#3: Leverage and Nurture Your Current Capabilities

Part 3 -- The Digital Marketing Journey of an Industrial Giant

The following is the third in a series of articles sharing lessons learned from the digital marketing journey of a leading 90-year-old industrial manufacturing icon (Caterpillar Inc.). If you see similar challenges in your company, don’t despair, you’re not alone.

Last we spoke (Part 2 -- Four Lessons From Our Digital Marketing Expansion) we discussed our multi-year journey to add or upgrade our digital marketing capabilities across-the-board, and the four significant lessons learned.

Obviously such an expansion and upgrade can be costly and time-consuming, which, although can have significant returns, can also be limiting with regards to immediate impact. So balancing long-term goals and impact vs. some immediate improvements doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive.

The key is to dig deep into what you’re currently doing. There is always room for improvement, sometimes significantly. Yes that sounds obvious. But we get used to how we do things, get used to the metrics and results we’re achieving, and can at times neglect examining the real facts behind them. Let me give you three examples of where our current state at the time offered ample room for improvement.

1) Data, data, data. Too much. Not enough. Disconnected. Yep, we had it all, as I suspect you do too. Despite all the talk about data-driven decisions and customer experience few have mastered it, let alone leveraged it to its fullest. It can be overwhelming and borderline paralyzing. So the key, and you’ll see this theme throughout, is start somewhere.

We, like many, wanted to connect all of our customer and prospect data to get a full overview of everything we knew about the customer, what they owned and their respective digital behavior. Ultimately the goal was to use data and predictive analytics to engage the customer the most appropriate way at the most appropriate time. This was a massive undertaking.

So we asked ourselves what could we do in parallel?  We started by looking at one of our main marketing objectives...how to improve conversion rates of qualified leads. Obviously over the years we had focused on the customer profile, the digital footprint of such leads, the content that moved them through the sales cycle and the like. But this time we looked at the comparison to unqualified leads (full disclosure—at this stage in our journey our leads were all self-qualified). And much to our surprise conversion rates were actually higher for unqualified leads!!

Now as we dug in we discovered certain reasons for that (some details I can’t share as I don’t want to give away proprietary insight). However it allowed us to make immediate changes that had significant impact...such as changing the language we used during self-qualification, sending a larger slice of unqualified leads to the sales organization and changing the way we nurtured leads. Real impact by looking at pieces of data that in the past we had paid little attention to.

2) Customer journeys. During the wide-ranging and complex process of mapping our customers’ entire digital journey along with layering in their offline journey, we ran a parallel effort. Again we started by looking at one of our marketing focus areas...customers requesting a quote, a source for excellent lead generation.

As we mapped out the customer journey specific to those requesting a quote we were surprised (maybe shocked) to discover the call-to-action was actually taking place much earlier in the journey than we anticipated. And I mean significantly earlier. Again this helped shape content creation and follow-up moving forward, ultimately driving improved conversion.

3) Online customer community. This was a little bit of a different twist in that here we had an opportunity that was available to us to leverage, but never really did. Although we had literally thousands of registered customers in the community we really never engaged them like we should have. Doing so could have provided a great source of customer input, product development and customer loyalty. But for some reason I believe the organization saw this group of online users as ‘less real’ (my words). They were customers we couldn’t look in the eye and engage like we were used to doing...and thus never really took advantage of (in a mutually beneficial way). Don’t let opportunities like these slip by...even if you’ve ignored the opportunity for some time, it is never too late. This continues to be one of my most frustrating and biggest regrets.

So, in summary, three examples. There were many. As marketers we are always looking for the next best thing, and in today’s quickly changing world that is necessary for sure. However, take a good look at what you’re already doing. Look at what information you have. Take a different view on things. The opportunities are there and can have significant bottom line impact. The hardest part just might be recognizing it!

Hi, I’m Dave Lucas. I am passionate about people-first leadership and marketing. My experience includes 20+ years in marketing leadership positions at Caterpillar Inc., many as the Global Digital Marketing Manager, and 10+ years in leadership positions at various marketing agencies. I am now the owner of Lucas Partnering, where I leverage my experience to help companies advance their marketing efforts to the next level, as well as help leaders and future leaders be the best they can be. You can reach me at davidlucas@lucaspartnering.com.

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