How Marketing Velocity Can Help You Increase Sales and Revenue

Image Source: Edward Musiak

Marketing can be expensive and, often, unpredictable. The most successful marketers and teams set clear, crisp goals, develop smart strategies, and experiment with different tactics. But even then, many campaigns fail to return the money marketers invest in marketing efforts.

I’ve previously written about lean marketing, which involves testing ideas in small batches, listening to feedback, tweaking campaigns, and re-testing. However, another important concept that complements lean marketing is marketing velocity.

Marketing velocity is the speed at which marketing efforts deliver measurable results. You can accelerate marketing velocity with various enabling technologies, such as marketing automation, CRM, and other tools and techniques. But at the end of the day, the true measure of marketing velocity is the speed with which you develop your goals, set strategy, and, most importantly, deploy tactics.

Keep in mind that marketing velocity and agility are two distinctly different concepts. Velocity is about doing things faster. Agility is about testing in small batches, listening to and measuring outcomes, tweaking, and re-testing.

Why should you care about marketing velocity?

The answer is deceptively simple: speed matters. Until you deploy your marketing tactics, you learn nothing. You can spend months strategizing, developing theories, creating collateral, etc. But real testing doesn’t begin until you actually market.

If your direct competitors can set their goals, develop strategies, and deploy marketing campaigns faster than you can muster, you will never be able to beat them in the market unless your strategies and tactics are materially better. Even if your strategies and tactics are better, you’ll still need to deploy them at a reasonable pace. After all, many good tools allow marketers to track, measure, and turn around real-time insights about their marketing efforts. The best marketers can make adjustments and tweak their strategies in near real-time. If your competitors are doing so and you’re not, you’re already falling behind. Ultimately, you need marketing that moves at the speed of ideas.

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Here are three tips to help you improve your team’s marketing velocity:

1. Create a solid foundation for success.

It’s tempting to simply increase the pace of your marketing tactics and assume that your marketing velocity will naturally increase. Before you do so, however, you need to develop a clear set of goals. After all, doing something faster without a clear goal is pointless.

Goals shouldn’t be easily achievable – but they should be realistic. This is where many marketing teams fail.

At least, in my experience, it’s counter-productive to have many goals tied to a specific strategy. You can have many different strategies and goals associated with each strategy. However, you should not have more than a few well-defined goals for each strategy. In the past, when we’ve set many goals for a single strategy, we found that the results were often noisy and non-actionable. It was too easy to meet some of the goals, but difficult to meet others. This noise led to indecisiveness and ultimately prevented us from learning and tweaking our marketing strategies and tactics.

Your goals should be directly connected to your key business objectives. You’re merely creating and increasing noise if there’s no direct connection. You’ll mostly distract yourself and your team if you choose more than 1 or 2 core goals.

For example, few businesses will benefit from increasing their audience on Facebook or getting more shares or “likes” there. Likes, impressions, page views are mostly vanity metrics that don’t produce tangible business outcomes. Such metrics might be relevant to growing an already established brand (although even for established brands, those are mostly vanity metrics). Still, they are rarely helpful to startups and small businesses.

Kissmetrics has a terrific post exploring how different marketing teams set goals.

Once you’ve defined a clear set of goals, develop strategies to meet each goal. Here are a few good reads on building marketing strategies: Building Online Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses from Moz, Gear Up Your Small Business Marketing for 2017 from Melinda Emerson,  5 Steps to Creating a Killer Marketing Strategy from Peter Daisyme.

2. Test in small batches.

Instead of spending weeks or even months planning and researching, develop your untested assumptions and quickly test them.

For example, do not commit to a three-month email drip-marketing campaign that takes you one month to implement. Instead, set up one to two-week mini-tests that you can deploy within 1 or 2 days. For example, here are some quick and simple tactics you can test during the holiday season.

If your experiments fail, don’t worry—this is normal. Many of the marketing tactics we try at crowdSPRING fail. But it’s better to fail with campaigns that take 1 or 2 days to create than with campaigns that took months to develop. This is where marketing velocity can truly help you.

3. Be prepared to change gears quickly.

As I mentioned above, most marketing tactics fall flat or fail. But if you’re smart about testing in small batches, failures can lead to incremental success. For example, if you run a short email marketing campaign that you deploy within a few days, you can assess open rates, click rates, and A/B test subject lines, images, etc. When you run your second email marketing campaign the following week, you’ve gathered valuable insights to help you tweak and improve the follow-up campaign. If you keep iterating in this fashion, each successive campaign will build on what you learned from the prior campaigns. This will improve the odds of meeting your marketing goal(s).

Compare this with a team building a deep drip-marketing campaign for a month. During that month, they’ll learn nothing actionable. They won’t start learning until they deploy their campaign.

Ultimately, keep in mind that when you invest most of your marketing time, efforts, and budget into developing strategies and tactics (rather than executing them), you make a gamble that your strategies and tactics will succeed. This is a sucker’s bet because most marketing strategies fail. Increase your marketing velocity, and you’ll put yourself and your company in a better position to succeed. Execution is everything.