Why You Should Care that Marketing & IT Leaders are Collaborating More (Infographic)
Collaboration is the new way to work. We no longer make progress in the silos of our own departments, we synchronize the efforts of multiple teams to get projects out the door faster and with better results. 55% of marketing leaders say they're now collaborating more closely with IT leaders than ever before. But there are still many kinks to work out in the collaborative process. It is not easy to collaborate with new teams for the first time — especially other departments who are used to different lingo, processes, and mindsets. If you want to prevent your collaborative efforts from devolving into a war between right-brained and left-brained colleagues, check out this infographic to see the common challenges facing Marketing & IT collaboration, and then think about how your team can overcome those barriers. Sources: The Creative Group (TCG) and Robert Half Technology (RHT) How to improve collaboration between Marketing and IT professionals TCG, RHT, and Wrike have published several articles to help you think about how to overcome the collaboration problems between these two power groups in your organization. They're worth reading, so take a look: Can We Please Get Along? 10 Tips for Collaborating with IT Professionals The Great Creative-IT Divide: Top 10 CIO Concerns 3 Collaboration Tips for Enhancing Teamwork Why Every Company Needs a Culture of Collaboration
15 Stats You Should Know to Improve Your Sales Team
As a driving force in our economy, a lot of research has been done on the world of sales. What do sales orgs need to do to drive profit? What leads to a successful sale? When is the best time to call someone, and how many times do you have to call? If you're trying to improve the performance of your sales organization, check out these stats on what works (and what doesn't) when you're trying to close a deal. If you want to learn more, check out this post: 26 Sales Process Statistics & Best Practices. 15 Statistics to Help Improve Your Sales Performance What have you done to improve your sales team? You can't only rely on stats and figures if you want to improve your sales org. You also need experience, and a knowledge of how other departments can help your sales department, including how to interpret what are leads in marketing. Share how you've improved your sales team in the comments below, and we can all learn from one another.
7 Secrets of the Best Marketing Operations Teams
By Lynn Hunsaker and Gary Katz, President/CEO and Chairman/Chief Strategy Officer, respectively, of Marketing Operations Partners Value creation is the ultimate measure of success in business: value to customers, shareholders, alliances, employees, and the community at-large. In the quest to be best, follow the money, or better yet, be the one that enables value (money, capability, opportunity) to be created. Marketing Operations is a role that can facilitate the whole marketing department responsibilities in value creation. Here are 7 secrets for success: 1. Know which side your bread is buttered on It’s a fact of life that you get ahead faster when you cater to whoever holds the purse strings. For Marketing, that’s first and foremost your customers. If your marketing is out of sync with content, timing, and methods that customers prefer, there’s not much point. Always start with WHO. This applies not only to messaging, but also to your strategic plans, tactical plans, process designs, people, tools, performance measurement – really, everything that Marketing does. This analysis and management of stakeholder needs is also known as ecosystem. 2. Set your CMO up for success Going hand-in-hand with the big picture of the ecosystem, the next layer in the bread-buttering hierarchy is enterprise objectives. Your CMO will be successful to the extent that the C-team perceives strong fit and contribution to their strategic goals. This is the WHY of the Marketing organization. You can align everything in Marketing with what the C-suite cares about by using a technique called cascading objectives. It’s the logical starting point for all marketing plans and performance monitoring. This orientation is the basis for your Marketing strategy. 3. Be a strategic enabler Someone needs to ensure the strategy comes to life, and that’s you. See yourself as a facilitator of Marketing’s success. Standards and oversight to help all marketers achieve enterprise goals are the WHAT of your role. It’s not about bureaucracy, but rather, connecting dots between strategy and execution, connecting people, connecting diverse data, and connecting interdependent processes. This is also known as governance or guidance. 