Creative Leaders: Be Consultants Not Just Service Providers
An interview with Jason Resch, Vice President and Creative Services Director at Umpqua Bank.(This is part of a series on managing and creating world-class internal creative teams.) With the increased pressure to deliver more output faster, creative teams — and especially their creative directors — must find ways to manage work and teammates efficiently. Creative leaders must find ways to behave as a marketing project manager, and offer themselves as professional services experts. But what is a professional services consultant? This interview series seeks to learn how creative leaders can succeed even under these circumstances and what advice they have for others in the field. Here, we talk with Jason Resch, Vice President and Creative Services Director at Umpqua Bank as well as assistant professor at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. At PNCA, Jason established and now serves as Director of the Center4Design, where students can work on real client projects under his supervision. His diverse experience includes music licensing with Rumblefish, experiential marketing for Red Bull, event marketing for NAU, award-winning multi-touch design project management for Citrix, Johnson Controls, and McAfee, award-winning work for both Nike and Target at Wieden+Kennedy, and he recently led a team of creatives to secretly build the brand identity for Xbox ONE. Jason was also an influencer in the making of our eBook, The Definitive Guide to Building a World-Class Internal Creative Agency. You created the Center4Design at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Can you tell us about the program and what inspired you to start it? I first joined PNCA as the guy teaching marketing to a group of artists. Initially, the topic was not met with much enthusiasm. However, shifting the topic towards being more informed about your audience ultimately led to the evolution of the program from fine art to commercial art. This paved the way for the creation of the Center4Design, which acts as a design agency within an art school. The goal: create opportunities for the students to connect with the community in order to develop actual deliverables rather than just “class work.” How do you get your students and your team at Umpqua to think of themselves as leaders as well as designers? Upon discussing the power of marketing as a discipline, a student recently said something that made us chuckle a bit: "So we have superpowers? Like in Spiderman — with great power comes great responsibility?’ It opened up a deep conversation around what we do as creatives and how we do it. The majority of us left feeling like we could better serve the industry if we acted as consultants. Not just service providers, but strategic partners who can contribute to the big picture. That conclusion continues to drive me as a manager/educator to this day. [inlinetweet prefix="" tweeter="" suffix="via @Wrike"]"We could better serve the industry if we acted as consultants." —Jason Resch, Vice President & Creative Services Director, Umpqua Bank[/inlinetweet] What are the biggest challenges in marketing that you see right now ? Social media has opened up a medium for anyone interested in having a very vocal and honest opinion about goods/services. Marketing attempts to differentiate, but I believe it has to try harder than ever to find a balance between being authentic while simultaneously pushing its message. What blogs, podcasts, websites, or other great design resources do you regularly follow or reference? This is a great question. On a typical day, I often find myself at Design Milk, Cabin Porn, Core77, Draplin.com, Fast Company, LinkedIn, Remodelista, Gardenista, I am also oddly fascinated by TheFancy. I definitely look forward to every issue of Communication Arts. And a new issue of Plazm always makes my day. Build Your Internal Creative Team We hope you got some insight from our interview with Jason. For a comprehensive guide to building your creative agency, download our free eBook: The Definitive Guide to Building a World-Class Internal Creative Agency. Author Bio:Kate Thome is a writer and consultant. In over 15 years in banking and payments in various marketing, analytics and risk-related roles, Kate developed a keen understanding of the internal workings of marketing and creative organizations. She's worked for Visa, HSBC, and Capital One, leading marketing teams to success. Her writing appears on LinkedIn, Mutha Magazine and Talking Soup. She blogs about her memoir in process at http://irememberthatnight.blogspot.com. Follow Kate on Twitter @kthome219.
How to Build Your Next Year's Marketing Plan
Looking ahead of schedule and devoting ample time to planning out your campaigns and marketing milestones is not only essential for success, but also for allocating resources and finding where gaps exist. Waiting too long to plan can result in unrealistic expectations, team goals that don't align with company objectives, and a marketing team scrambling to throw something together as quickly as possible instead of focusing on top quality output.
