Freeze! Are You Violating the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing? (Book Review)
The best thing you can be in marketing is first. 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing cites the examples of Gillette and IBM, which paved the way for their respective industries. If you're in an already-developed arena, find an undiscovered space to be innovative.
Announcing Wrike's New Solution for Marketing & Creative Teams
Wrike for Marketers gives you the freedom to focus on your creative journey while we take care of the administrative necessities. Ready to supercharge your entire end-to-end creative workflow? Then it's time to explore the power of Wrike for Marketers.
More Tools for Marketers to Love: Introducing Side-by-Side Comparison & Wrike Publish for Bynder
We’re excited to announce two updates to our Wrike for Marketers’ platform that further support marketers and creatives to deliver amazing branded campaigns: Side-by-Side Comparison in Wrike Proof and Wrike Publish for Bynder.
Viral Marketing Strategies from Crazy Successful Campaigns
It's the holy grail of online marketing: the campaign that goes viral. Massive numbers of views, a staggering amount of social shares, and the kind of brand awareness money simply can't buy. But crafting a successful viral campaign is no easy feat; in fact, most experts say you can't really plan it with a marketing strategy definition at all — it either happens, or it doesn't, and luck is no small factor. But that doesn't mean you can't craft your campaigns to increase your odds of viral success. The key is to tap into your audience’s "lizard brain." “Stories that evoke very primal emotions tend to work best,” says Neetzan Zimmerman. He should know: during his time at Gawker, he generated an insane amount of traffic — more than all of his other colleagues combined. So which emotions do you target? How do you start? By getting to know your audience and understanding what makes them tick, first and foremost! Then, try these three proven viral strategies to help your next campaign spread like wildfire. 1. Make them laugh. Why it works: Funny marketing videos downplay the hard sell and instead go for "surprise and delight." They make people say, “I have got to see that again!” This cranks up the view count, and makes people want to share a laugh with friends. Positive emotions like joy are much more likely to trigger an action like social sharing. (Check out our recent work humor video, "Beware the Managers from Hell!") 2. Make a bold statement. Why it works: These campaigns go for the gut, tapping into powerful emotions. People connect to your message on a deeper, "Me too!" level and genuinely want to spread the word or share your cause. 3. Make their jaws drop. Why it works: The awe factor. These are the videos that make people turn to their friends and say, "You gotta see this!" Everyone wants to be the first person to share something cool or amazing with their friends. Warning! Don’t get so wrapped up in achieving viral status that you stray too far and your campaign ends up having nothing to do with your brand. If people remember your campaign but can’t remember what company or product it’s associated with, your efforts are wasted. Follow the DroneCo Comic for More Startup Fun! Browse previous episodes of Welcome to DroneCo in the comic archive, and subscribe to the strip to get each new episode. Then follow DroneCo on Twitter to keep up with the gang all week long. Share the comic on your own site with this embed code: Webcomic brought to you by Wrike
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.