4. Formalize the methods to your madness Process diagrams and procedures go a long way in accelerating necessities like onboarding, minimizing duplication of resources and effort across geographies and lines of business, and maintaining know-how when key persons depart. This is the HOW for your delivery of the why and the what for the who. Everyone’s work methods in Marketing comprise processes. 5. Remember: What gets measured gets done Help every Marketing sub-function select metrics that monitor early signals in their work. Typically, metrics are focused at the extremes of the spectrum: click-throughs (activity) and revenue (outcome). Don’t confuse outputs of a process to be early signals. These are junctures within a group’s work that signify potential re-work or scrap, or otherwise, potential successful outputs and outcomes. This is the SO WHAT? of everything Marketing does. By monitoring early signals before stakeholders can see outputs and outcomes, marketers are empowered to make adjustments that are efficient and effective. Measurement of progress is commonly known as metrics. 6. Prevent accelerators from becoming imploders Technology is intended to be an accelerator of everything. Select technology per who, why, how, what, and so what. When it’s selected in a vacuum, or without a firm understanding of the preceding, technology often derails strategy. Rushing to technology prematurely typically requires people and processes to bend in ways that aren’t sustainable. Conversations are taken over by what’s needed by the technology, instead of what’s needed for strategic opportunities. Make technology choices wisely to ensure Marketing’s strategic impact. 7. Ensure the horse is before the cart The combination of processes, metrics, and technology forms Marketing’s infrastructure: the vehicle to get from point A to point Z. This is the means for all the moving parts to function as intended. Remember that who, why, and how – ecosystem, strategy, and guidance – inform the necessary characteristics of infrastructure. The seven secrets of the best Marketing Operations teams fit together as shown in this framework.Notice the flow beginning with the ecosystem. Metrics, especially early signals, indicate what needs to be adjusted in every component of the framework. In our benchmark study, Journey to Marketing Operations Maturity, this framework represented the secrets of the best Marketing Operations teams, and is your path to value creation. It’s the lifeblood of your enterprise. In turn, it’s the ultimate measure of your success. These seven secrets can take root in your Marketing organization readily through our new Marketing Future Forum, which allows you to personalize these ideas to your business, access them on-demand in half-hour bites, and share them across your marketing organization. Join our Leap Day announcement webcast to learn how you can ready your Marketing organization for the future. Register now at http://ow.ly/YDCV1 Author Bios: Gary Katz, Chairman/Chief Strategy Officer and Lynn Hunsaker, President/CEO of Marketing Operations Partners, an organization that aims to transform marketing organizations as a value center via Accountability, Alignment, and Agility.
Marketing Operations: A Primer on the Fastest Growing Role in Business
For businesses looking to stretch their marketing dollars, marketing operations is a hot topic. In order to keep up with the current speed of business, organizations need to leverage technology and gain insight into customer needs and business performance. And while marketing operations has quickly become the fastest-growing role in business, there are still plenty of questions surrounding this relatively new field: What is marketing operations, and why bother with it? How does it fit into the broader marketing discipline? Is there a conflict between operations management vs marketing? And what strategies can businesses use to improve their marketing campaign results? What is Marketing Operations? First things first: what is the role of marketing operations? A typical marketing operations director or coordinator has many responsibilities, including measuring and evaluating marketing performance, strategic planning, budgeting, developing and improving the overall marketing process, selecting and implementing marketing technologies, and providing professional development for the marketing team. So the operations and marketing relationship is really that of a partnership. Marketing ops focuses on behind-the-scenes activity to ensure processes are running smoothly and campaigns reach their goals. Digital marketing operations may be a relatively new field, but its beginnings can be traced back to the 1920s. This infographic shows its evolution, and growing importance to various