Creative Leaders: Balance Business Strategy and the Latest Technologies
An interview with Alex Calicchia, Founder & President of Hive Partners.(This is part 1 of a series on managing and creating world-class internal creative teams.) With the increasing speed and digitalization of business, creative teams are under a lot of pressure to deliver projects - faster, better and in higher volumes. With this interview series, we learn how creative leaders can succeed even under these circumstances and we share their advice with others in the field. In this interview, we converse with Alexander Calicchia, Founder & President of Hive Partners, who has 25 years executive experience in the financial services sector as both strategic planner and project manager. Prior to this, he held senior leadership positions at Capital One and regional banks such as Amegy Bank and MidSouth Bank. In those positions he's built internal creative agencies from scratch, grown creative teams, and driven marketing and MarTech strategy — all while working past internal challenges. His creative agencies became strategic partners for their larger organizations. Here's his outlook on what it takes to lead an internal creative team to success. Alex also contributed to our free eBook, The Definitive Guide to Building a World-Class Internal Creative Agency. On the challenges of marketing What are the biggest changes you see in marketing happening right now and over the next few years? First, I think the pace of change is in constant flux. The technology with which we can communicate with our target audiences is always changing. This requires assimilating information and changes at breakneck speed. If you stop to reflect for too long, your competitors outflank you. But without reflection we might miss the next big Idea. Second, because the pace of change is so fast, there is a void in experienced talent that can use the newest solutions. This puts more pressure on leadership to be aware of the next big thing so they can be hiring ahead of the curve. Third, because of this rapid pace of change, institutions of higher learning need to focus on the foundational aspects of strategy and not just how to navigate the latest tech. In fact, creative leaders need to demand this change from institutions. I often see lots of great tacticians who can navigate the latest high-tech innovations in the digital and social media space but who lack a core understanding of business strategy. "I often see lots of great tacticians who can navigate the latest high-tech innovations in the digital and social media space but who lack a core understanding of business strategy." —Alex Calicchia, Founder & President, Hive Partners On being a creative leader What's one piece of advice you'd give to a new leader now heading an internal creative team? Trust your instinct AND trust your team. You are not in it alone and if you set a clear vision and hold your team accountable to the goals you set forth. You will gain their respect and also get the greatest output from them. What's the difference between leading an internal creative team vs. leading an agency? I don't think they're all that different. At its core, the client leads the strategy and the creative team. Without strong leadership on the strategy, the internal or external creative team is likely to miss the mark. It's critical that the client drive the strategy and define what is expected from the creative message. Who is a creative leader you admire and why? This one is easy. Stan Richards. I was lucky enough to work for The Richards Group early on in my career. Stan and his team have demonstrated time and time again that they can keep up with the changing information consumption preferences of customers while creating strategically-driven messaging that resonates with them. What are some blogs, podcasts, websites or other great design resources that you regularly follow? I find myself going through Flipboard at lunch, when taking a break, or before going to bed. I set my preferences so I receive a regular stream of information on topics such as business, film, design, emerging technologies, branding, business intelligence, street style, culture, personal development, and ethics. I believe that in order to develop great strategies and ultimately great messaging, you have to look in areas that are not always your core discipline. [inlinetweet prefix=" " tweeter="" suffix="via @Wrike"]"Trust your instinct AND trust your team." —Alex Calicchia[/inlinetweet], Founder & President, Hive Partners On creating value for your company/clients How did you get your first big career "break?" How would you advise people looking to start a career in the creative space? My big career break actually came through an internal layoff due to a RIF (reduction in force) at the organization I was working for. Initially, I was a casualty of the RIF. But rather then accept the layout without a fight, I chose to challenge my layoff as a missed opportunity to keep a strategic thinker on staff during what was going to be a difficult economic period for the company. I laid out a scenario that illustrated that I could focus on both strategy and the day-to-day tasks thus ensuring a smooth transition through the layoffs. You recently launched Hive Partners. Tell us about what Hive does and your inspiration for starting it. Hive Partners helps organizations harness the individual and collective intelligence of teams. We design custom solutions tailored to our clients needs; whether it be around strategic planning, leadership development, or problem solving. The inspiration for HIVE really came from years of working with internal teams who often struggled with growth. Just as in a beehive, each individual — each bee —has a role. But when the hive is under threat from the outside, the collective intelligence of the hive kicks in and everyone works together to defeat that threat. At HIVE, we look for ways to amplify the individual intelligence of teams while ensuring that, should the organization come under threat, individuals are prepared to work collectively as a team to ensure long-term sustainability. Now, Go Build Your Creative Team We hope you learned a lot from the discussion with Alex. For a comprehensive guide to building your creative agency, download our free eBook: The Definitive Guide to Building a World-Class Internal Creative Agency. Author Bio:Kate Thome is a writer and consultant. In over 15 years in banking and payments in various marketing, analytics and risk-related roles, Kate developed a keen understanding of the internal workings of marketing and creative organizations. She's worked for Visa, HSBC, and Capital One, leading marketing teams to success. Her writing appears on LinkedIn, Mutha Magazine and Talking Soup. She blogs about her memoir in process at http://irememberthatnight.blogspot.com. Follow Kate on Twitter @kthome219.
