5 Ways Your Organizational Behavior Can Affect Your Marketing Strategy

We get a lot of questions about our consulting services because clients are curious about why a marketing firm is offering business consulting services. This is probably a good question because most people don’t think about how marketing and business are completely intertwined.

For us to understand how to put forth an effective marketing strategy, we must understand business basics and more specifically the business that we are marketing for, as a whole. The point we’re making here is that we can put together an excellent marketing strategy and bring you leads and clients but if you don’t have solid business operations or organizational behavior how are you going to fulfill and satisfy those clients that we bring you?

So with that being said here are five different ways that organizational behavior can affect your marketing strategy:

1 – Communication

Strong communication is key to any organization’s success and that goes for the marketing as well. We generally assign a point of contact for each organization we work with so we can ensure we communicate with you effectively. This way nothing falls through the cracks and we’re talking to the same person every week. We strongly recommend an internal system as well.

For example, if your point of contact is your marketing executive, you need to have a way for them to trickle down information from us, the marketing team, all the way down to the sales associates and every other relevant party, in order to effectively use our strategy. If we’re doing a lot of great work but nobody knows about it and nobody can use it, what’s the point? Strong communication also prevents double work or mixed messaging, such as if you’ve got us running campaigns and other employees on social media sending out a different message.

This message should carry through more than just your marketing efforts as well. Is your front office employee giving out the same message that’s in the marketing? How about when someone answers the phone? Two-way communication can help the marketing team as well. There’s a lot we can measure digitally, but there is plenty that we can’t. Ask your customers and employees for suggestions, feedback, advice. GIve them an outlet to communicate this up to your executives and on to the marketing team. Boots on the ground feedback is very valuable!

2 – Project Management

Having a project management or organization system ties directly into communication. Not only do we need to look at how your team communicates, but what tools they use to organize that information. If everyone’s just using their mouth, no one will remember what was said! If people are just using email, is there an effective system so that things don’t get lost in the shuffle and in the chains of reply-all? If the company is using some sort of project management methodology or system, is someone in charge of it?

There are so many elements that go into a digital marketing strategy, items can easily get misplaced. We use a combination of Asana, Google drive, 1password, and other software to keep all client elements organized. A single campaign can involve multiple ads, landing pages, forms, emails, videos, and copy for all of those. If you aren’t organized in some way, things will quickly fall through the cracks.

Project management can be the key that makes a company productive and therefore sustainable for long-term growth.

3 – Culture

Having a strong culture with core values and a way of running your business that every employee understands can be very important to your marketing strategy and of course your business as a whole. If you don’t have a culture that includes the who, what, where, when, and especially the ‘why’ of your business and the messaging that goes with all of those, you may not get company-wide buy-in for a marketing strategy.

The message that your organization puts on social media, for example, should be consistent between your employees and the marketing team. Do both understand what kind of messaging and what kind of vibe you want to put out in the world? Or are people sharing a more personal message which might not represent the company as a whole? In order to work effectively with any other outsourced firms, you need to have a buy-in from your employees with everyone on the same page, with the same goals in mind, so that we can work together seamlessly.

4 – Managing Change

Does the organization have a good system for managing change? If the organization has been doing things the same way for 20 years just because ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it’ this could be troublesome. On the other hand if what they’ve always been doing has worked why mess with it? This is where we, as a marketing team, need to dig in a little and see if the change-culture will work well with a marketing strategy.

The marketing world is fast and constantly changing and to be at the top of the game you have to be an early adopter. Google seems to be changing policies weekly and Facebook it’s algorithm almost daily. To stay on top of all the super fast changes in the world of technology in 2018, an organization must be open to change and ideally have systems in place that allow change to happen quickly and effectively when needed.

5 – Relationships

Does the organization have clearly defined leaders, managers, or workers? Is everyone organized into teams? Are there a lot of office politics or is everything pretty smooth sailing? Relationships inside of an organization are a huge part of organizational behavior as having the right butts in the right seats often leads to great successes. When working with outside firms specifically, relationships are very important. There needs to be trust between those involved and in charge of marketing inside the organization and the marketing agency coming in. Both parties need to be able to communicate well, to not just explore strategies and ideas but also to explore various conflicts that may arise and challenges that may occur. Trust is key.

While there are plenty of other factors that go into organizational behavior that might affect your marketing strategy, we’ve found these 5 to be a top priority to explore. If the organizational behavior is something that you haven’t really thought about yet let us help you dig in a little bit. If you’re interested in learning more about organizational behavior and our assessments that we run our clients through and our experience with organizational behavior please contact us below.