Want To Improve Marketing Efficiency? Optimise, Don’t Build.

“Marketing Efficiency” Doesn’t Always Mean Faster Time to Market

Look at the projects currently in your pipeline. What proportion is made up of developing or designing new things? New campaigns, new emails, new journey flows, new reports? Now compare that to optimisation tasks like A/B testing, improving conversion rates, improving analytics, or finding friction points in current customer journeys.

Chances are, most of your work is in the “new stuff” category. Marketers love new stuff. 

The trouble is that new stuff uses up your resources a lot faster than optimising what already exists. Even if you find faster ways to build and launch new things, the relative gain is minimal when compared to what’s required to get from concept to launch. 

Optimising your resources (including creative assets, customer data, people’s time and energy, and technology) is almost always more efficient. That’s not surprising when you think about it.

What might be surprising is that it’s also more effective. Optimising often leads to improvements that keep customers around longer. That’s good for business growth. Loyal customers spend 67% more on average. They’re also 64% more likely to purchase frequently and 31% more willing to pay a higher price.

How to Move from Building to Optimising and Improve Marketing Efficiency

Making this change requires a matured approach to customer experience management (CXM). Processes, workflows, team structure, data management, and content creation pipelines all play in. The business as a whole also needs to agree that what they’re doing is worth the effort.

This is why it’s important to understand and communicate that optimising improves marketing efficiency and effectiveness. If we’re going to overhaul ways of working, we need a reason tied to bottom-line results and business growth. 

        1. Set Goals That Make Sense

Before you do anything, clarify how it’ll benefit the business. Usually that means understanding how it benefits the customer. After all, happy customers are the engine of any successful business.

We recently published a customer intelligence playbook that talks about reworking KPIs and metrics so that customer-centric outcomes become everyone’s focus. The upshot is:

• Define and communicate business outcomes like revenue, profit, or market share.
• Identify the KPIs that drive those outcomes, whether it’s retention, lifetime value, total customer numbers, revenue per customer, new value, retained value, or something else.
• Track tactical metrics that indicate how you’re performing against those KPIs, such as CRM engagement, media performance, or website/app interactions.

These are unskippable steps on your journey to marketing efficiency. “Efficiency” and “effectiveness” are meaningless without a goal.

        2. Identify the Efficiency Problem

Start by mapping your end-to-end processes to pinpoint efficiency blockers. You’re looking for places where work repeatedly stalls, indicating that something needs to change:

• Approvals take weeks.
• Briefs arrive half-baked.
• Too many layers of sign-off.
• Siloed or missing customer intelligence.
• No creative templates or asset library.

Once you find the culprit, dig deeper to learn what needs fixing. For example, clunky approval processes could be a sign of unnecessary bureaucracy. Or they could be a hangover from historic issues with low-quality creative.

You need to diagnose the real problem before you can solve it.

        3. Build Processes That Stick and Workflows That Scale

Formal Yet Flexible

Good workflows have rules, but not so many that they become rigid and restrictive. For example, you might use briefing templates that require a certain level of completeness before they can be submitted.

Effective and efficient teams don’t always need step-by-step workflows. They often find organic ways to collaborate. The trick to marketing efficiency is to start with structure but empower process owners to decide when to lower certain guardrails.

Read more: Tips to Rethink Your Marketing Operations Organisation.

Build Modular Systems

Always needing to build customer experiences from scratch is the enemy of efficiency. 

Create a system that lets you reuse and recombine assets without risking compliance, consistency or quality. That could mean a library of assets that slot together in different variations:

• Copy blocks.
• Images.
• Headlines.
• CTAs.

Marketing automation tools can then assemble the right offer for the right customer at the right moment on the right channel.

Change management is often the hardest part here. Old-school managers are more comfortable with in-situ approvals. Unfortunately, this bureaucracy is bad for efficiency. 

Think of it like programmatic advertising. Google Ads doesn’t design every variation from scratch. It pulls from a set of approved components, tests different variations, analyses the results, and continues iterating to find the highest-performing combination. The same principle works for journeys and campaigns. Approve once, then let the system do its job.

We’ve helped more than a few clients move from building everything from scratch to working with repeatable assets. In every case, the benefits were immediate and impressive:

• Direct Wines is moving from seasonal campaigns to always-on journeys to cut development time by 50-57% and reduce monthly meeting loads by up to 90%.
• Vertu Motors hunted down manual processes to cut campaign development tasks from 6 hours to just minutes, and saw ROI in the first month.
• A global toy brand uses repeatable email blocks and a set number of needs-based customer journeys to streamline campaigns.
• Ten Lifestyle Group will save hours on every client email by using dynamic templates powered by liquid script.

Spend Time on Optimisations that Drive Growth

So, what does marketing efficiency look like day to day? It’s the discipline of building once and improving constantly.

Mature organisations only build new things if:

• There’s a clear value proposition (against customer outcomes).
• Nothing exists that can be adapted or optimised.
• It can be tracked, measured, and optimised.

And they’ll do it upfront, not ad-hoc. We tend to recommend an 80/20 optimise/build split as a good target. Although the exact ratio varies between organisations.

There will always be exceptions. That’s marketing for you. But the more you can avoid building something new to solve a problem and instead look for optimisation opportunities, the more efficient, consistent, innovative, and energetic your marketing organisation will be.

The Role of Data and Analysis in Efficient Marketing Operations

Everything Needs Evidence

Smart operations are built on measurable insights and calculated risks, not assumptions and leaps of faith. Without evidence-based analysis, it’s impossible to know what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs improvement.

Let Data Lead

Responding to a Gartner survey, one-quarter of marketing analysts (26%) said decision-makers ignore marketing data. Another 24% said they reject marketing’s recommendations. And another 24% said management relies on good ol’ gut instinct.

Which leaves *checks notes* just one quarter of decision-makers who let data drive decisions.

The survey also found that marketing data only influences 53% of decisions, and 1 in 3 marketers cherry-pick the data that supports their preconceived story.

Quick caveat: these numbers come from a relatively small survey of marketing analytics users (n=377) published in 2022. Still, they probably echo your experience.

Marketing efficiency and gut feeling aren’t compatible. Data must be deeply embedded in decision-making for optimisation to become a continuous cycle of experimenting, measuring, learning, and refining.

You Can (and Should) Always Improve Marketing Efficiency

Optimisation is never-ending. There will always be something to tweak, refine, investigate or improve. A more personalised customer journey. A smoother offer-building process. A faster campaign QA workflow. Better briefs. Faster sign-offs. Clearer reports.

The point isn’t to reach an end state. It’s to keep improving.

Of course, you need to start somewhere. Clarify what matters most to customers – the processes or strategies that currently have the biggest impact on customer-centric KPIs – and prioritise those areas.

Every incremental improvement from there drives growth and builds momentum. Over time, continuous improvement tasks will replace new developments in your To-Do list. Optimisation will become part of your culture. As your marketing operations continue maturing, your teams become tightly aligned, incredibly efficient, and laser-focused on work that delivers measurable customer value.

This guide is part of our in-depth series on designing and optimising customer journeys. You can download our comprehensive Customer Journey Playbook now to read more.