5 Steps for Making Your Marketing Team More Efficient
From the mobile boom to the rise of social media, the realm of marketing has grown far beyond just promotional emails and consistent content. It's not a one size fits all solution, but here are five surefire ways to start building a more efficient and collaborative marketing team.
5 Future Marketing Job Titles You Should Be Hiring For Right Now
Since buzzwords like social shares, mobile marketing, and (wait for it) Big Data are nothing new and don't really provide a competitive advantage any longer, the marketer of the future will be nothing like the marketer of the past... or present. Marketing has changed more in the past two decades than it has in the last 80 years and we are all just trying to keep up. From data to design to content to creative, customers are becoming harder and harder to impress.
6 Traits of Successful CMOs
CMOs are under tremendous pressure to deliver, and the challenge is proving difficult to face. According to The Wall Street Journal, average CMO tenure is currently just 42 months — down a full six months over the last two years. In the UK, the average tenure of CMOs is only 18 months. It's by far the shortest in the C-suite: CEOs average 7.2 years, for example, and CFOs 5.7 years.
How Leading CMOs Create a Culture of Excellence
It’s totally possible to foster an environment where roles and responsibilities are clear, goals are agreed upon, deadlines are met, and your whole team is able to produce top-notch work like a well-oiled machine. Find out how you can build a culture of excellence at your organization.
5 Rules for Scaling Your Marketing Operations Successfully
Marketing organizations are under tremendous pressure to perform. Budgets aren’t growing, but expectations are. How do you do more with less, without compromising on quality? For marketing leaders at growing companies who are ready to expand their programs, scaling marketing operations is a top priority. But doing so comes with major challenges: coordinating different teams while managing priorities, resources, and metrics in a way that doesn’t slow you down is no easy task. But bigger doesn’t have to mean slower or less effective. By scaling your marketing operations, your growing marketing organization can stay lean and agile while continuing to deliver campaigns that impress customers and fuel business growth. Wondering what is professional services marketing and how to excel at it? Follow these five rules to scale your marketing operations successfully. Rule 1: Ensure Your Strategy & Processes are Scalable Bigger doesn’t always mean better. Scaling your marketing efforts can create needless complexity, hinder collaboration, and slow your team down. Smart planning is needed to avoid these growing pains and keep your marketing organization running smoothly. So scale back before you scale up. Examine your current processes to see where you can streamline, determine which marketing efforts are generating a positive ROI, and cut back on what’s not working as well. To help determine whether you're in a good position to scale, ask yourself these questions: Do you know what distinguishes your brand from competitors in key vertical markets, or areas you've targeted for market expansion? Can you clearly articulate that difference? Being able to scale successfully means knowing what attracts and retains the customers you've already acquired, and leveraging that knowledge for growth that's sustainable. Rule 2: Make Sure Your Team is Ready Think about your team and its current workload and responsibilities. Are they equipped to handle a ramp up in projects without neglecting current customers, products, and services? If your marketing coordinators are also supporting other departments, such as PR and customer service, analyzing performance data, and implementing new marketing tools, they’re doing too much. Go back to step one to streamline efforts and processes so your team has the bandwidth to scale. Or consider adding staff to balance your team's workload and responsibilities. Next, ask yourself: does your team have the expertise needed to launch successful campaigns in the new regions or industries you're targeting? If not, should you hire new staff now, or contract out until you have a better idea of the kind of expertise your team needs? Evaluate your current team to identify each member's strengths and expertise, find out where your talent gaps lie, and hire for those roles. Rule 3: Fail to Delegate, Fail to Scale According to a report done by CMO Council and Deloitte, 45% of CMOs say they spend most of their time reviewing and approving marketing plans, budgets and campaigns. 42% say most of their day is spent in meetings. 