Most businesses can get by with a primitive marketing infrastructure in their early days. A handful of channels, light tracking, and manual campaign management will do the trick when they only need to acquire dozens of customers a month. Then the growth happens and things fall apart. The ad-hoc approach that works at low scale becomes unmanageable at high scale.
If you want to scale your business, you need an infrastructure to acquire customers consistently that doesn’t get in the way of your growth. The marketing infrastructure you put in place now will determine whether you will crash at the wall of your ability to acquire customers.
Every scaling business needs a consistent and accurate source of insights into who their customers are and what they do once they arrive on the website. This should be a no-brainer, but many businesses operate with far too little visibility to make good decisions. When multiple channels are in the mix, it matters a great deal to know which ones work well enough to justify the effort and spend.
Analytics tracking needs to be thorough enough to cover the entire customer journey and not just the last interaction that brought them to convert. A customer may have discovered the business on one channel, done their research on another, and then converted after clicking through on yet a third channel.
Without visibility into channel performance, a business can’t budget for future advertising spend. If they have no clear idea about which channels work best, they risk wasting budgets on poor-quality channels without realizing the shifts that could make a world of difference to a high-quality one. The infrastructure that provides this visibility doesn’t need to be expensive, just reliable.
Relying on one or two customer acquisition channels is a recipe for disaster. Once the cost of acquiring a customer rises enough, it is almost certain to kill your growth. Scaling businesses set up a diverse range of channels to acquire customers. This way, they mitigate the risk of having their entire operation come to a grinding halt if one channel becomes unreliable.
This diversity can include a diverse selection of owned channels as well as paid ones. Email lists and maintaining them are owned channels. Content marketing is another, as is the SEO work businesses do on their websites. Paid advertising and the partnerships that businesses form in this space are classic examples of channels that can scale well in ways that owned channels can’t.
When exploring options for advertising push notification ads, businesses discover formats that complement existing channels rather than replacing them. Effective infrastructure combines multiple formats and platforms working together, not just adding more of the same type of advertising.
Getting in early with new channels that others haven’t flooded yet offers explosive growth opportunities. Businesses that got in early with content marketing or who moved into mobile advertising before everyone else had years of low costs and high returns.
Manual campaign management has its limits. As the business grows, the number of campaigns, ad sets, and unique test cases that need attention from creative marketers will become far too many for any human to optimize.
Scaling businesses can invest in tools that take care of the legwork once businesses reach a certain level of development. Automation doesn’t mean the complete removal of human input. The goal is to automate everything repetitive so that humans can focus on creative thinking and other areas that require human attention.
Many tasks can be automated when they fall within specified parameters. Bid adjustments, budget shifts between campaigns, and A/B testing can all run automatically if the right foundational systems are in place.
Businesses that scale best also build systems for launching new campaigns and testing channel performance, and variations of the creative elements in their ads. These systems are even more valuable when businesses have grown large enough that many people are involved in campaigns across different timelines.
Parts of marketing infrastructure contain data-based systems that allow scaling businesses to make data-based intelligent decisions that inform their strategies. A capable CRM software package helps businesses track the responses they get from customers and also segment their markets.
Segmentation models help separate out segments of the market and target them with appropriate responses. A lot is going on with this as businesses grow and scale their operations.
Where small businesses might segment their market into two or three categories based on simple markers like demographics, scaling businesses focus on things like age groups and purchase patterns. They may even factor in a customer’s engagement with previous messages from them. This allows marketers to treat customers as individuals rather than making a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing.
Integration means a lot at this level. When a business’s email platforms, CRMs, and analytics tools don’t work well together, they waste data scientists’ time trying to extract insights from messy data.
What works for a business when it is small and floundering isn’t going to cut it when they have scaled their operations. Scaling businesses invest in infrastructure that will prepare them for the future while solving today’s challenges.
They need systems that focus on future growth while addressing present challenges. This means choosing platforms that will grow with the business. It means setting up metrics that provide insights while still building an accurate view of who is responding to campaigns. It also means creating systems that work with whatever size teams people are put into.
The thought that goes into creating marketing infrastructure with as much attention as designing their products or focusing on operational excellence is part of what allows some businesses to scale and others not to.
The businesses that scale successfully treat marketing infrastructure as seriously as product development or operations. They invest in the systems, tools, and processes that enable consistent customer acquisition at increasing scale. This infrastructure doesn't guarantee growth, but its absence almost guarantees that growth will stall or become prohibitively expensive.