Archives: Process

Let’s face it, customers nowadays have already decided on who they’re going to do business with, before even going out to shop. One of the main reason for this is the abundant information available online, which is why we consider Inbound Methodology as the Bible of all our marketing strategies & innovations.

Inbound marketing methodology is a way for businesses to attract customers by creating valuable content and personalised experiences tailored to their challenges & ambitions. 

Inbound marketing identifies the connections customers are looking for and solves problems they already have.

Why we Love Inbound?

The concept of Inbound is simplicity itself, the more you understand your customer, the better will be your content’s quality and context while communicating with them. This approach is not just about getting business, but more focused on building a relationship with the customer, till they become your brand’s advocates.

In case you’re wondering what Inbound strategies can do for your business, Here are some significant benefits:

• Increase in website traffic

With the help of marketing activities like blogging, SEO, social media marketing, PPC, for better visibility on Search Engines.

• Generate qualified leads & sales

Using creative & conversion-centric landing-pages, CTA (Call-to-Action) buttons and compelling content to lead visitors towards conversion. 

• Easy to analyse & track

With CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools like Infusionsoft, Zoho and Hubspot you track the effectiveness of your online strategies so you can optimise accordingly.

Our Inbound concept

All our digital marketing strategies are centralised our two facets, first is composed of the inbound stages (Attract, closed & delight) and the second is Buyer’s persona. These two aspects give us a clear idea of who we’re marketing to and what stage of their buyer’s journey our prospects, leads and customers are.

Attracting Strategies

Inbound strategies that attract our target audience and buyer personas are tied to content creation and development. In this stage, we produce content like blog articles, content offers, and social media to reach our audience and provide value.

The attract stage doesn’t just end with initial content, the content also needs to be optimised using SEO strategies like adding of targeted keyword. These keywords or phrases are related to customer’s challenges or ways to help the target audiences.

This will allow our content to appear organically on the search engine results page (SERP) for the people who are searching for similar results.  

Engaging Strategies

As the name suggests these strategies are implemented while communicating and dealing with leads and customers, to makes them want to build long-term relationships with us. 

At this stage, it’s important to inject information about the value we can provide the audiences with. This will ensure all deals would be mutually beneficial agreements for customers and us. 

Delighting Strategies

We consider this stage to be the most important as these strategies ensure customers are happy, satisfied, and supported long after they do business with us.

Incorporating thoughtful, well-timed CRM(customer relationship management) to ask for surveys to assist, support, and request feedback from customers is a great way to delight them. We make sure that the CRM communication should be timed in accordance with the customer’s journey to ensure the right context and provide value.

Lastly, the entire focus at this stage is to assist and support partners in any situation, whether or not there is value in it for us. As a delighted customer becomes a brand advocate and promoter and is most likely to come to us for more business. Contact Us for more information.

We believe that growth shouldn’t mean that businesses have to limit their agility and spirit. In today’s competitive world, not being able to adapt as you scale is a recipe for inevitable failure. 

Which is why we need OKRs to help in overcoming this challenge, Big time.

Objectives and Key Results (OKR) is one of the most popular management strategy used for goal setting used by Google and other companies.

OKRs connect the company’s teams, and personal goals to measurable results while having all team members and lead strategies work together towards a unified direction.  It is a simple approach to create alignment and engagement around measurable and ambitious goals.

Why OKR?

The OKR matrix established within the SOSTAC framework creates alignment and engagement around measurable & qualitative goals across all the business units.

Let’s have a look at some of the major benefits of this model: 

Alignment and cooperation: Shared OKRs improves collaboration among different teams, resolving interdependencies and promoting competing initiatives.

Faster goal setting: The model’s simplicity makes the goal-setting process faster and easier, drastically reducing the resources spent on setting the goals.

Clear communication: Complete transparency gives the teams a better understanding of the goals and priorities of the organization as well as how each individual can contribute.

Autonomy and accountability: As the Teams receive a clear direction and are free to choose the way to achieve their OKRs. They become more responsible for their objectives, And as clear success criteria are known to the whole company, creates mutual obligations.

Our OKR approach

While forming our OKR model, we figured out that the linear approach would not be able to handle uncertainty. In order to quickly adapt to the changing organisational environment, a cycle would be an iterative approach to enable greater flexibility.

