Too often we become focused on new and trending data-driven marketing and forget the fundamental old school principles. Marketing isn’t an isolated discipline and it needs an holistic approach.

The Agile CMO, Chris Raven believes there is value in educating people in how to connect the dots for this kind of holistic perspective to their strategic marketing efforts. He has put together a five stage process that can be used in any context where you are looking to bring structure and order to the chaos.

Chris Raven works with clients and agencies to create cohesion from chaos, bring direction & focus to their business growth efforts, and ties together disparate functions to reduce friction.

Stage One:

Start the conversation and use a combination of broad and detailed oriented questions to establish what value your business is providing for your customers.

Marketing starts when you ask these very basic and yet critical questions - Why? What’s it for? Who is it for and who are you trying to change?

The followup questions are a lot more detailed orientated.

What are the objectives? Revenue goals? Conversion goals? Customer acquisition goals? Is there any exit strategy? Growth strategy? Promotional strategy? Content strategy? What has already been done? What worked and what didn’t work? Is there enough resources to achieve your goals?

This stage is about gaining a firm understanding of the business and for getting buy-in from all players. Both aspects are critical because they form the foundation for the rest of the process.

Stage Two:

Carry out an audit with four specific pillars of marketing in mind. These are:

Awareness - Can people find your business? Do you know what they are actually looking for? Are they aware of your brand? Do they see you on social media?

Acquisition - Are you already invested in PPC and SEO or any other paid channels that drive people directly to your site?

Conversion - What is your site user experience? Is your site fast and working properly? Are there any fundamental pain points? Sometimes it can be obvious things like the checkout doesn't work or it's broken on mobile. Other times it is more subtle where email and CRM play a part in conversion.

Retention - An existing customer is usually more valuable than trying to acquire a new customer.

You can use retention as a mechanism to derive brand evangelism and referral of loyalty - even if that loyalty is peer related rather than one individual buying multiple products from you repeatedly.

The main aim of these four pillars is to get people to understand your brand, come to your website, convert and then convert again to become a repeat customer.

The problem is that often the prevalence of digital channels is too highly positioned in our awareness and we forget the fundamental, old school marketing principles that underlie these four pillars.

Growth hacking is a buzzword for data-driven marketing. When it was first coined by Sean Ellis a decade and some ago, it was relevant because the technology didn’t exist to allow people to seamlessly connect data across lots of different platforms.

Data-driven marketing needs to be blended with the more classical marketing principles such as the four P's of marketing (price, promotion, place, product), SWOT and PESTLE. These principles lend to a greater understanding of how you position your brand, your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and even wider factors like new product development, supply chain and political and economic factors.

Stage Three:

Use the answers from the questions in stage one and the information from the audit in stage two to build a list of prioritised tasks.

Ask yourself - What does my business need to do right now? What are the immediate priorities for the next 3-6 months? What are the priorities for the next 6-12 or 6-18 months? What is the big picture or end goal?

To make your audit make sense, translate your findings into specific tasks and break them down into individual level details.

For each task, detail:

What it is

Why you are doing it

When you will do it

Who will be doing it

How will it be measured

ICE (Impact, Confidence and Ease) score - how much impact will this task have on the business? How confident are you in achieving this impact? How easy is it to enact this task? Give each of these a gut feel score out of 10 and add them up.

Tasks are prioritised based on the highest scores.

Stage Four:

This stage is about taking the top level view and prioritising specific tasks with associated time frames and giving access to all the different people who will contribute to the set targets.

Translate the document of tasks into a prioritised current sprint plan or a series of plans and focus on how things should be done and by when. Choose what works for your context. The basic premise is to visualise what you should be doing in your chosen sprint timescale.

Current sprint might be five tasks, 10 tasks, two tasks, one task. It doesn't matter as long as it's the thing that's going to have the most effect in the shortest amount of time against what you’re trying to achieve. What's going to give you the biggest bang for your buck? Work on those first to get momentum

Stage Five:

And finally, evolve and iterate.

Always be asking, what can be improved? How can it be more transformative? Is it working for the client? Does it need tweaking?

Go back to the early conversations and understand whether things have worked and whether the landscape has changed.

This five stage process is going to work for you whether you are a large company or a small startup eCommerce business or anything in between because the context is entirely irrelevant. Simply define what you need to achieve, break it down into small tasks and then prioritise what tasks need to be done first.

To harvest the full benefits of this holistic approach to marketing, attention and execution are a must. There has to be dialogue and determination to invest the time and energy it will take to push through to the end.