In this not-so-tongue-and-cheek blog series, we present 18 Marketing Management Survival Tactics for staving off common marketing management disasters. The first two posts in the series provided 12 tips for surviving marketing management natural disasters and man-made marketing management industrial accidents. This third post in the series provides 6 proven tactics for quelling public unrest.

Marketing managers have many choices. In particular, marketing managers must decide what they are going to do before they can plan how to do it. Should you improve your message or drive more traffic? Does your product need more capability or higher quality? Once decided, the real work begins. Without a clear strategy, each marketing manager chooses differently and you end up with marketing anarchy characterized by conflicting priorities, confusion, frustration and inconsistent, sub-optimal marketing results.

Your marketing strategy must be more than a plan. It should include clear cross-functional goals and priorities that facilitate everyday decisions by constraining marketing choices and clarifying marketing tradeoffs. You can’t just do a presentation or send out a memo. Marketing strategy must be baked into your marketing management process to link everyday work to strategic initiatives, keeping work in step with strategy even when priorities change. It should enable every marketing manager to make coherent choices and avoid wasting time on random acts of marketing.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #13

Improve alignment and integration by linking campaigns and projects to strategy. Publish a real-time marketing roadmap that presents your marketing plan by strategic initiatives, such as “increase awareness”, “drive new business” and “build loyalty”.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #14

Task lists are great for getting things done, but they don’t help you decide if you are doing the right things in the first place. Don’t just make a list of marketing projects. Create roadmaps, calendars, campaign plans and charts by market segment, channel, product, buyer personae, strategic initiative, customer value, and other critical marketing dimensions to see if your marketing work and results are properly balanced, prioritized and integrated.

Everybody wants something from marketing. Sales wants leads. Support wants a community website. The CFO wants more revenue with less budget. And, every CEO has a pet marketing project. Keeping stakeholders happy, particularly when they have conflicting priorities, is a never ending challenge of every marketing department. If you consistently miss stakeholder expectations, you’ll find yourself facing a frustrated and angry mob.

You can’t please all of the people all of the time, but you can build buy-in and co-opt your critics. The best approach to quashing marketing stakeholder problems is to involve stakeholders in the solution. First and foremost, keep stakeholders apprised of marketing plans and performance. Marketing blackouts encourage stakeholder riots. Proactively solicit feedback on marketing plans and source suggestions for future marketing programs. Collaborate directly on important marketing projects, so your stakeholders are as committed to success and own the results as much as you.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #15

The best way to avoid angry mobs is to set the right expectations in the first place. Communicate key marketing strategies, priorities, plans and decisions broadly to all interested stakeholders on a regular basis.

If you like these marketing management survival tactics,
then check out the complete Marketing Manager’s Survival Kit and get all 18 tactics.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #16

People tend to take care of their own. If you want real stakeholder buy-in to your marketing plans, then you should include them in your planning process. In fact, you should collaborate with stakeholders on the actual work to tap into their ideas and perspectives. When you co-opt your critics, they don’t just buy into your plans, they co-own the results.

Rapid organizational changes can wreak havoc on marketing productivity. High growth, corporate reorganizations, acquisitions and sudden turnover can create scenarios where the marketing department is full of new, inexperienced and potentially unmotivated marketing managers. Even the most senior marketing managers can freeze up while coming up to speed on entirely new surroundings. Welcome to the marketing zombie apocalypse, where the blind lead the blind and nothing gets done except trying to keep yourself from being eaten alive.

When ramping new or inexperienced marketing team members, it’s best to be more explicit about what, when and where things need to get done. While experienced, senior marketing managers are proficient team leaders, more junior team members need to be led. They are also less likely to raise the alarm when they are stuck or overloaded, and have no internal benchmark for good performance. Priorities and tasks should not only be explicit, they should be visible to the entire team, so marketing managers can detect and resolve individual problems before they impact other team members and marketing deliverables.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #17

It’s hard to tell if you are doing great if you don’t know what great looks like. When everyone has a clear picture of superior marketing performance, then it easy to tell when marketing managers are living up to their true marketing potential.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #18

When tackling an entirely unfamiliar project, even the most experienced marketing managers appreciate a little detailed instruction. Also, unmotivated and underperforming staff need to realize that they are bringing down the entire team. The best way to handle both of these difficult marketing management situations is to define specific task plans and monitor progress until the suffering individuals are back up to top performance.

The post Marketing Management Tactics for Quelling Public Unrest appeared first on Markodojo - Marketing Management Software - Agile Marketing.

In this not-so-tongue-and-cheek blog series, we present 18 Marketing Management Survival Tactics for staving off common marketing management disasters. The first post explored how to survive marketing management natural disasters. This second post in the series provides 6 proven tactics for avoiding common man-made marketing management accidents.

