Conversion Heuristics – the new formula in marketing – typically looks at your marketing experience with the goal being to drive conversion. But if you’re in marketing, you know that there’s a much bigger picture. Your day to day isn’t about the single point of conversion. Your day to day is about wrangling the beast that is your marketing department.
So the question is how do you do apply the genius that is conversion heuristics to your entire marketing department? Contrary to how we’ve been talking about Conversion Heuristics so far, when it comes to your marketing department, you’re not going to be looking at the whole formula, but rather parts of the formula, with “a” and “f” being divided by the other variables in order to get c. So there’s a little bit of algebra and reshuffling of values, but the values are still the same.
So now we have anxiety and friction as the first figures we tackle. The question is how do you tackle that in your department?
In the consumer sense, “anxiety is defined as any psychological discomfort that a user experiences when they are visiting a website at any stage of the buy cycle. Anxiety results in no conversion action taken.”
Your department can still be seen as a consumer, in the sense that your team members are consuming the back end of your brand – and that brand is defined by the day to day running of the business. I’ve worked in at least 3 different marketing agencies and I’d say that psychological discomfort is a pretty big player in any dysfunctional marketing department. That’s not to say that the feeling reflects your brand, company, values or even capacity. It means that if your marketing team is suffering psychologically – through stress, uncertainty, misdirection, etc. – then you’ve got an anxiety problem.
Anxiety is still the symptom of a greater problem, and that great problem is friction. If your marketing department suffers from friction, then you’re going to have more than just anxiety to deal with. Other results of friction in this integral department include reduced sales, unhappy clients, and lowered productivity. Marketing departments are the mitochondria of any business; if it suffers so does the entire cell.
So what exactly causes friction in a marketing department?
Luckily, the answer to this is quite simple: processes. Processes, a necessary structure in even the most creative environments, allow for seamless communication between different parts. People know what to expect, how to behave, who to turn to. A process is a guide or a template of behavior that really takes the guess work and frantic communication – and subsequent errors – out of the equation. You know where you can be creative in marketing, and that’s in actually doing the work and coming up with the ideas. But a bulk of marketing work isn’t about being creative – it’s about managing creativity and expectations, and that’s where processes come in.
Having a process in place reduces a lot of the anxiety among team members in a marketing department. They’re not being drained by what’s essentially unreasonable and unnecessary worry. Chances are you have a highly talented team, but anxiety in your department is going to hold back potential. Tackle the friction and you’ve tackled the anxiety.