66% wish they could spend more time on business strategy with fellow company leaders, and 55% want more time to implement innovative new marketing approaches. Making good decisions takes time — something few marketing leaders have enough of. So save your attention for the most important cases, and delegate whenever you can. Set your team up to be able to make good decisions on your current marketing initiatives, so you can focus on executing new strategies. Because many marketing tasks are recurring, like setting up campaigns, planning and publishing content, or promoting events, so are many of the decisions your team has to make around these initiatives. For instance, which segments or channels should a new campaign target? Which metrics will you use to track success? Create templates for recurring tasks and projects, so processes are standardized and easy to follow. Set up reporting dashboards that make it easy to measure and share results. This visibility lets you quickly check in on campaigns without spending all your time in meetings, and it allows your team to stay aligned on priorities and know exactly what their colleagues are responsible for, and what goals they're driving towards. Email and spreadsheets are about the least scalable solution there is, so find a work management tool that can grow with your team. This guide will help you evaluate your options and find the right fit for your needs. Rule 4: Embrace Automation It’s the central puzzle of marketing: sending the right message to the right person at just the right time. But as you ramp up your marketing machine, launching simultaneous, complex campaigns, it becomes more and more difficult to do so. In order to keep up with the complexity and volume of customer and campaign data, you need the right technologies to track, analyze, and optimize your marketing efforts. So how do you scale without losing the personalization that's resonated with your customers and fueled your current successes? Leveraging marketing automation tools allows you to send highly targeted messages to leads and shorten the marketing cycle. Automated lead nurturing helps you build relationships with customers through helpful emails, follow-ups, social media engagement, etc., to determine when they’re truly sales-ready. And by automating your creative workflows, you streamline repetitive tasks, cut down on errors, and execute faster. Rule 5: What Can’t Be Measured Can’t Be Improved A recent study by HubSpot found that only 23% of companies are exceeding their revenue goals — and of those not exceeding their goals, 74% don’t know the number of monthly visits, leads, MQLs, or sales opportunities they need. How can you grow your customer base and revenue streams when you don’t now how leads are coming into or moving through your marketing funnel? When you’re tracking the right things, growth becomes a much simpler task. Focus on metrics that make you a customer-centric organization, so you get actionable data and timely user feedback that pushes your company forward. Find out which marketing initiatives are creating value in order to improve results, boost ROI, and deliver mature leads to your sales team. Being able to properly attribute revenue across each of your marketing activities is key to knowing where to place your resources to fuel growth. Basic metrics like lead volume and website traffic are important, but failing to dive deeper means you’re missing out on key insights into your marketing performance, and valuable opportunities for improvement. MQL to SQL ratio, unengaged subscribers, and other advanced marketing metrics will give you deeper insight into what's driving your success and where you should focus your attention. And don’t just measure campaign results; measure the effort that goes into them as well. Evaluate campaign performance based on two factors: did your efforts produce the desired outcomes? And did the outcome justify the resources required? Maximize Growth and Stay Lean With the right foundation of marketing operations, you can grow your marketing organization into a responsive team that’s able to capitalize on customer needs and market trends. Teams that embrace the Agile marketing framework stay lean while improving productivity and efficiency. In fact, 87% of CMOs have found their teams to be more productive after transitioning to Agile marketing. Get in-depth strategies for making your growing marketing team more Agile in this free guide, 7 Steps to Developing an Agile Marketing Team. Sources: Oktopost.com, Blog.marketo.com, Inc.com, Blog.Hubspot.com
Top Tools for Maximizing Marketing Productivity & Efficiency in 2021 (NEW)
There are dozens of tools out there for every facet of marketing team productivity, but in this article, we’ll just look at the top tools that every member of your marketing team can use to boost their effectiveness. Here are the top 40 tools for maximizing the productivity of your marketing team.
