At first we collected and analyzed all the marketing data. During one week, our manager with advanced psychological skills spoke informally with each employee of the marketing department and related departments. We made a map of existing business processes and their effectiveness, as well as a schedule and format for employees’ personal reports and partner reporting.
Then we took a look at the effectiveness and cost of working services. On the very first week serious problems were identified affecting the results of both the marketing agency and Fort Family itself, as well as the results of franchisees:
Further analysis showed that this approach directly reduced the quality of advertising: copywriters wrote inexpedient texts, social networks were “winded up”, advertising was launched randomly, there was no comparison of the effectiveness of channels. Having delved into the technical details, it also became obvious that there was no clear infrastructure for working with leads, analytics.
Since there was no option to stop the current work completely and redo everything, we started cleaning up business processes and reducing unnecessary employees. First of all to allocate work in the context of downsizing we took a wide-profile marketologist to the position of head of the lead generation department and reduced the amount of internal reporting. This made it possible to painlessly remove the current manager without interrupting the current advertising campaigns and maintain a positive mood in the team.
Further, 3 technical employees, the appointment of which is still a mystery to us, were reduced: a tildologist, a specialist for Roistat end-to-end analytics (which did not work) and his assistant. The in-house designer was transferred from a salary form of payment to a piecework one. At the same time, we kept a full–time layout designer with DevOps skills and hired a front-end programmer. He ensured the optimization of the company’s technical resources.
During the month end-to-end analytics was all set, CRM Bitrix24 was optimized, all the company’s landings were redone and their number was halved. Also we designed a new multi-landing on our own server for all the franchisees. Google Analytics and Yandex Metrika were installed on each site via Google Tag Manager containers. We set up conversions and collection of them. Then we launched Google Optimize for A\B landing tests, efficiency estimation and detection of new ways to improve conversion rates. Thus, the volume of traffic on the landing pages has increased significantly, and the cost of third-party services and specialists has decreased.
Next we moved on to advertising campaigns and implementing a new approach to advertising. As part of the Zoom conference common for all Fort Family partners, we presented a holistic marketing system with an emphasis on three main metrics:
Previously, the lead generation department of the MC divided leads into segments and assigned targetologists a target price per lead. The salary of specialists was based solely on the price of the lead and their number. In fact, a whole department was engaged in collecting the cheapest junk traffic, which was practically not converted into sales.
Evaluation of the effectiveness of advertising channels revealed that the undisputed leaders among them were Facebook and Instagram. The company however focused on the VK target, and there was simply no competent Facebook Ads taretologist on staff. We replaced two employees who did not even understand the basic principles of targeting with one experienced Facebook specialist.
Yandex Direct turned out to be the second most effective channel. We hired an experienced specialist to work with it. With the help of two staff members he completely changed the approach to campaigns. The remaining targetologists and their supervisor were reduced, while maintaining the overall payroll at the same level and fully optimizing advertising tools.
We started to hold training meetings within the department, including joint analyzes of ads campaigns, marketing strategies and situations of individual partners. Marketing goals were defined as
All the SMM was delegated to the one competent specialist who began managing franchisees’ pages in social media, according to the main strategy, in a brand style, with constant frequency. Creatives were being prepared in batches, according to clear technical tasks, on time, in the proper style, in the right sizes for each network, with source code for A\B tests. All wind-uppers of likes and subscriptions were fired.
We implemented brief free-form internal reporting collected in pivot tables, from which any targetologist could find out the budget, all the required data for each campaign, and find links to suitable advertising materials without unnecessary communication. The work of the department has become clear and transparent.
A new reporting format was developed for network partners, with a presentation from a personal manager, an analysis of the results of the ads campaigns, a discussion of the processing of leads and sales, and recommendations from a marketologist. In addition, partners received access to operational data on their branches in automatic mode.
Between June and November 2019, the business unit was completely reorganized. Out of almost 50 employees, 30 remained, taking into account the admin posts. By December, we completely updated the advertising system and eliminated the accumulated problems. Fort Family entered 2020 with the following results: