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How to achieve ‘brilliant’ marketing: a step-by-step guide

Excellence should be the aim of every marketing team, but achieving it takes time, a systematic approach and close collaboration with technology teams.

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watch the ‘Achieving Brilliant Marketing, Step by Step’ session at the Festival of Marketing on demand

“At the beginning of my career, I wasn’t keen to understand what pixels, APIs and SDKs were. However, as my career evolved, I realised I had to get friendly with the tech side of things,” she admits. “It unlocks marketing opportunities and allows me to understand the effort of my requirements, and to come up with creative workarounds if needed. In today’s world where information is so available online, self-tutoring is easy - and also expected if one wants to advance their career.”

Find out more about how to go from ‘basic’ to ‘brilliant’ marketing. Watch Braze’s ‘Achieving Brilliant Marketing, Step by Step’ session at the Festival of Marketing on demand now.

There will be many marketers out there who have felt, and still feel, the same way – even though they may not be willing to admit it. But just as it takes time to develop a marketing function that truly excels, so it does to become expert in the technology that facilitates it. “Crawl, walk, run”. That’s how Georgia Harrison, customer success director for customer engagement platform Braze, breaks down how to get from ‘basic’ to ‘brilliant’ in your marketing. It's a tool called the Braze Continuum that helps brands take their marketing from a reactive state to a proactive one. “It categorises different skills and technical capabilities in terms of sophistication,” Harrison explains. “This means that you can follow a clear path that helps you to focus and plan in a measurable way.” A brand's journey starts, she says, by establishing the strategy and the team’s understanding of it; moving up to an ‘excellent’ team application of the strategy; then to a cross-functional company application of it; and finally graduating all the way to the brilliant end – iterating to innovate. The Continuum is also spread across four key pillars, which are complementary, but typically require different teams and focus. “Because of this, our clients tend to focus their efforts on different pillars at different times,” she notes. According to Harrison, the four pillars are:

Cross-channel personalisation: “Is your messaging translating across different platforms?” Lifecycle engagement automation: “Have you set up all of your major ‘hands off the wheel’ marketing flows to cover onboarding, habit setting, power and lapsing users?” Optimisation and AI: “Do you have a culture of testing with the ability to move quickly? Are you also using things like intelligent sending times and intelligent channel selection, to leverage some of the things machines are good at? There’s no point agonising over whether 4am is the right time to send out a push, if with a click of a button you can send to each individual at their perfect engagement time.” Data agility and management: “This is about making sure data flows around your marketing ecosystem in real time. Do you have a singular view of your customers across all platforms?”

It might sound overwhelming, but Harrison acknowledges the importance of recognising that becoming brilliant is a process as well as a destination: “Just because the ‘brilliant’ marketing idea seems a while off, doesn’t mean that you can’t see brilliant results by applying ‘basic’, ‘good’ or ‘great’ marketing strategies.” However, one common denominator of brilliant campaigns, Harrison observes, is successful collaboration between marketing and tech, with marketers often supported by business intelligence analysts, CRM engineers, and CRM quality assurance leads. This is key for Viber’s marketing team, and also its users. “We have embraced omnichannel marketing, localisation rather than translation, a data-driven approach, continuous testing, and API-triggered campaigns. We’re definitely on the right path which doesn’t mean there’s not a lot to be done,” says Polliack. She is, however, careful to draw a fine line separating “brilliant and personalised” from “invasive and disrespectful”. “I expect apps to have social etiquette similar to real life. If I’m dining at a restaurant, it’s fine for the waiter to ask me about my dining preferences, allergies, offer me another glass of wine, ask me if I enjoyed the food and offer me to join their loyalty program. However, I don’t expect them to keep following me for the rest of the evening, checking who I hang out with later on and what movie I went to.” Ultimately, for Polliack, brilliant marketing is “something people want to share with their friends, family or on social media. It takes into consideration the customer’s point of view rather than the business one. It empowers customers and uses simple language to convey the true gain for them.”■

THE HIGHLIGHTS