3 Disastrous Marketing Horror Stories to Avoid
Marketing teams battle chaotic workflows, long review & approval processes, and poor cross-team communication, not to mention changing priorities and ever-growing workloads. Read our cautionary tales of killer marketing catastrophes, and learn how to avoid them yourself. Chapter 1: Bad process purgatory Vague requests, muddled processes, and confusing priorities kill Kate’s genius marketing campaign stone dead. Everything’s due yesterday and it’s all mission-critical priority — that’s the typical day in the life of marketing manager Kate. Deadlines and priorities change hourly, as if someone’s purposely testing her just to see if she can keep up. Kate’s pretty capable, but she’s so constricted by red tape and convoluted business processes that it’s impossible for her to juggle incoming work, meet every changing deadline, or jump on fleeting opportunities. Even though her team has great ideas, they’re not able to execute them into a functioning marketing strategy or fulfill their campaign’s potential because they’re so restricted by the marketing machine. Don’t make the same mistake! Tip 1: Simplify and standardize all your work processes. Requests, planning, tracking, reporting — everything should be streamlined and straightforward. Agile marketing methods create a truly collaborative environment that enables teams to perform efficiently, deftly manage heavy workloads, and quickly respond to changing customer needs. Tip 2: Set up templates and recurring tasks to make your team more efficient, clarify roles and responsibilities, and create a reliable workflow. Everyone can forget the process and just focus on being creative. To set up workflows for your team, start by: - Listing your major project types - Documenting the steps, responsibilities, and necessary approvals - Creating those steps in a work management tool - Using the tool to monitor progress and get status updates via notifications - Eliminating unnecessary status request emails and meetings so you can get more done. Tip 3: Save your sanity with a shared digital workspace. Real-time messaging, file sharing, task management, and an accessible knowledge base free you from searching for project information and sending time-consuming emails — which can be easily lost, overlooked, or buried in an overflowing inbox. Chapter 2: Work requests roulette Marco frantically tries to respond to every new request, and ends up totally losing sight of top priorities and deadlines. Marco’s a brilliant marketing manager, and he’s just landed on a genius idea for a new paid ad campaign. He’s pumped to roll up his sleeves and dig in… when he gets a new email notification. And then an incoming Skype message. Marco understands that it’s all about teamwork — and his colleagues are wonderful designers, developers, and product marketers. But when they need something from him… well, they quickly start to resemble children begging for candy. Soon, he’s fielding a swarm of incoming requests, shifting gears to accommodate new priorities, and scrambling to meet changing deadlines. His own high-priority projects are suddenly being pushed farther down his to-do list. Don’t make the same mistake! Tip 1: Give your teammates an easy tool for submitting new work requests, so that even the summer intern knows how to initiate new projects, and no one can submit a vague request that requires you to chase them down for clarification or redo completed work. Use Wrike Request Forms, Google Forms, or Wufoo. Tip 2: Consider implementing Scrum. It's a popular Agile project management methodology with defined work sprints, daily standup meetings, and a public “to-do” list Backlog where new tasks and requests are logged and prioritized. While it takes effort and patience to implement, you'll soon wonder how you managed to survive without it. It could save your time, resources, campaign deadlines — and nerves. Tip 3: Schedule, prioritize, and adjust your entire campaign plan to ensure you stay organized and focused on your most important projects, even when new requests come in. With online Gantt chart software, you can quickly adjust your plan to accommodate inevitable surprises and incoming tasks while making sure you'll still hit important deadlines. Gantt charts visualize your project schedule, display the sequence of tasks and milestones, note task dependencies, and show when work is on track or overdue. Chapter 3: Digital assets anarchy Nadia is about to send the final, fully designed campaign files to the printer for production. But which document is the latest, approved version: “complete-Final(V8).jpg,” or “final-draft-campaign-Oct-17.jpg”? Stefan, the marketing director, feels like banging his head against the wall after receiving yet another “final” design that completely disregards both the creative brief and his latest round of edits. Nadia, the designer, nearly strained a muscle rolling her eyes at Stefan’s vague feedback. She can’t understand why he insists on needlessly complicating the original design plan. Creative collaboration inevitably involves rehashing and revising work, resulting in dozens of files and a complicated mess of drafts, mockups, and version histories. Keeping everything organized so old, unapproved versions aren't used accidentally in final deliverables can feel like an exercise in futility. Don’t make the same mistake! Tip 1: Improve your creative briefs. Add all the relevant details, including clear objectives and full context so that designers understand your marketing goals and can support them. The creative department should know exactly what you expect from them and when, with no guesswork. Provide examples of similar projects or samples of your likes and dislikes: share Behance portfolios and/or Flickr images to create a clear picture of what you're looking for and save designers from producing work that misses the mark. Tip 2: Simplify review processes by limiting the number of revision rounds your teammates can request. Start by listing all your current steps, then decide which are truly necessary and which you can eliminate. Then build a repeatable workflow that your team members can follow every time they start creative asset production. Don’t compromise your productivity by not having a defined approval process in place. Tip 3: Name your files properly — let drafts stay drafts, and mocks be mocks. Then make sure your teammates can access all the files they need in one place, ideally a shared work environment or file repository that supports file editing and versioning. That way you'll achieve one 'Final' file nirvana across the team. Achieve happily ever after with your marketing team Share your tales of marketing madness in the comments below, then start a free trial to see how Wrike can help your marketing team coordinate efforts, adjust to changing priorities, and keep every campaign organized.