Now, let’s go through each step of our Cycle: cover approach as per our slides as discussed

Setting Up

While creating OKRs some of the crucial first steps were:

• Valuable: The impact should be measurable and Value-based.
• Engaging: The process should engage the creativity and perspectives of the employees. The OKRs should be inspiring.
• Actionable: The team should be able to understand the metrics and every member should be able to execute their roles in accordance.

1) We define a set of high-level strategic OKRs – preferably with input from the team.

2) The executive team then validates the company OKRs, gathering feedback from the teams.

3) Teams develop their Tactical OKRs using the bi-directional approach

Alignment

For cross-team alignment, we needed a structured approach to ensure that each team aligns not only with the company strategy but also with the others. 

After drafting the OKRs, each team was required to:

• Map out interdependencies.
• Create shared OKRs.
• Ensure the alignment is vertical as well as horizontal (cross-functional).

During the Alignment, each team would discuss the proposed OKR with their manager. The role of the executives was to coach and to challenge them and help the teams create better OKRs.

We reviewed the OKRs after team discussions to inculcate new ideas as well as the team’s capabilities & limitations. 

Attain 

Goals are often out of sync from the organisational rhythm. To avoid this we made sure that our teams made OKRs a part of their work. 

The teams were asked work to attain their OKRs accompanied by routine audits and measurements for required adjustments. 

The routine audits were necessary for OKR’s success to make them more productive and value-based.

Contact Us For More Details.

Digital transformation is a challenging process. Which is why to envision and create real value for our partners, all our business solution are moulded by a unified framework –PR Smith’s SOSTAC^®.

The SOSTAC^® approach is the core of all our strategies and technological innovations. Be it Agile focused web development, process automation or even growing our client’s business, all adopt SOSTAC^® to bring about remarkable transformation.

What is SOSTAC^®?

SOSTAC^®, created by PR Smith is considered as an authoritative Planning and strategy framework amongst businesses of varying sizes, be it a startup or a global organisation. The framework allows us to ask the right questions that are crucial while planning, strategising or executing any project.

Let’s see some of the intuitive questions we can ask with SOSTAC^® framework:

Situation Analysis – Where are we now? Understanding the current landscape, bench-marking

Objective Setting – Where do we want to be? Setting useful, actionable objectives

Strategy – How are we going to achieve these goals? Setting a meaningful strategy

Tactics – What are the details of the strategy?

Actions – Roles and responsibilities. Who does what?

Control – By what time frame to make it happen?

How we make use of SOSTAC^®?

We are going to segregate S-O-S-T-A-C and discuss how we apply these stages to bring value for our partners.

Stage 1. Situation Analysis

While setting out the analysis this stage should provide an overview of your organization – who you are, what you do and how do you interact and addressing internal and external factors impacting the business.

• To paint a clear picture of your organization we implement some of the following methods to meet the requirement of this stage:
• Identifying your digital customers (buyer’s persona) and how do they interact with the brand?
• SWOT Analysis – what are your organisation’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Competitor analysis – who are your competitors? How do they operate? e.g. price, product, reputation, what are their key differentiators?
• Digital channels landscape – listing out all the digital channels for your organisation and analysing whether they are performing well or not?
•  Technical Architecture – Developing your digital framework to meet the current market standards and enable seamless consumer’s journey.

Stage 2. Objectives

Once the above requirements are met its time to focus on the Objectives using the 5S strategy (Sell, Serve, Speak, Save and Sizzle).

Although we’ll be thoroughly discussing the objectives in our OKR process, however, to touch base with stage 2, let’s discuss how we make sure to categorise within these 5S’s.

1S – Sell – Regarding the transactions that lead to sales & revenue.

2S – Speak – Objectives related to how your business communicates with the customer.

3S – Serve – About adding value to the customer, mostly related to customer service.

4S – Save – Related to cost savings and reducing process time.

5S- Sizzle –  It is about building brands repute online.

Once the objectives are defined by 5S’s it’s important to make them measurable and to make them into SMART objectives, 

Stage 3. Strategy

Strategy refers to the plan to fulfil the terms that have been set in the objectives. At this stage should we identify all segments of the market to target?

