To close the marketing gaps, you need control over the four cornerstones required for a stable and strong marketing department — budgets, people, data, and content.
Budget: Gain visibility into all spend and easily reallocate budget
Does it feel like you’re entering the Bermuda Triangle when it comes time to manage budgets and spending? Visibility is the key to your budgeting success, enabling you to make informed decisions and adjust with agility. Which marketing projects were most and least successful? How much did they cost? What was your ROI? With full insight into campaign dollars, you’re better equipped to make real-time decisions, agile adjustments, and impactful reallocations – which makes budgeting a lot less painful and a lot more manageable.
People: Streamline marketing collaboration
Your professional success is tied to your ability to make sure corporate strategic goals are infused within every marketing activity. Real-time insight into exactly what your team is working on can help you ensure agile processes are in place and that everyone is working efficiently toward a common set of goals. At the same time, happy employees make productive employees. With streamlined, agile marketing you can also help your team feel more empowered and in control, vastly improving job satisfaction and reducing turnover – all while maximizing productivity.
Data: Harness the power of your data
You need control over two types of data to be efficient, productive, and successful: operational data (how you’re running your marketing operations) and customer data.
How long does it take to create a campaign/experience/piece of content? How many people did it take to create it? How much money did you spend on it? What tasks are in the queue now? Who has the capacity and skills to work on these projects? This level of operational data promotes intelligent resource planning so you can be sure team members are allocated to projects appropriately based their available capacity and rolls. This level of insight empowers you to adjust processes for greater efficiency and outcomes, pinpoint where your team is spending their time, and track spending to make sure you’re getting a return on your marketing investment.
Customer data is truly the key to the customer experience. You need the ability to access, organize, and make sense of that data to gain a complete view of your customers, no matter where that data resides — from marketing clouds, marketing automation solutions, and analytic platforms to a scattered set of mini customer data marts across email, digital, display ad, and real-time channels. Optimizing the return on your channel marketing investment also requires a direct line of sight into activities and results at every level of distribution. You need the ability to measure what matters most to your organization, such as campaign performance, community health, fund usage, lead status, channel trends and more.
Content: Create consistent, engaging, brand-compliant content
If you’re like most marketing leaders, your team is using an average of 13 tactics[i], 23 channels[ii] and six social media networks to connect and engage with customers.[iii] That requires a lot of content. Working harder isn’t the answer. Your marketing efforts need to be more intelligent, able to scale with demands of the digital world.
Successful marketers need the ability to quickly and easily create, re-use and re-purpose content that is brand and legally compliant. Did corporate marketing launch a successful global campaign? Think of the potential ROI if regional marketers can leverage elements of that campaign, and localize them for their own audiences. Did your agency create a brochure for you that you need to turn into a flyer? Do you have access to the source files or will you have to start over? Do you still have rights to the images or do you need to extend the contract?
How do we get control of the four cornerstones?
With streamlined, automated processes, and innovative technologies, you can bring order to the chaotic world of marketing, bridging the gap between the customer experience and marketing complexity. Learn more about how you can take control of your budget, people, data, and content to achieve better marketing results. Watch our recently recorded webinar – Mind the Gap: Making Marketing More Productive.
This is Part 4 in a four-part blog series. Be sure to check out the rest!