The marketing landscape is constantly in flux. Today’s marketers must deliver consistent, personalized, compelling experiences across all channels. They’re tasked with developing new ways to generate leads, manage campaigns, as well as create and maintain a strong brand.
Pair these high expectations with rapidly changing customer needs and increasingly limited resources, and marketing teams are tackling new channels, embracing new technologies, and expanding their strategies in order to keep up—resulting in disconnected processes and fragmented teams.
And this problem is only magnified for global teams who are struggling to stay in sync across borders and time zones.
As a CMO, how do you gain visibility into what your team is working on, what progress has been made, or what’s coming down the pipeline? And even more importantly, how those efforts will contribute to your brand and overall customer experience? How do you report on the impact of your campaigns, and adjust strategies accordingly?
62% of enterprise CMOs say visibility into marketing performance is a top challenge — and a top priority.
The good news is, you can dramatically improve visibility into your marketing organization and your ability to deliver an on-time and on-budget successful project with these tips.
Visibility Into Goals
As a senior marketer, you know your strategic goals inside out: deliver more marketing qualified leads, improve your MQL to SQL ratio, increase brand awareness, and improve the overall customer experience.
But most organizations aren't particularly effective at communicating or reinforcing these objectives across the larger team. When your team is fielding a stream of incoming requests and new assignments, they're focused on executing, and it's all too easy to lose sight of the business value of each task.
That's why strategic objectives must be continually communicated—not just once, when kicking off a new campaign or strategy—and why you need to help your team convert those high-level goals into specific marketing objectives.
Define a marketing process that starts with a creative brief that clearly links the request to a larger strategic objective. If that connection can't be made, it's a waste of your team's time.
Make sure your teams can write effective briefs, and require them to do so for every campaign asset. A short email or chat message may be a quick way to get work started, but incomplete instructions only waste valuable time and resources.
Download a free creative brief template that you can customize to your team’s needs
Visibility Into Plans & Progress
Spreadsheets are a massive headache, and just about the least effective way to track campaign timelines and work status. They’re never up-to-date, a single inaccurate entry can screw up the whole thing, work gets lost, and they’re hard to read. And yet spreadsheets are still used by many marketing teams to manage their marketing calendars.
Visual campaign timelines provide intuitive, easy-to-read views of all your marketing activities and plans. They update in real time so you always see current work status, flag missed milestones and overdue tasks, and easily spot potential conflicts. Make the switch from spreadsheets and your team will thank you.
Visual campaign timelines in Wrike
Visibility Into Processes
Even with a marketing team that’s together in the same office, it’s difficult to always know who’s working on what and when. That problem is only compounded when your team is remote.
Say Janice is tasked with writing copy for a new paid ad campaign, while Karen is assigned to the landing page. They each get started in their own separate Word documents, not knowing that the other has already begun work. By the time Karen realizes Janice has already started working, they've each sunk hours into their separate assignments.
The result? Rework in trying to align the two tasks, wasted time, frustration, and confusion.
Collaboration software is designed to prevent these issues. Wrike’s custom statuses make it easy to clearly define workflows and processes for your team. Everyone can follow an efficient process, see where work stands, and know exactly what their colleagues are working on right now—no matter where they’re located. Instead of working in the dark, Janice and Karen would have seen each other’s updates and easily collaborated.
A work management solution provides a shared environment for campaign planning, execution, and performance analysis. Without one, it’s much harder to get the visibility you need to help your team work efficiently. It’s your responsibility as a marketing leader to establish clear, consistent processes, and to provide the tools necessary for success.
Visibility Into Resources
Who’s working overtime and who’s twiddling their thumbs? What’s been completed and what still needs to be approved? Which projects or tasks are eating up too much time and money?
Without clear visibility, it’s exponentially harder to manage your team’s time and resources.
Insights into the number of revision rounds it takes for projects to get approved, how many incoming requests your team is fielding and how those requests are prioritized—this kind of information is crucial for improving inefficient processes, managing your marketing resources more effectively, and producing better work, faster.
Marketing operations tools that can provide this information and support agile approaches to work are essential for marketing leaders to improve their team's workflow and results.
Visibility Into Performance
Getting custom reports from your analytics team or external agency can take days, or even weeks. So how can you see whether your team is on track to achieving their objectives right now—and share that information with fellow company leaders?
By using a work management tool instead of manually collecting updates, you can quickly analyze your team's results, broken down by geographic location, marketing activity, audience segment, channel, etc. You can see exactly how you're delivering on objectives in a matter of minutes, and make the necessary course corrections immediately.
Improve Your Marketing Visibility with Wrike
Wrike helps global marketing teams work together to manage and produce marketing campaigns on time, on budget, and on brand. Start a trial of Wrike for Marketers to coordinate your team's efforts, track resources and results, and get the insights you need for marketing success.
Sources: ivci.com, roberthalf.co.uk, contently.com, simplehq.co
