Behavioral Marketing: Delivering Personalized Experiences At Scale

14Managing UpwardsSocialize If You Must, Prove Results Every Time

Although the previous chapter focused on how to gear up and nurture the right team in order to bring behavioral marketing to life, this chapter provides a how-to exercise for the single practitioner or tiny team. This thinking is designed for the marketer who has a decent, if old-school, management structure that's not necessarily going to help you much strategically. These marketers certainly want better campaign-level performance and revenue lift, but they aren't going to be much help in getting there. This is a unique scenario that requires both an expert touch and a clear understanding of results-oriented internal positioning.

Two-thirds of the effort is recognizing the challenge ahead, and that recognition should be a major factor in how you move forward. Although other peers are going to have a smoother road forward than you, that doesn't mean you can't also make great progress. I've personally seen more than one marketer who figured out how to bring behavioral marketing to life in an overly hostile environment and then went on to massive success at a different company. It wasn't necessarily a walk in the park, but accomplishing that in a subpar environment simply emboldened them the next time out, when they clearly selected a more supportive environment.

Seeing the Tree among the Forest

So what are the leading indicators that you're going to be swimming upstream against in your effort to bring behavioral ...