Marketing Processes And Operations: A Quick Beginner’s Guide
What happens when you combine a great team, excellent ideas, marketing materials, the best tools, and the right platforms into one single epicentre?
I believe it empowers marketing teams to succeed in an efficient & fast way to deliver the best creative content to the world.
However, that doesn’t just magically happen.
Sadly, most marketing teams across the world do not have the right marketing processes enabled, which creates a gap in communication & workflow of your teams.
What are the marketing processes?
It’s an “orchestra” of tools, people, actions, systems, and procedures that entrust organizations with more power over their workflow so that no misunderstandings can happen and everyone is on the same page.
And it doesn’t get solved just by throwing more people, money, and tools at the situation.
It’s an issue of increasing complexity that needs a new resolution, mindset, strategies, and processes to be solved. It’s the main idea of my book “Marketing Teams of the Future” throughout which I expand on the problems, the solutions, and the future.
Why should you create & optimize your marketing processes?
Having a broken collaboration in a team is half of the problem.
The second half is the consequences of meetings, the back-and-forth emails, lack of communication, having to stay organized, meeting deadlines and chaotic multitasking that leads to marketers being overwhelmed, which leads to poor creative solutions.
In fact, a majority of professionals said that lack of alignment and collaboration between sales and marketing leads to weaker financial performance (60%), poorer customer experience (59%), and reduced customer retention (58%), according to Payoffs of Improved Sales & Marketing Alignment report.
Also, 62% of marketers say wasteful meetings get in the way of their work. The second most prevalent culprit is excessive oversight (51%), followed by excessive emails (48%) and a lack of standard processes for workflow (33%) as it’s been said in U.S. State of Marketing Work Report.
And the last one, as 45% of employees generally feel overwhelmed by the number of meetings they have to attend every month, which adds up to more than 60 meetings per month on average, or about two per day. 47% of employees complain that meeting volume is the number one time-waster at the office, according to You Waste a Lot of Time at Work [Infographic].
The pillars of the strategic marketing process
There are three main players when it comes to improving your marketing planning processes, these are: people, processes and tools.
Business management requires all of these.
They all create the experience you need to build within your organization so that it truly succeeds as one marketing “organism” that can evolve in the best possible way.
People
Over the past few years the entire creative marketing process has been injected with steroids, vitamins, pumped up and broke down in multiple parts.
Back in the day, you could’ve mastered marketing fast and sweet. But those times have passed, now we have separate and dedicated professionals for every part of it – there’s campaign planner, art director, social media, programmatic buyer, advertising, automation director and the list goes on and on.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed.
And the marketing industry needs to overcome that. I believe marketers need to morph into integrated professionals of many skills and know-how.
The ideal structure is the following:
- Marketing Project Manager, it’s the bandmaster of the team that makes sure everything is on time, the goals are set, and everything works smoothly.
- Marketing Engineer focused on making things happen and delivering.
- Growth Marketer knows the in and out of a specific channel that brings lots of value to your brand.
- Marketing Designer is designing new conversion, optimization, A/B testing, backlinks, and user acquisition tactics for the team.
Process
When it comes to processes, there are three things you need: transparency, efficiency, and constant iteration.
It’s not THAT complicated to do and you can implement it right away.
The modern & growth-oriented brands trust their employees with what they do. However, information is at the center of what we all do – media, texts, assets, communication, etc.
If you hire the best of people it’s your responsibility to offer & give them everything they need, including making all the needed information available to them. That’s why I recommend implementing these two things:
- Give everyone access to the information they need
- Give everyone access to the same information, not bits and pieces
Secondly, it’s important to align teams with clear goals, strategy, vision, action plan, ideas and vision you have that will be reflected in the outcome.
Stay consistent with this and go beyond transparency.
Iterate fast. Planning & content creation can’t happen for six, three, or even 1 month in advance. Things are moving fast in the world and they change.
That’s why you need to iterate with real-data and the most relevant content for your audience. Implement an easy process of feedback iteration, when content is created to share with the team, ask for feedback, implement it and continue the process.
Tools
No automation tool can or should replace your creative team.
However, some tools can help you become more efficient, improve the communication of the team, enable transparency, help you track all the changes or activities of your organization.
When time-wasting tasks are taken care of, those valuable hours can be used for more creative work.
It’s not only about tools, but also resources that you should use more efficiently. If there are small tedious tasks that can be outsourced – do it.
Stop losing time on things that don’t bring real value to your brand, and work with more freelancers, or virtual assistants to help you create more.
The main takeaways
Marketing is moving at a fast pace, and all the changes in the industry have a profound impact on the way we work.
Sadly, most marketers struggle to understand the constantly changing landscape and feel confused or overworked. That’s why the key to modern marketing success is becoming agile and adapting in real-time to what’s happening in the space.
Prioritize your efforts. No matter the size of your team, it’s hard to balance the drive to do everything with the resources you have.
Don’t be afraid to invest in technology that can help you automate and track tedious tasks and processes. It will improve the focus of your team so you can concentrate on actual work.
It’s imperative to have everything and everyone in one common space. Inviting everyone to contribute with ideas and feedback will improve both the content and the relationships between teammates.
