want to think about the capabilities that will get you there.   Identifying how well-and-personal you want to know your customer, will help determine which areas of your Marketing initiative deserves attention.  The self-assessments should give you a good idea of your current state and your maturity-level in this area. If you are ranked much lower than where you’d like to be, making impactful changes may indeed seem radical, but I assure you they can be both realistic and achievable! Don’t believe me? Just take a look at who has moved in and out of the Fortune 100 over the past 10 years.

2.) Prioritizing Goals:  Value is in the Eye of the Beholder

Simple enough, prioritize the areas of improvement that are meaningful to you.  In Step One, you’ve identified your primary goals.  The development of your project plan objectives should be prioritized on those benefits that you are seeking most to achieve.  Sure, I could run some creative campaign to de-throne the Golden Child, but that isn’t my goal.  I prefer to improve in the areas that are more rewarding to my lifestyle and that keep me ahead of the rest of the pack.  A more realistic example, if your business drives revenue off of well-serviced customers (via add-ons, repeat business, consumables or other), and increasing revenue is a key driver, then you will want to make sure your marketers are sending campaigns that have real-time insight to your Service Department.   One of your key initiatives should not only to have a 360-degree view of your customer, but should also include providing the marketing team with real-time signals coming from the Service Contact Center to address this specific goal.

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3.) Quantify Potential Benefits First: Bring in the Valuation Team!

Wouldn’t it be nice to know how much value in terms of potential financial and efficiency benefits could be achieved before you continue your journey?  If one of your primary objectives is to Increase Revenue by a certain percent, then conducting a value assessment is a no-brainer.   You can do this yourself or better yet – Oracle has a specific team and resources that can help you align your Marketing efforts to your key objectives while quantifying these benefits – based on actual customer benchmarks.  If you don’t already have a relationship with an Oracle representative who you can reach out to, you can go to the Cloud page and request via Chatbot that a representative contact you. 

4.) Resource Planning: Executing Strategy

Not everyone has an internal team of Marketing professionals to accomplish your key objectives in-house.  If you don’t have the right internal resources, there is a multitude of expert resources who offer just consulting hours, full-scale implementation services, or even managed services.

Oracle also offers hourly consulting and implementation services with their Expert Services Team or via Oracle Consulting Services.  You can also find a large range of partners who specialize in Marketing Enablement with a search on the Oracle Partner Network – Partner Finder.  Again, the Oracle Business Value Services resources from Step Three can help quantify the overall benefits based on the product solution and partner investments you may need to incur.  

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 What are you Waiting For? 
Rarely do people use the term, radical when describing Mother Teresa, but she was an example of a force who was truly disruptive in her daily behavior and created change in our world.  I certainly will never attain that type of saintly or golden child status, but I can always strive to get better. My family can also attest I am not wife, parent, or marketing genius of the year, but it isn’t stopping me from creating regular habits to improve in each of the areas that are important to me.  What radical steps can you take to attain the change you desire?

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No proprietary information has been shared. This post and this blog are solely the opinion of the author.

Part Two of Two: Value of Oracle Marketing Cloud