marketing disciplines: Popular Marketing Operations Tools As with any branch of the marketing world, there are a zillion options when it comes to marketing operations software. In fact, in his annual Marketing Technology Landscape super graphic, Scott Brinker of chiefmartec.com identified a whopping 3,874 marketing technology solutions. If you want to zoom in for a better look at the landscape, you can view a hi-res version here: 2016 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (PDF) To save you some time looking through thousands of tools, we've rounded up some of the most popular software used by today's marketing operations managers: Kissmetrics: Build customer funnels and sort website visitors into groups based on common actions and triggers so you can understand how potential customers are engaging with your site. Unbounce: Use A/B testing to discover which features, website elements, or marketing messages are most successful when it comes to eliciting a desired response from potential customers. Hubspot: Analyze and improve landing pages and forms to collect the right information from potential customers and automatically plug them into the appropriate nurture tracks. Clicktale: Heat maps track website visitors’ mouse movements, clicks, and scrolling to determine which parts of your site they’re paying the most attention to — and what’s being overlooked. SEM Rush: See top organic keywords, keyword rank, and search volume for keywords that are driving organic traffic to your competitors’ websites, and discover opportunities for gaining ground. Wrike: Give your teams a collaboration and work management tool for organizing incoming requests, delegating tasks, and tracking project progress and results. Get 10 more must-have marketing operations tools, plus details on the metrics you should track, here: Marketing Ops Tech & Tools for a Customer-Centric Organization Marketing Operations Strategies Most bad marketing decisions come down to one simple mistake: not having the right information about your target audience. This is where marketing operations strategies become an essential ingredient to marketing (and business) success. A common myth about marketing operations is that it’s all about crunching numbers and automating processes. In fact, a good marketing operations analyst has the skills to interpret a mess of numbers and fill in those knowledge gaps. They use their data-driven insights to help the marketing team improve customer experience and boost engagement. Marketing operations also focuses on improving processes and cross-team collaboration. By coordinating the various arms of the marketing organizational structure and product management roles, marketing operations management can connect the dots between strategy and execution. They can ensure that inbound and outbound campaign messaging is aligned, content managers are on the same page as the Lead Gen team, and all efforts line up with the CMO’s priorities and business objectives. Ultimately, marketing operations works to combine processes, metrics, and technology to support the entire marketing organization. For more marketing ops strategies, both the CEO and the Chief Strategy Officer of Marketing Operations Partners give their best tips here: 7 Secrets of the Best Marketing Operations Teams The Future of Marketing Operations In an effort to make their marketing efforts more efficient and effective, more and more companies are turning to marketing operations. And in turn, marketing operations teams are focusing on a central goal: value creation — for customers, employees, and business owners alike. This focus will continue to make marketing operations a global discipline used by successful organizations worldwide. The Road to Successful Marketing Operations By Diederik Martens from MarTech Conference Ready to Get Started with Marketing Operations? If you think your company needs a full-fledged marketing operations department in order to have effective marketing operations, think again. You can improve your marketing operations today, with resources you likely already have. Radius provides advice on identifying someone within your current marketing team that would be a good fit for taking on some marketing operations responsibilities, Emmsphere explains how you can improve your current marketing operations processes without spending a dime, and industry leaders offer 10 suggestions for marketing operations success.
5 Reasons Why Your Creative Team Isn't Scalable Yet
Creative teams are constantly under the gun to deliver compelling, innovative campaigns. And it's easy to buckle under that pressure when there's a lack of time and resources. As anxious as you might be to scale, here's why you might not be ready yet.
