Taking on Behavioral Marketing at Any Role

To illustrate the point, I'm going to break down the organizational structure we discussed in the last chapter and discuss how each role might begin to factor for behavioral marketing. Although it might seem like overkill to read about every role, depending on what yours is, it's critical to remember one important thing: anyone can undertake these tactics. Understanding how those both above and below you in the organizational structure are thinking about improving marketing's performance can be very insightful in plotting your future plans. So keep those minds open, and let's begin with the specialist role.

If you're the junior person in the group, you're typically going to have to manufacture your own opportunities to prove your skills and intelligence. Hopefully, your manager is helpful and is teaching you the real-life marketing skills while you transition from book knowledge to getting it done every day. Even—and maybe especially—if they're not, you should be looking for places to add value. That value often comes in the form of insights that others might overlook or not consider for as long as you might.

For example, you should be poring over every report of key performance indicators (KPIs) and looking deeply at the performance numbers behind the marketing efforts. Your undertrained eye may not spot everything, but think logically about cost versus reward. Look at top-line numbers—like how much your brand spends on paid media—and then look at program performance over the same time period. Are the larger investments paying dividends or are you wasting money? You can uncover these types of directional, data-driven trends by digging deep into the data—a task many marketers simply don't take the time to do.

Let me take a second and share a few tips for the new kid on the block. It's very much a question of personal style, but working most closely with your direct manager is usually the best way to consistently compel bottom-up change. You don't have to give her or him your best ideas to take as their own, but impressing your boss with your work ethic and thinking is normally your most effective path forward. Yes, there is the occasional case where the boss is a moron and you may be tempted to take your great idea to the director, but that rarely works out in your favor—particularly because your manager is probably insecure enough to take it as a personal slight regardless of how mind-blowingly great the idea may be. If you're in that crappy spot, start making the move to change companies (or divisions inside a really big company). Or decide to wait out the scenario. The important lesson here is choose your direct boss VERY carefully next time around.

So although the specialist must work hard to be seen and heard, the type of change behavioral marketing represents is absolutely the main job of every marketing manager. You are the primary doer, and you can unlock a ton of potential by thinking more deeply and working just a bit harder. And the great news is you don't need all kinds of permissions from your executives to get started. Actually, you might just work with your direct report to rethink some KPIs or look for performance improvements in content strategy.

Make no mistake: a strong orientation toward data and action is a great thing for your career. Unfortunately, many marketers have to change jobs to get promoted—particularly early in your career, when there's a natural stack-ranking going on among you and your peers. By overindexing for both the art and science of marketing discussed in the last chapter, you'll set yourself apart from others and put yourself on a much faster path to director—and beyond. If you can think critically like a VP (by understanding the VP role and motivation) and then extrapolate that into changes you can make, you'll move ahead quickly. Trust me—driving more revenue with the same resources is the magic trick that gets you promoted most often.

If you're a director, then bringing behavioral marketing to life will have some downstream skills requirements. You're not likely to have your hands in the day-to-day execution, so you'll need a team sharp enough to take your lead and run with it. As with almost every role, you can make some smaller moves independently (like beginning the customer journey mapping process we discuss later). But properly motivating your team to move toward ever more customer centricity should be your primary task.

In addition to properly motivating your team, the director should begin the selling-up process. Anyone in this role should be close enough to marketing execution to see the opportunity for upside and savvy enough to position it in terms your executives can understand and get behind. If anyone's in charge of building a pure business case to transform your marketing, it's the director. In general, I think about the director role as the chief change agent and improvement boss for that channel. You can't wait for your executives to request improvements, or you may have already lost the battle.

At the VP level, transforming your marketing to be more behavioral-driven is normally a question of channel orchestration and customer focus. Very few VPs I've ever met want to spend more money or do less marketing—unless there's a clear business case to reprioritize channel spending. By embracing the core tenets of behavioral marketing and assessing each channel's capability to deliver, the VP has the opportunity to perform like an air traffic controller. For example, you can divert funds from outdoor advertising to double-down on cart abandon email programs if need be.

