#2: Four Lessons From Our Digital Marketing Expansion

Part 2 -- The Digital Marketing Journey of an Industrial Giant

The following is the second in a series of articles sharing lessons learned from the digital marketing journey of a leading 90-year-old industrial manufacturing icon (Caterpillar Inc.). If you see similar challenges in your company, don’t despair, you’re not alone.

Today’s topic revolves around our journey to add or upgrade our digital marketing capabilities over the past few years. During these years we went from very few digital capabilities to an across-the-board introduction or upgrade. Marketing automation, new web content management platform, social media sharing and communities, CRM, content and digital asset management tools, search, and on and on. It was a huge undertaking and one filled with many lessons. Here is what we learned...

1) Set expectations early with executive leadership and the organization on costs but also results. We didn’t know what we didn’t know in relation to costs, so this was a little bit of the chicken and egg scenario (see #4 below). But even with clear business goals tied to our marketing...measurement strategies in place...and a pretty strong and clear understanding of the benefits of what we were doing, expectations were high. In some cases I would even say the organization expected our new capabilities to be a silver bullet.

We had steep learning curves along the way (not with marketing people, but others with vested interest)...such as, great marketing automation tools provide little value without great content and an understanding where it fits into the customer journey. It seems basic I know. But we repeatedly had to respond to the comment ‘well I thought it could do _____’. Fact is it could, but not without maturity, understanding and commitments from multiple groups. We should have spelled more of this out upfront.

2) We underestimated the human support of our new capabilities. Too many times we started with capability purchase and implementation then looked to bring on product owners. If I had to do it all over again, I would strongly recommend finding experts to bring on board even before capability and platform selection. Timelines would have been shorter. Organizational learning curves would have been shorter. Re-work would have been avoided. Quite honestly this is a hole I’m not sure we ever got out of.

Not only would I start with people first I would also say don’t underestimate the on-going need to invest in people as your capabilities mature. Let’s face it, a marketing automation team of one (as an example) for nearly four years for an organization of our size just wasn’t conducive to speed and agility.

Digital marketing technology can and will sometimes reduce the need for human involvement, but don’t ever believe it can happen without proper people investment as well. Based on our history, I would start there. It would’ve helped with point number three.

3) Nothing is ‘off-the-shelf’ or ‘plug and play’. Ok, on the surface this one may cause a little controversy especially from technology/platform providers, but our experience was—no matter our intent for the capability—nothing was plug-and-play.

In the same breadth, I’ll also say our technology partners were great to work with. We chose the best of the best. I would never suggest they mislead us, not at all. But because we chose the best capabilities one at a time—for example, marketing automation, CRM and WCM—it was from three different partners. This resulted in a fair amount of disconnect or at least considerable work on our end to connect and integrate.

Now at that time, all-encompassing marketing cloud providers were still a little rare unlike today. Today I would lean much more towards a key partner or two and go all in with them. I’m interested to see what readers of this article have to say about that approach based on your experience.

In addition, internal governance, process development and documentation, testing, etc. takes time. And you can’t underestimate its importance. Yes it sounds like red tape and bureaucracy, but it has to be part of the implementation process, as without doing proper due diligence upfront we would have run into even more challenges down the road.

And finally...

4) Costs go up. Period. Based on the fact technology evolves so fast and efficiencies improve so dramatically, the expectation by many was costs would go down year after year...or at least wouldn’t increase. (Let’s face it, we heard the comparison to television technology and related costs many times over. Even though that was clearly not an apples-to-apples comparison.) But our reality wasn’t that.

More users meant more licenses, more subscriptions. Maturity meant more sophisticated uses of the capability, meaning we needed even more human resource. More content meant more management, more people wanting access and at times even more content development. All driving additional costs.

The increased costs were the result of success, but it didn’t always make the additional investment easy to secure.

So that’s it. At least that’s my top four with respect to technology, people and related investment. There were many more.

So what are your experiences? Biggest obstacles? Most important lessons learned? Anxious to hear your thoughts!

Hi, I’m Dave Lucas. I am passionate about people-first leadership and marketing. My experience includes 20+ years in marketing leadership positions at Caterpillar Inc., many as the Global Digital Marketing Manager, and 10+ years in leadership positions at various marketing agencies. I am now the owner of Lucas Partnering, which focuses on companies looking to leverage my experience to advance their marketing efforts to the next level. You can reach me at davidlucas@lucaspartnering.com.

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