7 Eye-Opening Tips to Stay on Top of Your Marketing Projects
Are you tired of having your project information spread out in disconnected files, e-mails and papers around you? Do you feel you are constantly missing something important? Do you believe you and your team can collaborate more productively? "Before Wrike, I had everything written down on multiple sheets of paper. At the end of every week, I spent hours on taking them all, consolidating, reprioritizing, and figuring out if these are the most recent notes or if there are some newer notes somewhere." After adopting Wrike project management software, Dave's entire marketing and sales department productivity increased by 25%! This story is a great example of how project management practices and a team's productivity can be improved with the help of an appropriate tool. Here's a list of 7 eye-opening things to do to help you boost efficiency in the management of marketing projects: 1.Don't get drowned in the data flow It's not uncommon for marketing departments to be overloaded with campaign plans, sales reports, stats and multiple document versions. What a relief to know that the latest piece of data is always at your fingertips! "We ended up with going with Wrike primarily because it had all of our projects in one screen, and we could easily manipulate back and forth between those projects," Dave says. "We just log notes to the tasks, and Wrike sorts it all for us, the most current ones." 2.Ensure you can descend with ease from the bird's-eye view to tiny project details To run a project successfully, you need to have the full overview of it with all completion dates, as well as the ability to drill down instantly to any particular task detail you are interested in right now. "In Wrike, I see everything that I need in one view, not way too much information or not enough information to estimate the progress. It actually ended up a perfect fit that way," Dave comments. 3.Take your office anywhere instantly Trade shows, meetings with customers and partners outside the office, business trips, and working from home in the evenings... Rather than having papers scattered everywhere, now Dave can take his office with him anytime, anywhere: "I can go home or pull up Wrike anywhere in the world and have all the project folders in the same place. On the road, I just pull out my iPhone and plug in new updates and check on the status updates from the team." 4.Collaboration is vital, so share smartly! Marketing hard skills are essential, of course, but soft skills, such as knowing how to collaborate and communicate effectively in a team, are just as important. Some tasks are to be done by a single team member, while others require collaboration. Wouldn't it be convenient to have all of the team's data stored in a central place, while the project view of other team members never gets cluttered? That's easy to do with Wrike's selective sharing! "The thing that I love about the system is that everyone can have their own unique environment within Wrike. Team members have their to-do lists within their own view, and if they are collaborating with other team members, they just easily add other people to these tasks," Dave says. Selective sharing also helps you create a common workspace for a distributed team: "Now with shared folders, remote employees don't feel as remote. They feel like they are a part of the organization," Dave adds. 5.Keep worthy ideas safe for tomorrow Quite often, you may not have enough resources to implement all of the great marketing ideas right away. Store them as "deferred" or "backlogged" in Wrike to get back to them at the right moment! "When we have brainstorming sessions, I add everything to Wrike. It's very easy for us to bring all those ideas right back to the forefront of our mind and to figure out whether now is the right time to implement them, now that we have some freed-up resources," Dave comments. 6.Time is precious, so make the most of every communication! For a busy head of a marketing department, it's important to be efficient in both downward and upward communications. At the meetings with your direct reports, you can instantly filter out the tasks in Wrike by assignee for any given time period and give them immediate feedback on their productivity. "I also have a folder specifically for the president's approval. This way, we are able to save a lot of time, as we don't necessarily need to meet on every single topic of discussion. If a resolution wasn't agreed on at a certain time, the task just stays there, and I don't have to write hundreds of reminder notes," Dave says. 7.Balance work and personal life No matter how busy you are, you shouldn't forget about your personal life. Wrike is as efficient for work projects as for birthday shopping and party planning! "I can mix my personal to-do lists and work in one workspace in Wrike. So whether I'm home or on the road, I find everything in one place from the personal perspective, as well," Dave says. ___ We enjoyed the podcast with Dave and believe it provides valuable, first-hand experience and useful examples of how the right technical solution can significantly improve planning and productivity in marketing teams. If you have helpful tips to share, too, we'd be happy to know about them!
How 2020 Has Forced CMOs To Think Differently, Part 1
In the first of our two-part series addressing common pain points for CMOs in the current climate, we focus on integrating the right technology tools and using that tech to gain essential insight and justify spend during an economic downturn.