Why Smart CMOs Are Making Workflow Automation Their Top Priority
Imagine this: You’re sitting in a meeting, discussing progress on a new campaign. The creative director, Julie, says she’s still waiting on final approval for the design budget. "Oh, finance approved that last week," you say. "Didn’t you see the email?" Then Mark, the Head of Product Marketing, announces, "I’ve just heard from Sales that they want all new collateral, including an updated PDF. Who has the time to work on that, and how will it affect our schedule?" Crickets. You head back to your desk, only to find three emails asking you to approve new campaign assets. But you have no idea who on the team has already looked at it or what edits have already been requested. And should you be reviewing the attachment or the slightly different version provided in the body of the email? Scrolling through the message thread doesn’t help either— it’s just a mess of edits and revisions. Wish things could be simpler? Workflow automation isn’t just for boring business processes. Automating your creative workflows is a smart way to make creative collaboration run smoother, and finding the best professional services automation software for you can boost your processes for maximum productivity. Top reasons to automate your marketing team's workflow Less busywork How much of your team’s day is spent updating spreadsheets, generating reports, and adjusting campaign schedules? Automating these routine tasks can be a significant time-saver, freeing hours in the day for them to focus on CMO responsibilities that are value-adding creative work. Automation also ensures reports and updates are based on accurate, up-to-date information, so you have all the details you need to make smart, timely decisions. Fewer errors and inconsistencies You know that sinking feeling when your website redesign tanks your SEO rankings? Or the headache of launching a campaign with outdated pricing information? As CMO, your job is to make sure your marketing initiatives go off without a hitch. But it’s all too easy for important details to get missed, with costly results. With automation, creative briefs are standardized, contain all the details needed to get the job done, and are automatically assigned to the appropriate party. No important details are miscommunicated, left out, or overlooked. Processes and policies are consistent, fewer tasks fall through the cracks, and everyone is clear on responsibilities and deadlines. Automation also makes it easier to provide a consistent customer experience across all your channels. Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer, for example, automate your social media publishing schedule so that prospects and customers always see an active page and your brand identity stays true across your networks. Wrike Requests Faster reviews and approvals Has everyone signed off on the final version? How long should you wait for someone to leave comments before moving on? If two people leave conflicting feedback, whose edits are implemented? Automating the review and approvals process can eliminate all the last-minute scrambling and second-guessing. Reminders, alerts, and notifications keep reviews moving forward since everyone can see the status of each asset. It's easy to stay up to date, a clear process is followed, and nothing gets mistakenly published without the proper approvals. Try Wrike's Proofing & Approvals for Free Fewer process headaches You can’t fix what you don’t know is broken. Automating your workflows makes it easier to see where tasks get stuck, which tasks eat up the most time and resources, and where you can make some simple changes to help work run more efficiently. And automatic notifications that alert colleagues when they can begin work on a task make handoffs faster and easier, so work keeps flowing. Higher revenue All of these benefits add up to one thing: a boost for your bottom line. By automating your creative workflow, your team is able to spend more time on high-value creative work instead of routine administrative tasks. Collaboration is more efficient, with fast hand-offs and requests that contain all the context necessary for work to begin. Teams avoid the frustrating cycle of rework and revisions due to miscommunications. Costly errors are caught in an efficient and thorough reviews and approvals process. If you're in the market for a new collaboration tool, download our free collaboration software buyer's guide. It includes questions and features you should think about carefully before you purchase. Start automating your marketing team's workflow Give Wrike for Marketers a try to see how it can help relieve your biggest work headaches — all you need is an email address.
Collaborative Work Management: The Ultimate End-to-End Marketing Solution
Marketing teams need a centralized work management system that will consolidate the martech stack, streamline bloated processes, and consolidate information to create a manageable go-to-market workflow. The solution is collaborative work management.