And the opportunity to merchandise your team's success upward is a huge credibility opportunity with your SVP or CMO. They're looking at you to drive incremental revenue from marketing activities, and showing them hard data from newly launched campaigns that convert at 10 to 20 times over your standard batch-and-blast mailings signals a significant accomplishment. You might have to teach them a bit about the new behavioral capabilities and make sure they clearly understand they're part of an overall mix of truly effective marketing—mostly because you don't want them to think they can cut 90 percent of your budget and get the same revenue!

And finally, if you're a CMO and considering behavioral marketing as a discipline, remember that it's all about optimizing spend and keeping your marketing machine moving forward toward the future. I won't beat the dead horse regarding the average tenure of a new CMO remaining around 24 months, but, clearly, being more responsive to customer needs and leveraging data are huge top-level initiatives that CMOs are driving down into their organizations to increase revenue.

Great behavioral marketing done right uncovers untapped revenue that's close to closing but that you just can't count on yet. If you are an ecommerce seller, ensuring that your commerce team is crushing the cart, browse abandon campaigns can be the difference of thousands of dollars in revenue per month (and the bigger your average cart, the higher the return). You can bring to life the central tenets of measurement and data-driven decision making for both B2B and B2C longer-lead sellers with behavioral scoring and a perfectly designed content strategy that meets the customer at every step in the buyer's journey. This is not science fiction marketing from the future that requires a bench full of overpaid PhDs to execute. Have the forward-looking vision to challenge your teams to think more deeply about the customer, and be open to revising or even adding job requirements in the future that further the behavioral focus.

Although every role can bite off its own chunk of behavioral marketing, the true power comes when a couple of levels line up to prioritize it from an overall marketing perspective. Maybe it's just a director along with the email and database marketing managers who decide to move the approach forward. Or, ideally, it could be a top-down mantra, and all team members jump in, feet-first, and bring it to reality for their role every day.

At the Speed of Business

We close this chapter with some thoughts on how you can (and will be allowed to) spend money on behavioral marketing—both hard external dollars on technology and vendors, and human resource (HR) dollars on permanent headcount and contractors. No marketer should ever think they're going to get additional money to do anything they can't prove to be a winner first. That might sound ominous, but assuming you'll get nothing and having to sell every budget line item is more often the reality. So why not put yourself in that mode from the beginning?

This also means that getting a new marketing automation platform to execute all this might have to wait three months until the first quarter, when the financial results for holiday season are in the can. However, this doesn't mean you cannot—or should not—do anything until then. Take your best shot at personalized communications with the tools you have now; show small but steady lift in testing among small groups. Be creative.

And yes—you're going to need an executive sponsor for most major technology upgrades and new headcount—unless you're the chief marketing officer and want to move some budget or job requirements around. Be keenly aware of your company's annual budgeting cycle and the requirements needed. And of course, someone needs to step up and be the face of the request process. Although the VP is normally the natural candidate for this, I've seen a hotshot director pull it off as well. Whoever leads the contingency will be the chief consensus builder among marketing as well as across the organization. Remember, it's almost always a fixed-sized pie and marketing competes for funding against sales, accounting, and customer support. Make sure you're buttoned-up and compelling in your argument, base it on revenue lift, and be prepared to defend it against all forms of other programs for budget allocation.

At the same time, I always counsel growing companies to be planning ahead aggressively. Even if you're not ready to buy this quarter, you might want to be investigating world-class SaaS tools as a director. Speak to your peers at other companies or search out analyst content on the topic. Having your desired solution laid out in broad strokes is a very smart plan—especially if you're venture-backed and there's a round of funding on the horizon. Venture firms dole out money based on the idea that they can drive geometric progression in terms of revenue, and behavioral marketing can be a great tactic to gain quick wins.

Understand the market and company dynamics continually swirling around you, and be fully prepared to strike when the opportunity presents itself. Cultivate your go-to advocates in marketing; spend time talking to sales about increasing efficiencies between your groups to close more deals; and be ready to accept the role of change agent. Almost every marketing group in the developed world is going to have to figure out how to be more personalized and focused on customer behaviors. Go invent the future.