7 Resolutions All Marketers Should Make for a Successful 2017
Time moves fast—but the marketing industry moves even faster. Changing customer needs, new campaign management tools and technologies, and emerging trends make it difficult to keep up and continue serving up fresh campaigns. Now that 2017 is here, it’s time for marketers everywhere to review their strategies and make some new resolutions. What should you focus your efforts and resources on in the coming year? What ineffective strategies or old habits should you leave behind? Which trends will have the greatest impact on your business? Find out in the infographic below: [caption id="attachment_421020" align="aligncenter" width="626"] Infographic by MDG Advertising[/caption] Set Your Marketing Team Up for Success in 2017 Looking for a complete marketing solution to drive your marketing and creative teams? Check out Wrike for Marketers to enhance collaboration and streamline workflows. Further Reading Quiz: What's Your Team's Agile Marketing Score? The Creative Brief Template: Elements of an Effective Creative Brief 5 Steps for Making Your Marketing Team More Efficient
State of Marketing Operations and MarTech in 2015
The marketing technology and marketing operations landscapes are shifting rapidly, as marketing departments adapt to an increasingly digital world and tech-savvy consumers. Find out the current trends, strategies, and common practices for many marketing ops and martech professionals with this collection of current statistics, to help you build your martech stack. 1. Marketing Operations Statistics 64% of marketing operations teams have 10 or fewer members. (Source: Mo-cca.com) 83% of marketing ops teams report to the most senior marketing leader (CMO). (Source: Mo-cca.com) Most-Desirable Skills in Marketing Ops Professionals: -General marketing skills -Analytics skills -Project management skills -IT skills -Change management skills -Lead management experience(Source: Mo-cca.com) 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing, but only 36% believe they're effective at it. (Source: Webbiquity) 73% of B2B marketers use video in their content marketing. (Source: Business2Community) SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads have a 1.7% close rate. (Source: Hubspot) Search Engine Marketing will continue to get the largest share of resources, at 14% of total marketing budgets. 10% of the budget will go to online display advertising, like banner ads and re-marketing/re-targeting campaigns. (Source: Business2Community) 60% of B2B marketers measure success by web traffic rather than sales lead quality or social media sharing. (Source: Business2Community) Many marketing organizations say managing data is their biggest challenge: data storage (36%), data quality (23%), and making data actionable (15%). (Source: The Wise Marketer) 84% of top-performing companies are currently using or plan to start using marketing automation by 2015. (Source: Business2Community) Yet only 5% of all marketers are currently using a full-featured marketing automation solution. (Source: Hubspot) Of companies using marketing automation and ROI metrics, 69% report an increase in total marketing revenue contribution. (Source: CMO.com) 2. Marketing Technology Statistics Scott Brinker's 2015 marketing technology landscape includes 1,876 companies in 43 categories. The landscape has seen year-over-year growth of 170%. (Source: Radius.com) 65% of marketing executives plan to spend more money on marketing technology in the coming year, including 28% who plan to increase spending by more than 25%. (Source: Conductor) 51% of marketing execs say that their marketing technologies are only loosely integrated or not at all. (Source: Signal.co) 76% of marketers say that analyzing performance data has made either "more" or "much more" of an impact on their decision making. (Source: Chiefmartec.com) Only 7% of those in a martech role have "marketing technologist" in their title. Marketing, business, and technology titles dominate. (Source: Chiefmartec.com) 43% of marketing technologists come from a technical/programming background. 33% come from a marketing/communications background. (Source: Chiefmartec.com) Top 5 Skills for Future Marketing Success: 1. Marketing Strategy and Positioning 62% 2. Target Market Identification 44% 3. Web design (including responsive and adaptive) 43% 4. CRM systems and platforms 43% 5. Ability to persuade and negotiate 42%(Source: Chiefmartec.com) Want to Learn More About MarTech? Check out our guide to the top martech conferences and events in 2015 & 2016.
Why Social Media is a Top Priority for CMOs in 2015 (Infographic)
It's no secret that social media has permanently altered the marketing landscape. But eight years after Facebook opened its doors to businesses, many marketers are still trying to perfect their strategies and learn how to expertly navigate both emerging and established networks. According to a recent survey, this isn't likely to change in the coming year: social media is dominating CMOs' priorities for 2015. These three factors are driving CMOs' focus on social media: 87% of CMOs say social media is the most engaging medium for real-time content, over video and blogs. As a result, CMOs are devoting a full 21.4% of their total marketing budgets to social media efforts. Respondents admit social media is poorly integrated with their overall marketing strategy. (3.85 on a scale from 1-7.) Curious about how budgets are shifting from traditional to digital marketing this year? Or how content, analytics, and consulting fit into CMO plans for 2015? Take a look at the full infographic below: Source: Ciceron What do you think? Do you agree with these CMO priorities? Let us know in the comments below! Related Reads: 6 Top Marketing Trends for 2015 Will Your Company's Social Media Efforts Pay Off? (Infographic) Origins of the Hashtag in Social Media (Infographic)