Is Organisational Culture The Critical Component To Marketing Success?

Have you considered how your organisational culture is driving your success - or limiting it? In today’s market, embedding a deep understanding of your audience within organisational culture is critical to staying competitive.

How many of your discussions involve the thoughts and needs of your customers? 

Have you considered how your wider business could get a grasp and a deeper understanding of what an audience first could look like?

Audience insights are essential to be driving the the right strategic decisionsOr is the approach your business takes is more tactical? e.g. a list of activities defined by data alone that lacks the qualitative insights of audiences?

Harry Lang eloquently explained this as a danger sign in a previous Marketing Unfiltered article: 

“…us marketers seemingly covet the complex and unintelligible domains..enjoying the process of crafting unnecessary titles, channels, descriptions and acronyms every year” 

Take A Break 

Rather champion the need for an audience first approach and build a plan for Market Orientation as you move into 2025. Orientation by its nature is something many businesses undergo but more by way of Product / Sales orientation. 

This is commonly because businesses assume a tactical approach is the basis of a robust marketing plan

Back to the Future

Market Orientation is about taking a big step away from your organisation…you’re effectively putting yourself into the shoes of the customer. 

It might feel it’s not progressing the role of marketing, but you’re taking a step away from the processesto re-connect with your audience and categories you play in to help propel your business forward. 

It’s a pivotal step to take to not only accelerate the effectiveness of marketing but also in how to build a well structured marketing strategy, from the ground up..

A Bootstrappers Guide To Market Orientation..Some Practical Steps To Take

But where to start? Budgets are tight and as a marketer you’re looking to convince your organisation to take some time of reflection to the needs and wants of your audience. 

Here are some simple and practical cost effective suggestions (not exhaustive) recommended as to how you can start now and begin to change the culture. 

I will also recommend a framework as to how to start to communicate these insights across the wider business through building a Knowledge Hub

Planning

1. Document your findings – As you begin to build up and collect insights, I’d recommend a simple excel to help document all the findings you capture, this can be seen as your field notes and insights as you build the picture from the customer point of view

2. You’re not the customer –Get yourself away from your desk and distance yourself from assumptions made by your business. You’re going to take a view point from a customer that has entered the category you play in

3. Market Research – There are a number of routes to take when it comes to listening to the market and gathering actionable insights. 

Simon Akers, Marketer and Founder of Archmon, recommends to follow a plan using the 3Cs as a great starting point as “these starting steps ensure you are more informed about your audience, your market, and even your business…from there, you get a clearer customer orientation and you can position yourself with a genuinely informed strategy” 

1/ Customers

Active customers - take a segment of your customers and get onto the phone and call them to ask for their experience of your company. What do they like? How did they come across your brand? What channels did they use to find you? What other competitor brands have they bought from

Non-customers – Speak to customers that have not purchased again and ask the questions as to why they decided not to buy again or interact with your business?

Useful link for support: Adele Revella, Founder / CEO - Buyer Persona Institute

2/ Competitor Research

Make a purchase from your competitors. What was the experience like? How did they respond to customer service? Was the process to buy the product/service simple? What findings can you take away that could support your own business as a useful benchmark?

3/ Share of Search

Share of Search is a useful indicator to show the number of organic searches a brand receives as a proportion of the total number of searches from within the category you play. 

A useful tool to help understand impact is MyTelescope. This can be run based on a brand term or keyword across location and also by channel e.g. Google, Amazon, TikTok or YouTube. 

So if you previously  ran campaigns across these channels, take a look to see the impact you campaigns had 

Useful Links for Support: MyTelescope ; Google Trends

4/ Analytics 

This will provide you with some key insights into how users interact with your brand site in terms of channel sources, content consumed your digital marketing path to purchase as well as any clear challenges and jobs to better enhance performance. 

Assess the user journeys taken and the types of search terms used to find your website? 

Research what other sites within your category to users also visit?

Useful links for support: www.semrush.com ; Google Analytics, Google Search Console 

5/ Customer Service Insights 

Take the time to listen and speak to your customer service team. The eyes and ears of your front facing department and who most likely have the closest relationship to your audience and have a clear understanding into the common pain points 

What are these common pain points expressed by customers? Are they to do with your brand or more to do with the wider category? What are the regular issues that could be addressed? 

6/ Market Research 

Both qualitative and quantitative methods will provide you with that insight into the wider category and past / future trends that you should be considering. What are the customer segments relevant to the category ? What is the market sizing?

ChatGPT can be a useful tool to help you kick off some initial diagnosis on the market you’re in by running prompts to give you insights into the practical approaches to uncover to identify audience segments, accelerating insights into customers’ views and thoughts to competitors and summarising main themes of comments as an example

Useful Links for Support:

• Smart Insights Audit Template 

• 42 Courses 

• Oxford Artificial Intelligence in Marketing Series | Saïd Business School

Building A Customer Knowledge Centre In Your Business

From the findings documented you can now piece together a plan to create an internal communications strategy that’s remit it simple and clear: 

To bring the voice of the customer to the centre of our organisation

Be clear as a leader on the importance of this change agenda with some core steps:

1. Be clear on the objective and purpose of the transformation agenda this is to the wider business

2. Set up a bi-weekly/monthly event to invite all departments to learn about audience behaviour in the context of your business - 45 mins/60 mins would be ideal 

3. Be prepared to mix the events with internal speakers from across your organisation as well as invite in external speakers that can add weight to the customer agenda and importance

4. Gain insights from speaking to key stakeholders across the business for ideas/pain points and challenges they’d like addressed as part of this event

5. Ensure the purpose of the bi-weekly/monthly events are connected back to the objectives and vision of your business 

The Cultural Shift in Marketing

The simple truth is why so many marketing strategies fail is that they fall short because they lack a clear business case for success grounded in customer insights 

A customer-first approach, championed by your organisation is going to provide you with a wealth of useful information from which you can re-connect your focus

But you need to take the initiative and build that internal communications plan to bring everyone on the journey and drive change in the organisation. 

Organisational culture is the hard bit. You can spend money on finding people with the core skills organisations need but it is the attitude, collaboration, and initiative that drives the real transformation needed.