How to Build an Integrated Marketing Strategy?

About the Guest

Jennifer Ravalli is the Vice President of Marketing for PandoLogic. An experienced executive, before PandoLogic, she most recently ran planning and product marketing for iCIMS. Before that, Ravalli held several key marketing leadership positions at ADP.  While at ADP Jennifer also led Client Service and Operations for ADP’s small business health insurance brokerage firm, where she grew revenues from $4MM to $20MM in three years. Jennifer has also been recognized by the Stevie Awards as a top Female Executive of the Year and a 2022 Top Woman in Communications from PR Daily.

Connect with Jennifer Ravalli  

Key Takeaways

• Scrappy but strategic marketing can help organizations achieve their goals more efficiently.
• MQLs are a leading indicator of success. They are great for generating leads, but they also need to be integrated with marketing and sales to be effective.
• Giving people the freedom to be themselves is key to their success. 
• Shock the marketing strategy by engaging customers in high-end experiences that are not sales-focused. This allows for a more personal connection with buyers, which drives more demand.

Quotes

“I build teams that are not afraid to tell me I’m wrong. And that, to me, is a super important thing as a leader because I’m not going to be right all the time. And their ideas are often much better than mine. And I want people to have the freedom to do that.” – Jennifer Ravalli

Highlights from the Episode

Can you talk about the need for an integrated marketing strategy for organizations that are looking to grow?

As stewards of the business marketers, we are tasked with driving revenue, but also driving efficiency on how we gain that revenue. When you pull together an integrated plan, look into the reputation and demand through the enablement of sales. Pulling a holistic strategy that has repeatable channels and repeatable content themes that are going to the right people will ultimately drive the business faster, and will also allow you to be more efficient. What we’ve been able to do is align around four key content themes that ladder up to our brand message and bring those through in the types of content and the types of channels that we know the audiences are leveraging then. We also look at these from both the marketing-generated perspective and also looking at influence of revenue through an account-based strategy. So having those two things work together, as opposed to working against each other helps us develop not only with the surround sound messaging approach to the prospects that we’re looking to bring into our world but also be able to deliver that in the most efficient way.

Why is it that we need to think beyond MQLs?

To me, MQLs are a leading indicator that we are doing our job to deliver the revenue that the business needs. So we build our plan revenue first and then backward, into how are we going to be able to deliver the volume we need. The other thing is that MQLs are great from a generated perspective. But when we’re surrounding accounts you want to be looking holistically at, there may be things that they aren’t telling you that contribute to their buying behavior. Looking at the visibility, and being able to unite both the sales and marketing touches, has allowed us to see where the revenue is coming through. It is not just marketing or sales, it is those two things working together. And so we can now assign and look at the revenue that both from an attribution perspective we have delivered, but also in terms of the way that that revenue has come together through all of the investments that we’ve provided. 

Can you discuss the importance of building teams that have different perspectives?

We’re doing something called a predictive index with my team. And we have realized that only two people have an overlap out of all of the teams that we have today. So we have a team of about ten marketers. What that means to me is that we’re making the right choices in hiring folks who are going to challenge each other both in the way that they fundamentally do their work, but then also in the ideas and the creativity that they bring to the table. I build teams that are not afraid to tell me I’m wrong. And that, to me is a super important thing as a leader because I’m not going to be right all the time. And their ideas are often much better than mine. I want people to have the freedom to do that, but also to play to their strengths. Some folks on my team are strategic. Some folks on my team are fantastic at the details and the execution. And when you put those two superpowers together, they accomplish so much more. Giving them that ability to just run is something that I really truly believe is what has allowed us to have a small team and still accomplish great things.

Can you talk about how you decide when to insource something versus outsourcing?

Yes, we do have a lean and mean team, we do that on purpose. And part of that is that we’re never going to be able to move fast enough as individuals to capture what’s happening and what’s changing from marketing. So we’ve assembled a fantastic group of both agencies, freelancers, market experts, and technologies to help us deliver that forward. Our ability to be able to get more done through others is both better in terms of the expertise that we’re able to tap into and also the scalability of that framework. So we have a seasonality within our business. When we look at what we need to deliver to the business, that changes, so we’ve got to be able to dial-up folks when we need to and dial them down when we don’t. We have been able to have that elastic model to be able to make those decisions. The other thing is we have some fantastic customers and as we’re maturing as a business, we are thinking about customer marketing differently. We don’t necessarily have the staff today to support the kind of knowledge base and infrastructure in the business so what we do is to hire great talent who can do that, who can learn from our team, and then once we’re good there, and it’s easier to maintain than to start. So, insourcing and outsourcing have been very important to how we’ve been able to scale our strategy. So we hire folks who are specialists in a couple of key areas, but also have room to learn. And we’ll learn from those experts in the field.

How do you shockproof your strategy from black swan events like COVID-19?

There’s always light in any situation. It’s all about finding that. Early on, there was a lot of fear that there will be a tremendous impact from both a talent perspective and hiring perspective, but also, from a marketing and focus. When you’re thinking about engaging from a marketing perspective, you see live events fall to the floor. We thought about creating experiences when experiences didn’t exist. Have the ability to engage someone in person in a virtual environment–we’ve come a long way in seeing that. This is not a selling experience. This is an experience for folks to get to know each other. We amped-up personalization in all of our marketing efforts to speak to the things that those customers were going through. And I think that helped a lot. Creating experiences when experiences were void gave us the ability to set ourselves apart. We’re in such an online environment. Your ability to move, your ability to be personalized, and messages that are going to be in the moment are super important to make sure that you’re carrying yourself through when there are unexpected events with unpredictable outcomes.

Is there a book, blog, newsletter, website, or video that you would recommend to our listeners?

• Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
• Lean In Community
• https://chief.com/ 

Shout-Outs

• Jason Putnam – Chief Revenue Officer at Plum
• Susan Burke – Senior Director, Services Leader at Salesforce