Modular marketing is a relatively new concept that has started gaining traction in recent years. It’s the process of breaking down your marketing efforts into smaller, more manageable pieces.
The idea behind modular marketing is to make it easier for all parties involved — including marketers, salespeople, operations staff, and even customers — to work together more efficiently.
Inefficiencies in marketing often come from having too many people working on one task at once or from not being able to communicate effectively with other departments within an organization.
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Modular marketing advantages
Modular marketing allows marketers to focus on what they do best while also providing them with the tools they need to work together more efficiently.
As businesses grow, they often struggle to keep up with the demands of their customers and potential clients. This is where modular marketing comes in handy.
The goal of modular marketing is to help companies reduce costs, improve efficiency and avoid burnout by empowering teams to focus on one aspect of the business at a time.
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Marketing teams often have an overwhelming amount of responsibilities on their plate — from creating content for social media channels like Facebook or Twitter; managing email campaigns; performing A/B testing; tracking analytics; and much more.
In many cases, these responsibilities are spread across multiple teams within an organization — which can lead to confusion about who should be doing what when it comes to social media posts or email blasts.
If you’re not careful, marketing can lead to wasted time and resources as everyone tries to figure out how their work fits together.
For example:
Your marketing team wants to focus on driving traffic to your website. Your agency wants to focus on maximizing conversions on the site. The customer doesn’t care about either of these things — they just want their problem solved as quickly as possible.
When all three parties are working towards their own goals without collaboration, it’s hard for them to get anything done efficiently or effectively.
One thing that separates successful unicorns from other startups is how structured their processes are. By creating SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) and breaking down campaigns into small modules, it is easy to collaborate, assign project owners, and have a clearer and more streamlined flow.
The Benefits of Modular Marketing
- You can easily see which parts of your campaign are working and which aren’t. Instead of trying to fix something that isn’t broken, you can focus on improving what is working.
- You can scale up or down based on what works best for your business. For example, if one part of your campaign is getting traction but another isn’t, you could focus more resources on the successful part and less on the unsuccessful one.
- You can test different versions of a module before rolling it out across the entire campaign so you know what works best for your audience before spending much time or money on it.
- It allows you to create more engaging content that people will actually want to watch (or listen to) over and over again online and offline.
- Modular marketing makes it easy for employees at all levels of the organization — from sales reps to customer service reps — to create their own content without needing approval from higher-ups every step of the way.
- It’s easy to outsource your sales and marketing when it is modular. You can hire different experts in different areas and let them work separately or together. They will still be able to coordinate their efforts because they have one goal in mind — your business growth.
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How To Successfully Execute Modular Marketing
Decide what you want to accomplish.
This can be anything from generating leads, building an email database, or generating revenue from existing customers (or some other combination).
Make sure it’s realistic about how much time you have and how much money you’re willing to spend on each activity.
Plan ahead.
Modular marketing is carried out with a long-term view in mind. Typically on a quarter or half-year basis. This allows you to plan out all the upcoming campaigns and break them down into smaller parts that can be managed over time.
Break down each campaign into smaller modules.
This could be as granular as knowing — the title of the blog posts, how much content to produce, videos and images, and where to source testimonials from.
This includes developing modules that can be used repeatedly or interchangeably in different campaigns.
If you’re aiming to generate leads through blogging, for example, then create a list of blog posts that will help do this and set aside time each week to write them.
If you want to build an email database using Facebook ads, then create a list of target audiences based on different demographics and interests and set aside time each week to run these ads.
Create a process for creating campaigns from these modules.
This includes deciding what information should be included in each module, how long each should be and how many modules there should be in total.
Create a process for testing new modules before adding them to your campaign structure.
This includes identifying which metrics are important for measuring performance and how long it takes to build new modules so that you can accurately estimate their cost based on time spent by employees who work on them if necessary.
Once the modules are identified, create a project owner for each of these modules.
Someone who has their own digital workspace where they manage their tasks and deadlines for each module on their own.
Create a digital workplace.
Creating a digital workplace is one way to help you manage all these modules together so that they’re more manageable. This workspace should include all the information related to each module so that everyone knows what’s going on at any given time.
So, create a digital workspace where all project owners are added — assign their tasks with deadlines so that everyone knows what needs to be done and when.
Set up a monitoring mechanism.
The good thing about Modular marketing is that it lets you see exactly where your campaign is headed, and where it is stuck. However, for a more effective campaign, set up survey tools that can constantly seek feedback from stakeholders on what is causing delays in execution. This way, it’s easier to fix bottlenecks before they derail your campaign.
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Have a project manager execute the overall roadmap.
Your project manager should be responsible for executing the overall roadmap of your modular marketing program. They’ll assign each module to a member of your team based on their skillset and ensure deadlines are met. This person should also be responsible for communicating with vendors and contractors if any outside resources are needed for each module (such as an IT professional).
The Drawbacks Of Modular Marketing
- It takes more time to develop a modular marketing campaign. The idea behind modular marketing is that you can tailor your message to different groups of people, but this takes time to do effectively. It also requires you to have a deeper understanding of the target market than you would if you were only marketing one product or service.
- It can be difficult to measure its effectiveness. With traditional marketing campaigns, you have concrete goals and benchmarks that you can use to measure success or failure on a very simple scale (for example: “How much did we sell?”).
Modular marketing doesn’t lend itself well to such simple measures because it’s designed for long-term growth over short-term results; instead, it focuses on how many new customers were acquired and how much money they spent over time. This isn’t necessarily bad news; however, if you want an immediate payoff then modular marketing might not be right for your business model. - If you’re not careful, it’s easy to get lost in the options and lose sight of what your ultimate goal is with your marketing efforts. It’s also difficult to measure the effectiveness of each piece of content as you build it out.
- It can be very expensive if you’re not careful about how you design your campaign. If you use too many elements or spend too much money on each element, you can end up spending more than you originally planned to spend and still not see any results.
- It can also be expensive if you don’t have the right tools and software available to help automate the process.
- It relies heavily on metrics and data from each individual module to determine how well each module is performing. If a company only focuses on one or two modules and ignores the others, the overall effectiveness of modular marketing will suffer.
- In order to implement modular marketing successfully, companies need to be able to identify gaps in their current capabilities and then find ways to fill those gaps with outside vendors or partners who can provide products or services that match their needs. However, finding vendors that meet all of your requirements may prove challenging if you do not have a clear idea of what your requirements actually are.
- It is not always agile. Once you have set up your modular marketing, it is difficult to rework it with new modifications. For example, if one of the modules fails, it can be hard to fix or replace it. Also, if your business has too many moving parts (like horizontal eCommerce stores) then collaboration can make or break such instances. This can bring down your ROI.
- It also comes with a higher cost since it’s priced based on the different modules — more modules means more price. At the same time, the cost is compensated by higher efficiency and more effective results from each module working together.
Modular marketing is an innovative way of organizing, executing, and analyzing marketing campaigns. It focuses on the impact your campaigns have on your company, redefining success in relation to each business’s needs. Through this strategy, you can increase transparency, measure effectiveness and assess performance towards set goals — ultimately helping your business to grow.
Do you think modular marketing makes sense for your business? Let me know in the comments below.