Are Marketers Allergic to Project Management?
Not everyone on your team has to be a certified PMP to reap the benefits of project management for marketing. Even an understanding of just a few basic project management principles and processes can help your team be better organized, more efficient, and enjoy improved results. In short, basic project management means you can achieve more with less effort and stress. But project management training can sound like a chore to your team, who may see it as just stuffy processes and restrictive rules — or simply more work than it's worth. So where do you start? Which principles or processes will have the biggest positive impact with the least amount of effort and disruptive change? Start with these three project management tips to get the most bang for your buck: 1. Better Project Planning As every project manager knows, getting all your ducks in an row before your project starts will save you an aspirin-bottle’s worth of headaches later on. Every effective plan starts with determining your goals, and that means sitting down with stakeholders to figure out exactly what their needs and expectations are. Only then can you define your deliverables and chart an efficient path towards producing them. Read: 6 Steps to a Foolproof Project Plan DroneCo's plans for the new HoverPup quadcopter — click to view full size 2. Better Processes Inefficient or broken processes can mean missed deadlines, overshot budgets, and work that doesn’t meet requirements — in short, wasted efforts and project failure. Fix the root cause of your frustrations by adopting a few principles from Lean project management: simplifying your processes and cutting out waste. Do it right, and your team will be able to get things done faster and more efficiently than ever before. Read: The 7 Wastes that Cripple Knowledge Workers (Video) 3. Better Solutions for Next Time Nothing’s worse than the horrible déjà vu of recurring work frustrations. Keep the same old problems from popping up time and again by taking some time at the end of your project to reflect on what went well, what didn’t, and what you’ll change for next time. That way, each project makes your team better and stronger. Read: Recording Project Management Lessons Learned: Tips & Templates So no, marketers are not allergic to project management. It's nurture vs. nature - nothing a little basic PM training can't fix! See how Wrike can help you coordinate your team, adjust to changing priorities, and keep every campaign organized and on track. Follow the DroneCo Comic for More Marketing Laughs! Browse previous episodes of Welcome to DroneCo in the comic archive, then subscribe to the strip to get each new episode. Follow DroneCo on Twitter and keep up with the fun all week long! Share this comic on your own site with this embed code: Webcomic brought to you by Wrike
6 Reasons Your Marketing Plan Isn't Working (+ New Welcome to DroneCo Comic)
Marketing teams have to be flexible in order to constantly adjust to new priorities, goals, tools, and audiences. But sometimes they get a little too used to the chaos, and start believing that creative work naturally feels out of control. Project management doesn't need to mean restrictive processes, frustrating red tape, or creative death for your marketing team. In fact, project management principles can help establish a reliable, efficient system so everyone can actually focus on being creative. Use these simple project management tips to get better payoff for your marketing team's hard work — and suffer fewer headaches along the way! Share the fun! Click the strip to Tweet it. 1. Standardize & simplify processes. Take a good hard look at your marketing process and developing a marketing plan. Does every single step add value? If not, cut it and focus on what does. Then make sure everyone in the marketing department can follow a clear-cut process and use standard formats and outlines as templates to save time and cut common errors. (See also this video on marketing workflows.) 2. Track your time. Aside from making billable and unbillable hours easier to track, knowing exactly how long typical tasks take makes it much easier to plan future projects and set accurate deadlines. 3. Balance your team’s workload. You shouldn’t have a few key team members drowning in deadlines while others are twiddling their thumbs. Keep track of everyone’s assignments and redistribute tasks as necessary to avoid bottlenecks and stalled progress. 