Online Marketing Strategic Planning Through Learning Launch Approach

Challenge   In my organization’s I have been awarded to look upon the marketing and sales department and  my challenge is to develop a strategy via improvement of workflow i.e. activities in order to  increase sales, thus increasing the growth through the online channel and further spending of the  marketing allocation on the right campaigns. The project scope includes the marketing and sales  department, comprising of five interns and me as the lead manager, as well as the operation  department and IT department, with whom we will be working closely. The project throughput is  limited to internal resources (i.e., internal budget allocation and intern time). The project time  span is 45 business days and the solution should include an even distribution of marketing and  sales strategy to drive sales up. The prime focus here is to uncover what our team members  including intern, as well as key stakeholders consisting of customers and other departments,  consider it to be ineffective or problematic with regard to the strategy.     Selection   Our intern team has already gone through several design thinking activities and tools, thus we are  ready to try the learning launch. The learning launch as we know is an experiment meant to  quickly test the hypothesis and prototype and then consider for full scale application based on the  results.

Application   For the first learning launch, our team focused on the structure and execution framework to be  followed for online marketing. In particular, the goal is to see whether it can be structured i.e.  tasks, projects, and processes, for adopting the project management strategy effectively and  making the process more agile. This tested our assumption that the structure and proper  execution model were the main causes of our workflow challenge. Two overcome this; the team  went through digital workshop of 3 days on online marketing. Next, the team with the intern  carried out on hand application of the learning for effective and agile workflow design for  meeting the goals. It is expected that a document with a clear description of the new, more agile  processes/workflow will be developed. For the second learning launch, the team was tasked to  focus on gaining clarity about the required sub task and priorities based on the previous trial.  This lead to the testing of hypothesis and assumption and revealed that the prioritization of tasks  was the main cause of workflow challenge. The team then went on to carry out anonymous  survey from different stake holders from the larger customer base to other departments. The  surveys included questions consisting of efficacy of new proposed process, understanding of the  process and the task prioritization within a two-week timeframe.    Insight   Through application of learning launch tool, the team identified the hypothesis and designed  launches to test these model. Additionally, through the anticipated results, it was considered that  through more agile and strategic approach, improve of the workflow and increase in sales can be

achieved. Thus the managerial stakeholders would highly appreciate the approach and will be  open to take up the developed workflow strategy. Although due to some anomaly in the actual  results the managerial department and IT department expressed some concerns thus moving  forward the team will review this insight given by the stakeholders and incorporate it into future  launch designs.     Approach   As the team in its initial stages has gone through different design thinking activities/tools and  currently the appropriate tool to apply at this stage was learning launch. As previously discussed,  the team will review the insight gained from the first launch and incorporate this insight into  future launch designs.

