With host Darrell Alfonso
The marketing operations function should be a key player in helping CMOs make data-driven, strategic marketing decisions. Marketing operations can help CMOs run marketing like a business by using marketing business acceleration to optimize their planning, performance, and productivity. In our Marketing Business Acceleration Series, forward-thinking marketing professionals share how they’re elevating marketing operations in their organizations and proving business impact.
In this interview, we spoke with Jenna Lucchesi, Senior Digital Strategist at Bosch—a leading global supplier of technology and services—about the shifts they’re making in marketing operations.
Our biggest strategic priority for marketing is to continue building Bosch as a flagship brand while creating memorable experiences across every touchpoint. We want to make sure we’re seamlessly connecting with the end user’s life across every channel. To do this, we’re implementing an omnichannel, user-centric marketing approach that seamlessly integrates Bosch into the daily lives of our users. This approach revisits and reinvents many areas including training, workshop loyalty, social media, and more so we can meet our audiences where they are at every stage of the funnel.
Some of the biggest shifts we’ve made have been in the planning space—how we’re doing our planning and how we’re working as a team. We’re in a constant state of planning, and that’s completely intentional. While we do have a formal planning process for the new fiscal year, it’s now more of a rolling session, with layers of on-going planning. Every time we complete a few steps, another layer of complexity is added to enhance how we develop user-centric relationships and what that means both internally and externally.
Since we’ve made the shift towards being even more user-centric with our marketing, we’ve had to alter how we choose our strategic partners. Any tool we select has to help us plan and scale our ability to form connections with end-users. As a data-driven organization, it’s critical for us to have the right message and measurable outcomes.
Our marketing department focuses on many segments that support each area of our business from diagnostics to automotive parts, including loyalty and workshop programs. To do this successfully, we rely on marketing operations to maintain similar internal processes for each segment and align on overall business goals.
Uptempo is an absolutely pivotal partner during our planning, bringing together all of the key areas of marketing operations. It allows us to view holistic and individual plans across many teams, and seamlessly integrates our performance management into the planning process. This has been one of the biggest changes and wins our team has accomplished, serving as a strong foundation to the implementation of our omnichannel digital strategy.
We’re really trying to make sure we can measure the results of each campaign and each segment we operate in, then connecting everything back to our larger corporate goals. This means we’re digging deeper into performance optimization. We’re able to pull performance data, but it’s about being able to understand the story and share how we positively influence our users to form deeper, ongoing relationships with Bosch.
It can be challenging for us as a manufacturer to prove the ROI of a campaign, so we look on a grander scale of how we’re influencing buyer behaviors and generating conversations in all channels which are customized to each campaign activation we complete.
We’ve made two significant shifts in our go-to-market approach. The first shift is centered on our planning process and covers every stage from conception to execution, outcomes, and optimization. We’ve changed how we execute our plans and how we evaluate success. This meant redesigning our internal processes to allow for more collaboration, embracing an always-planning approach, and working on campaign activations earlier to accommodate more of a real-time, agile marketing flow. The result is a more strategic planning process that can be directly tied to performance. The second shift is our focus on the user journey. Embracing a user-centric mindset changed how we approach activities. As a large brand with automotive solutions for everyone, it’s important to ensure that we continue to define and refine our audiences as well as understand each user’s unique journey. This helps us to ensure that we are reaching the right person with the right message at exactly the right moment. With that mindset shift, we’ve seen even better growth and outcomes around some of our key success metrics and user engagement.
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