The effectiveness of the selected strategy is greatly dependent on how aligned it is on the above two stages as well as the field (digital, Marketing, automation) the SOSTAC^® is created.

By identifying all the channels most suited to your  business need to craft customised strategies for your business

Stage 4. Tactics

The strategy gets further segmented into Tactics that cover the specific tools of the plan’s digital mix to use and realise the objectives of your digital plan. 

To get a clearer idea of the framework till now let’s take a situational example:

Upon Situational analysis of Australian Sports Camps, it was determined that there was a lot of drop-off traffic from the website. To achieve an overall objective of increasing top-line by 20% in one year, we recommended an inbound strategy to increase the number of lead entry points on the website. The actual tactics included defining the exact nature of those lead entry points. 

Usually, a digital transformation strategy involves CRM consulting & development and marketing tactics.

Stage 5. Action

Stage 5 of your digital Transformation planning framework focused on how to bring the plan to life, to make actionable measures.

The action-section covers what needs to be achieved for each of the tactics listed in the previous section of the SOSTAC^® framework to realise the objectives of your digital marketing plan.

Stage 6. Control

The final stage is to lay out the ways on how to monitor and measure performance based on the objectives set at stage 2. Once the tactics have been considered then the control section provides the dashboards tailored for each tactic.

All these stages must be in sync with one another to successfully execute a customised SOSTAC^® for our partner.

What is the output?

The output is a well-defined and documented roadmap with effective control measures. 

An organisation is a sum of all business units or processes. And the probability of success of any organisation is greatly enhanced if the efforts of these business units are focussed in one direction.

Which is why we have adopted systems thinking as our way of organisational analysis for optimal decision making and project management. It’s our way of creating long-term solutions and minimise unintended consequences.

Why the need for Systems Thinking?

Systems thinking takes into account all the relevant factors when implementing changes. By leveraging the relationship between different business units, it helps to identify points of intervention having the greatest impact.

In short, once you have the end-to-end picture of the business and all its interconnected elements, the efficiency of project management is enhanced exponentially. 

System thinking helps businesses improve upon:

• The costs and schedule estimates by managing re-work.
• Integrity and value of delivered product & services by anticipating additional systems required for the project.
• Understanding of stakeholders throughout the project lifecycle.

How do we apply systems thinking?

We work with numerous partners having complex business structures and varying challenges. As a full-fledged digital service provider, we need to make the best use of each & every one of our resources to provide transformative results for our partners. And systems thinking makes it possible. 

1. Understanding Perceptions with Causal Loop Model

The thinking can be understood using the causal loop method which considers that if A can cause B, then B can cause A simultaneously.

This methodology aims to ensure that the project’s thinking is moving towards Goal attainment. It is crucial to Identify the right moment of positive feedback that has the most impact on boosting project productivity. 

A project can also be considered as a multi-loop system where strong human action can affect decision making. 

2. Power of Soft System Thinking

One of the biggest challenges projects face is they are considered as closed systems which hamper innovations and creativity.

An open or soft system approach like our Agile development services allows adjustments and project complexity to be accounted for by subjectively acknowledging the problem and encouraging different perspectives from multiple stakeholders. 

Not only does it boost morale, but multiple viewpoints can also uncover certain business aspect the project management hadn’t thought of. 

3. Thinking across the Project Lifecycle

To apply the right systems thinking approach throughout the project, it is important to map out the entire project lifecycle.

For instance, during initial commencement it prudent to apply the soft systems methodology, during the implementation, the causal loop model ensures the right feedback at the right moment, and during the project review, the soft systems can be applied again to promote an open mindset.

4. Systems Thinking Tools

A process is incomplete without the right tools required to support it. Let’s check out some of our tools.

Brainstorming tools are designed to help us see the bigger picture of the whole system, where all facets of the project’s challenge can be explored.

Fishbone diagram is a good example of dynamic thinking tools, which represent event patterns via feedback loops and map all the aspects of the project.
A variety of graphical function diagrams are used to visualise relationships between variables. The structure-behaviour creates structure in correspondence to varying behaviour, while the policy structure diagrams depict the decision-making process that drives policies.