Organization brings greater clarity. Clarity brings more focus. And a marketing function, organized by its people and systems, needs clarity.
"The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious."
- Oswald Spengler
To create a more organized marketing function, it requires creating structure, improving the flow of information and streamlining decision-making. When priorities are established, they must be adopted into systems designed for effectively ORGANIZING the work. This requires examining team structures, management technology and planning methods.
Team Structures Define roles and management structures and provide them in a visible format. There are generally six groups of specialization within markeitng including strategy, creative, development, research, media and communications, customer experience and analytics. Every organization, however, is different. The typical specialized areas within those groups might include:
While dependent on strategy, industry and culture, appropriate functions will be organized by team size. Regardless, every member of the team should be aware of their responsibilities. The top trends in organizing a marketing team, as adapted from a recent HubSpot study, include the following styles:
This process may also reveal gaps in existing structures or a weaker capacity in specialized areas. These can become additional areas to include the backlog.
Traditional marketing job analysis often produces job descriptions that fall short of
compelling performance-based descriptions. Descriptions that focus on skills and experience don't potentially reach a larger, better pool of talent.
Marketing job descriptions that focus on performance measures and opportunities can produce better candidates, and ultimately better team members. Such descriptions include language around how the position will help to ‘create, lead, change, manage or produce’ meaningful outcomes for the organization.
Staying organized requires the right supporting software to keep information, people and objectives on track. Disorganized, under-utilized and inadequate technology implementations create unnecessary administrative work. This takes away from focusing efforts on more important strategic activities.
The options to manage marketing activities vary greatly by the size of your organization, customization needs and how you operate with other functions in the organization. Project management tools ultimately should drive efficiencies in marketing operations. The features often present in these tools that help keep teams organized and focused on what matters includes:
Evaluate what matters to your team with internal and external interviews, time studies (where do inefficiencies exist), mandatory requirements analysis and cost/benefit analysis work. Leave room for future growth but pick the features and functionalities that matter most and focus on getting those right first. There are a lot of options out there, but here are a few to consider:
Create a vendor matrix that looks at current and desired capabilities and maps to each of the above solutions. Look for opportunities to reduce redundancies between current toolsets. Also, consider what processes can be streamlined and how that can be factored into the return on investment in software purchases.
Manage and organize content assets in a database system to ensure clarity around ownership, revision dates, location, potential gaps, etc. It can be organized around products or services and type of content, or whatever makes sense for your environment. It should be accessible by all members of the organization to assist with locating relevant documents, web pages, videos, etc. The key is to treat your content like any other business asset. It took time, money and resources to produce it, so why let it collect dust? Like any other asset, it often requires regular maintenance, updates and polishing. A single data source of these assets gives you the ability to report on, search for and filter a list of what’s been published, requires review or needs
created. Each asset record could include:
Modeling the categories, styles, and types of messaging required for market success within the buyer’s journey can mean creating media formats and content types that address:
• Demand creation
• Meeting creation
• Opportunity creation
• Order creation
• Urgency creation
Mapping assets to these situations can ensure there’s an adequate amount of both descriptive and persuasive communications.
To develop greater competence around products and services, a central repository of information, ideally online, can serve as an important tool for faster and higher quality content development, consistent new hire onboarding and opportunities for continuous learning. It’s especially important in organizations with complex products and services and marketing needs. Too many dependencies on other internal staff members can create bottlenecks. These bottlenecks can prevent focus on what's important.
Managing the flow of information is key to preventing bottlenecks, developing internal knowledge and improving quality. Often email inboxes, file networks and chat platforms create silos of information and context. Social business tools, however, are platforms designed to get you out of your inbox, directory and chat window and onto one platform. Part social media, part intranet, part wiki, these platforms are the next one-stop shop for marketers, vendors, internal and external partners to collaborate, share information, manage projects and exchange ideas.
Many believe they are the next evolution of email and corporate chat technology, as they essentially combine these communication tools into one, and provide other enhanced features that eliminate internal corporate networks and file repositories. run polls, upload files, create workspaces, events and tasks, etc. Out of the email inbox, social chat window, internal network drive and project management application, and into one tool. Its central premise is to divide work into what they call spaces, groups of conversations, tasks, events, etc. that tie to an organization function or broader topic. These workspaces can be divided further into a web-based folder structure, containing relevant conversations, all of which can be tagged and then searched and filtered. The marketing space can be divided into areas around planning, partnerships and campaigns.
Operations can invite vendors, contractors and consultants into appropriate spaces to expand their team’s capacity. Marketing can create conversations with members of the organization before each meeting for everyone to capture ideas and action items real-time for future reference. Some tools on the market that are receiving praise in this area include:
Find a central place to manage all date-based activities and use color-coding and labels to differentiate the different types of events. This central calendar will be updated based on the frequency of your meeting and planning process and style of management. Ideally, this calendar will be fully integrated with your entire marketing suite, allowing you to directly tie production elements, metrics and team members in one place, giving a complete time-based picture of marketing efforts.
Campaigns typically include all the calendar items together, or can be identified within each calendar item record, in order to associate asset production, events, product launches, etc. into this broader category—important for tracking campaign-level impact and help to organize these smaller activities thematically. Knowing when a campaign begins and ends brings clarity to everyone involved, including other stakeholders in the organization.
Identify key events or time periods throughout
the year. Types may include:
As Marketing continues to become the “publishing” resource of organizations, the tools used by media companies to organize their content production become more relevant to marketing managers. A common example is the classic editorial calendar, which helps you schedule and assign content asset production and promotion.
Also, overlay on your editorial calendar various organization events to plan, promote and execute. You don’t want to lose sight of key external events that could impact performance or become opportunities to fill customer needs.
A careful analysis and mapping of the path in which a prospect or customer becomes a buyer, can provide clarity around where to devote efforts. It also provides a higher level of understanding around key points of interaction that may require rethink or redesign. Organizing your buyer’s journey in a clearly visible format can provide better visibility to the team for discovering these opportunities. Once mapped for various product and service lines, with an understanding every customer path and entry point will be different, you can map content, assets and experiences for each stage of the journey. Find gaps within the customer experience where marketing can improve delivery and execution. And look for ways to streamline or simplify the customer’s ability to get from point A to point B. Organizing all touchpoints a prospect or customer experiences can help identify areas that need greater focus.
While the old days of developing a heavily documented, 3-5 year marketing plan are
nearly over, annual planning is still necessary for establishing a clear picture of overall marketing realities, strategies and initiatives. Some of the areas to include are:
An annual plan should serve as a guide, not a rigid, verbose plan. It should be a living, breathing document that gets re-focused and adjusted as the market and business changes.
What should the marketing function of your business or organization achieve—increased demand, a new perception in your market, more awareness for your products and services, a better feedback loop for engineering, etc. If this isn’t clear or fully understood, begin to map out marketing’s link to business objectives. Business objectives are the quantifiable targets a company needs to achieve. They may tie to revenue and customer base growth, market share, profitability and operational efficiencies. Primary marketing priorities, goals and strategies must map back to these key objectives.
Marketing must decide where and how it can impact these business objectives. The next step is to outline what priorities marketing can reasonable handle based on capacity and timing. These priorities become the top areas of focus for marketing leadership. Marketing Goals Marketing goals turn the priorities into quantifiable statements. They will be different for every organization and requires some conversations with your leadership team and other stakeholders. Get specific and reasonable about the results you want to achieve: ie. $10 million in additional revenue. Some goal areas might include:
Stay organized around a set of a few realistic and achievable goals.
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