4. Make information & resources easily accessible. Put conversations, resources, and work updates in a central location where they’re easy to find. Everyone can stay in the loop since discussions, decisions, and files are all kept where the entire team can find them. 5. Stay organized. Project managers have mastered the art of juggling several projects at once, making sure resources are used wisely, deadlines are being met, and every project is running smoothly. Stop trying to manage all your work via email and spreadsheets. (There's a better way!) Take advantage of popular project management tools, like the Gantt chart, to manage all your campaigns in one place. 6. Record lessons learned. Every project holds takeaways and lessons you can apply to future campaigns. Record and share them with your team to up your game with every new project. Ready to Start Using a Better Marketing Management Strategy? See how Wrike can help you coordinate team efforts, adjust to changing priorities, and keep every campaign organized and on track. Follow the DroneCo Comic for More Marketing Laughs Browse previous episodes of Welcome to DroneCo in the comic archive, then subscribe to the strip to get each new episode. Click here to follow DroneCo on Twitter and keep up with the fun all week long! Share this comic on your own site with this embed code:
A Winning Video Marketing Strategy (A DroneCo Comic)
Welcome back to DroneCo, Wrike's weekly comic strip! We're following the madcap marketing department at a hot new drone delivery startup in Silicon Valley. Last week, Marketing Director Sujay awoke from his personal productivity paradise to discover an email catastrophe. In this week’s episode, the gang preps for an impromptu video shoot. But CEO Dot has other plans for their marketing strategy types.... Click to Tweet: Want to share the fun? Click the strip to Tweet it! Embed this webcomic on your own site using this embed code:
The Marketing Manager's Nightmare (A DroneCo Comic)
As the latest hot tech startup in the valley, things are always moving fast at DroneCo. Marketing Director Sujay and his team make a noble effort to keep up with their lovable-yet-eccentric CEO's zany ideas and half-baked instructions, but with all the late nights and hectic schedules, sometimes the inevitable happens... Click to Tweet: "The Marketing Manager's Nightmare — check out this funny comic from @Wrike!" Want to spread the fun with your friends on what does a marketing project manager do? Click the comic strip above to share it on Twitter! Don't Miss Out on Any of the Marketing Madness at DroneCo! Catch up on all the marketing department antics in the comic strip archive, or subscribe to the comic to catch every episode!
Key Findings on How to Succeed in Managing Internet Marketing Projects
Want to know what it takes to successfully manage online marketing project? Rich Byrd, the President of Fast Forward Marketing, Wrike’s new client, and Nic Bryson, Wrike’s VP of Customer Care, are sharing their key findings and long-term expertise on how to best keep projects and your team organized: Break a project down into discrete, clearly defined tasks, instead of having one complex task. This will sharply reduce the chances of team members misunderstanding what they were supposed to do on a project. One project is to have neither too many nor too few tasks. Divide your project into subprojects with 5 to 15 tasks to detail just enough things that go into its successful completion. Put all tasks in one place. This way, you’ll make sure the areas of responsibility aren’t blurred, and two people aren’t both working on the same task on some days, while on other days, no one is. Assign tasks whenever possible to a single team member. So there will be no question as to who is responsible for it. To back the assignee up and make task completion easier, use the descriptions and comments. Request a status update on uncompleted tasks with approaching deadlines – this is a one-click action in Wrike, so it won't take long, and it will help you to avoid neglecting tasks. Set up dependencies and reasonable durations for tasks to easily see when a project is getting stuck on something. I love the ease of seeing what’s holding the project up and adjusting these things on Wrike’s timeline! Work backwards from the hard deadline. If your project has a strict due date, start from that and move back on the timeline to when various tasks must be completed in order to meet the overall deadline. Big thanks to Rich for his excellent input. Experiences are best when shared, so if you too would like to share your best project management practices and tips with other Wrike users, let us know, and together we’ll think of a creative way to feature it in our blog. ”— Rich Byrd, President of Fast Forward Marketing Boutique marketing company, specializing in websites and Internet marketing for small businesses and startups
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.