How to Finally Organize Your Digital Marketing Operations

How to Finally
Organize Your Digital
Marketing Operations

How To (Finally) Organize Your Digital
       Marketing Operations

               Dave Sinick
          Paleohacks & PaleoPlan

Presentation Outline
1. Overview of what 4DX is and why you should use it

2. How to setup 4DX by department of your digital
   marketing operations (& KPI’s)

3. Walkthrough of our 4DX Setup

4. Organizing processes, tasks, and documentation

5. Automation & Zapier Neatness

6. Trello

Who Am I?
• Run PaleoHacks & PaleoPlan – largest combined
  Paleo community on the web

• Total operations nerd, “I just read this new business
  book and…”

• I brought a frisbee

Disclaimer
• First time presenting on this topic

• Like anything, it’s a work in progress

• Open to discussion, especially around picking KPI’s
  & lead measures

• The way I organize my business is likely imperfect

• Been working on this process for the past 2 months,
  just launched last month – already have seen results

THE PROBLEM
• 10+ departments in the company that all need
  management (Acquisition, email, affiliate, tech,
  customer service, content production)

• WTF is going on? Who’s working on what? Are they
  prioritizing the right work? Are we actually
  progressing toward goals or are we setting random
  goals that will never get achieved? How do we see
  our progress at a high level?

• How do we get focused on the RIGHT things? How
  do we make sure we’re not just hamster wheeling all
  year?

4DX Overview
Discipline 1: Focus on the Wildly Important (WIGS)
- Company WIG
- Departmental WIG
- “Lag Measure” – The What

Discipline 2: Act on Lead Measures
- The “How” we’ll achieve our WIG’s

Discipline 3: Create Compelling Scoreboards
- How we’ll measure our progress toward our WIG’s

Discipline 4: Keep People Accountable
- The meeting structure around WIG’s

Where We’ve Implemented
• Customer Acquisition
                      4DX
• Product Development

• Content Production

• Video Production

• Email Marketing

• Social

Focused on most important / needle moving
departments first. Haven’t done dev/partnerships/etc.

Tools We’re Using
Trello – Where commitments and projects
live

Zoom – Meetings scheduled & recorded

Slack – Organized by department

Google Sheets – Scoreboards live here

Focusing On The Wildly
            Important
•   WIG’s should ideally be SMART – specific, measurable,
    achievable, relevant, timely.

•   Some goals may not fit this format.

•   Timing of goals does not need to be the same across the board

Examples:

•   Company WIG: $10m in revenue by EOY

•   Email WIG: $275k/mo in revenue by EOY

•   Content Production WIG: 60 posts per month + audit + priority
    posts, etc. by October

•   Customer Acquisition: 3,000 customers per day by EOY.

Act On The Lead Measures
Lead measures are the “How” you’ll achieve your WIG’s. These are
usually daily actions that influence the lag measures.

Examples:
• Customer Acquisition WIG: 3,000 Sales Per Day
• Facebook Acquisition Lead Measure: 100% Split Test
  Coverage

•   Email WIG: $275,000/mo in Revenue
•   Email Lead Measure: “Ideal” Monthly Calendar Achieved

•   Video WIG: 100% of Videos Complete By Deadline (lol)
•   Video Lead Measure: Video Project Plan Created 30 Days in
    Advance

Scoreboard
As simple as possible based on lead measures.

Email Scoreboard

Keep People Accountable
Each scoreboard has:
• Meeting attendees
• Scoreboard Manager
• Meeting Manager
• Frequency
• Day of week

• Meetings are MOST IMPORTANT PART of
  implementation.

Meeting Agenda
PRIOR TO MEETING: Scoreboard Owner and each member to
ensure Scoreboard is fully up to date.

1. Account - Scoreboard Owner and all members to report on
   scoreboard commitments from previous week.

2. Review Scoreboard - Scoreboard Owner to lead the review of
   scoreboard commitments to review and learn from successes
   and failures. Share quick wins/successes, and call out any
   roadblocks.

3. Plan: Clear the path by removing obstacles and make new
   commitments that will raise the lead measures to the required
   level of performance the coming week. We put our
   commitments in departmental trello board.

How To Implement
1. Figure out your most important goal as a company. Usually
   revenue based.

2. Prioritize the departments in your business. Which are the
   biggest needle movers? Start with those – minimum viable /
   achievable.

3. Based on your main company WIG, what do your departments
   need to do individually to hit that company goal?

4. Decide on lead measures / lag measures for each department

5. Build out your scoreboards

6. Decide on the meeting cadence & structure

Pro Tips
1. Don’t do every department at once.

2. The action of implementing this process will make progress for
   you.

3. Imperfection is to be expected. Lead measures will change.

4. You need team buy in. Do not do this “top-down.” Also don’t do
   it with every single team member at once.

5. Start and finish this project ASAP.

6. Having a 3rd party help makes a huge difference. Eric
   Southwell was our consultant.

7. This is “High level” PM – you still need an underlying system

8. Meetings need to be committed to.

Operations….CONTINUED!
Company wide task list (organized by department)
   • Task name
   • Documentation/SOP associated
   • Who’s responsible
   • Who’s also trained
   • Status

Automation / Zapier: Web Forms à Trello + Google Docs +
Dropbox + Airtable
   • Product Development
   • Dev Ticketing System
   • Editorial pitches from writers

Trello
    • Assembly line
    • EVERY CARD is assigned to someone / has a deadline
    • Cardsync

Operations….CONTINUED!
Slack
- Departmentally organized
- Project chats
- Automated notifications
    - New Post/Video has been published
    - Web Dev tickets
    - Trello or Project management notifications

Next Up…
•   PM System that keeps track of project load by department/team
    member (Airtable + Trello)

•   Product launch/marketing templated process

•   Better/faster split testing process + management

•   Automated analytics & dashboards w/ Google data studio

•   Automated hiring/onboarding process