By Adam Chandler, Founder & COO, Eulerity
Does your role at your organization involve translation? Do you find yourself spending hours/weeks/months communicating your ideas prior to implementing?
As we think about applying proven ideas to grow market share on our own business, it can be hard to know where to begin. Here are some simple tips that may apply in getting your ideas sold through to your organization.
Let’s use the topic marketing automation (full disclosure, my company Eulerity is a fast growing marketing automation SaaS business).
#1: Start by gathering the business problems. What are the biggest pain points holding back your brand from local growth, market by market? Here are a few:
- Inconsistency in Marketing Measurement: I don’t have the same key performance indicators across my locations (my locations are doing different things!).
- Audit visibility — 74% of franchisors require / recommend local spending to their franchisees. Close to 60% use an honor system to audit. Do you have a scalable way to monitor your local spending? Or provide an easy to use already configured solution in case of non activity?
- Real time creative marketing — — In order to compete in today’s consumer marketplace, an always on marketing strategy can keep your brand front and center with potential new customers. Do you have a system in place that allows marketing messages to be highly visible to your target audience across all major paid marketing channels market by market?
- Motivating business owners — Do you have a strategy that provides your locations a system with an out of the box solution they can literally turn on? Something simple, not complicated, requiring almost no work is sometimes the best motivation needed to take local marketing seriously.
- Is your system really a marketing system? Different vendors, different strategies, various forms of measurement without some type of centralization can make it hard to systemize your marketing. Have you reviewed the role of software in organizing how you manage your marketing operation?
2. Vet, vet, vet new solutions. You wouldn’t believe what’s out there today. Much of what you may be operating today manually is now automated. In a marketing role, creative, brand strategy, consumer touch point communication should take a front seat vs. some of the mundane tasks traditionally worked on.
3. Internal education. Now that you have chosen a partner, how do you get your boss or counterparts on board? Rewind to point #1. Start with the business problem. Dive into the challenges and share the drag on the organization these problems create. Have an executive at the company you are excited to work with join the internal conversation and speak to the partner you are considering directly.
4. Implementation. Plan, define goals, execute, + obsess about measurement. Be careful not to jump head first into a new partner without defining goals from the start. Establishing the proper cadence to measure and discuss these goals throughout your partner experience is paramount.
Translation is the key to getting today’s best business solutions advanced. Having an amazing solution to a well known company problem is the half of it. The other half is advancing the ball.
Best of luck on the next pass.
Adam Chandler is the COO and Co-Founder of Eulerity. For more information on Eulerity, visit www.eulerity.com
Original article featured in The International Franchise Association: https://www.franchise.org/blog/the-translation-machine
