“But that’s the way we’ve always done it” is possibly the most troubling thing that a business leader can say.
When I joined PostBeyond, I was the entire marketing team. There was no “way that we’ve always done it.” Each of us had experience from our past positions, but creating strategies for a software platform in a relatively new space (employee advocacy) was challenging. We were forced to be innovative.
Safe to say “the way we’ve always done it” doesn’t always work in startups. But we do tend to hear it in the enterprise space.
We hear enterprises talk about digital transformation, embracing the “startup spirit”, or wanting to attract millennial talent. These are all great goals. But they require leaders to let go of the way things have been done in the past, which can be intimidating.
But different results will require a different approach. Innovation can’t happen if we’re trying the same techniques with a little change here and there. A new type of leadership is required to bring this level of change to a business.
What does that leadership look like?
I can tell you it isn’t full of “digital prophets” or “gurus.” I think the new wave of marketing leadership consists of people who can think at a strategic level (10 steps ahead) with a deep technical knowledge that can implement the right processes.
Asking the Right Questions
One of my favourite sessions at Social Media Marketing World this year came from Brian Solis. He’s spoken on digital transformation before, but I was blown away at SMMW16. He hit the nail on the head.
We get so caught up in all of the latest trends that we tend to follow in their steps (either subconsciously or consciously) and don’t actually blaze new trails. We base our future on past measures of success.
The fundamental problem with our approach to innovation is that we aren’t asking the right questions. Rather than thinking of how we can tweak our current processes, we should be asking how to approach things in an entirely new way.
There’s a great Harvard Business Review article on this very idea. Digital transformation should be about your customers, not your competitors. The point of digital transformation isn’t just to be modern for the sake of it, it’s to actually improve offerings for your customers.
Now I know what you might be thinking – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
But that isn’t how innovation happens.
The video rental industry wasn’t “broken”, but Netflix came along and turned it on its head by approaching the process in an entirely new way.
And chances are, there might be a few processes at your enterprise that are broken. Now it’s up to leaders and innovators to identify these problems and ask “what if we tried this instead?”
But in marketing, it can be easy to get carried away. I’ve seen so many enterprise marketers jump on the newest technology and call it “innovation” without thinking of how it will impact the bottom line, if at all.
Hate to burst your bubble, but creating a Snapchat account just because a big influencer said it’s the next big medium isn’t innovation. It may not be the right fit for your business, and if you’re waiting for an influencer to direct your marketing efforts, you’re already behind.
My advice is to never be afraid of asking “what if?”, but always keep your overall business goals at the heart of every decision.
Where Strategy and Innovation Align
We’re data-driven at PostBeyond. Even though “data-driven” has become a buzzword in itself, we ACTUALLY are. Our marketing team ties absolutely everything back to a number. And not just any number – a pipeline dollar value. Every single piece of content we put out there needs to be attributed in some way to a dollar value.
We still think ten steps ahead and embrace the “what ifs”, but we always come back to how this drives our business.
When the PostBeyond Marketing team consisted solely of myself, I had to come up with airtight strategies that were both innovative enough to set us apart as a leader, but valuable enough that they yielded the highest ROI for a limited budget.
And you know what? Some of them didn’t work out. Setbacks will happen. Budgets will change. That’s just the nature of getting a strategy off the ground.
So we still need leaders who understand at a highly strategic level who can plan what “ten steps ahead”, and what best and worst case scenarios will be, but who aren’t afraid to embrace big disruptive change.
We can see this in employee advocacy, too. It’s a totally new concept for some enterprises. It can be so foreign to some people that it seems impossible to implement. But that’s why we love working with our customers – they want that level of change. They see the need for modern technology, they want real ROI from it, and they embrace the fact that it’s going to drastically change some of their internal processes.
These are the leaders we need in marketing. It isn’t enough to focus on clicks, impressions (or as Brian called it at SMMW16 – “Mediumism”, which is the tendency to focus on the channel rather than actually reaching people.) We need to move past the shiny object syndrome and focus on real results.
Innovation in B2B Content
There’s a misconception that B2B content needs to be dry. Whitepapers. eBooks. Slideshares. Don’t get me wrong – they serve their purpose (and we love them!), but B2B content could use some serious “what if?” questioning.
I love this example from Jay Acunzo for CMI. During his time at Hubspot, he attempted to combat declining performance in their eBook library by creating an entirely new set of content for their audience – a free library of stock photos to share. And it SKYROCKETED. The results were amazing.
The bottom line? It saved their audience time and money.
That’s the only approach that mattered. In order for content to be innovative, it needs to help people. B2B content can get lost in the lead gen focus without actually asking how it will really help solve business problems.
So although we can’t definitively answer whether which new types of content will perform well for your specific goals, we can encourage you to try it for a position of wanting to help. Don’t shy away from the “what if!”
And as always, measure, measure, measure. The only way to prove whether your innovative ideas are actually worthwhile is to consistently track them throughout their lifecycle.
How do you define innovation? Are leaders at your enterprise truly embracing innovation?