If no one knows what marketing is doing, then the natural conclusion is that marketing isn’t doing anything terribly important. Moreover, when different groups within the marketing organization don’t know what other groups are doing, it is impossible to provide a unified experience for your customers. Unfortunately, most marketing plans, projects and performance reports are hidden away in spreadsheets, documents, email inboxes and other poorly lit locations.

Ending a marketing blackout requires systematic collection, integration and publication of marketing plans, projects and performance. Current marketing plans, status of work-in-process and marketing performance reports for each marketing area should be available to everyone in the marketing department. High level roadmaps, monthly marketing calendars, and regular updates should be published to all marketing stakeholders. Without an integrated marketing management system, consolidating and communicating marketing activities is pure overhead and can be quite labor intensive. However, the alternative marketing blackout is far worse.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #7

Real-time visibility across the entire marketing department requires detailed project tracking. Consider implementing a marketing project management system. A rigorous and automated approach to marketing project management increases the probability that reality mirrors your marketing plan, and eliminates busy work. If you systematically collect information at the project level, then higher-level views, such as marketing roadmaps, calendars and progress reports can be completely automated.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #8

An easy way to keep everyone informed about upcoming marketing promotions, projects, and events is to publish a monthly marketing calendar and update it weekly. Share the marketing calendar with marketing, sales, other departments and the executive team to keep everyone informed.

Sometimes big problems come in small, well-intentioned packages. For example, when the VP of Sales makes a simple and reasonable request that threatens to blow up all your well-thought-out marketing plans and committed marketing goals. Can we upgrade the website next month? Let’s start doing webinars once a week. And, so forth. Then there are the super urgent, yet conflicting requests. The VP of sales wants a website upgrade, but the VP of customer success wants a community portal, and, you only have one web team.

The ability to defuse potentially volatile situations involving hard-charging, single-minded executives is an essential marketing manager skill. Life is easier, however, if skill is also supported by process and a few facts. Executives ask marketing for things they think they need to be successful. However, exactly what they need and when they need it allows room for negotiation. What is the priority of the request relative to projects on the current marketing roadmap? Does it all need to be done yesterday, or can it be broken up into smaller projects and rolled out over time? Or frankly, is it sufficient to just capture the idea for future consideration.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #9

The secret deactivation code to defuse every explosive executive situation is the word “YES”. Manage project scope, not just resources. By breaking big project requests up into smaller increments, you can provide immediate satisfaction without derailing current marketing plans. Say “YES” to something small today, and deliver the bigger vision incrementally over time.

If you like these marketing management survival tactics,
then check out the complete Marketing Manager’s Survival Kit and get all 18 tactics.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #10

An executive request that looks important and easy in isolation, might be foolish and difficult when weighed against current marketing plans. Everyone wants marketing to work on the most valuable ideas, so keep a prioritized backlog of all potential marketing projects and publish it for stakeholders to see. Build consensus around your marketing plan and backlog priorities. Now handling a new request is just an exercise in reordering the backlog.

Most marketing departments are under-resourced and over-committed. There is no time for do-overs. Fuzzy objectives, fuzzy assignments, fuzzy agendas, fuzzy hand-offs and fuzzy communications lead to endless marketing rework and countless hours spent in useless staff meetings. Busy work that eats up precious marketing cycles without moving things forward is a toxic waste of time that can seriously undermine marketing performance.

Cleaning up waste from rework requires clearing up day-to-day marketing management activities. Luckily, it doesn’t require a lot of overhead. Rigorous work habits and simple process rules will often do the trick. Make sure strategic marketing goals are clear, so you don’t waste time on unimportant projects. Don’t start a new marketing project without clear objectives and requirements. Create modest project plans with a special focus on deliverable hand-offs to coordinate cross-functional teams. Make sure every project and deliverable has a single, clear owner. Bring an agenda to every meeting and record issues, decisions, and action items.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #11

Email, chat, and social tools are great for one-off conversations, but they lack the context, depth and continuity required for purposeful collaboration. Consider a marketing collaboration platform that links conversations, documents, and decisions directly to projects for greater efficiency.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #12

Streamline team meetings by eliminating updates on work that is going according to plan—just make sure the plan is up-to-date before the meeting. Focus instead on coordinating hand-offs, resolving issues, helping stuck team members, and removing obstacles from blocked projects.

The post Avoiding Marketing Management Industrial Accidents appeared first on Markodojo - Marketing Management Software - Agile Marketing.

In this not-so-tongue-and-cheek blog series, we present 18 Marketing Management Survival Tactics for staving off common marketing management disasters. This first post in the series provides 6 proven tactics for surviving marketing management natural disasters.

Creating demand and driving sustainable revenue growth is the primary charter of every marketing organization. However, they are much easier said than done. There are times when increasing demand is as simple as ramping advertising spend. Sooner or later though, every ad campaign and media channel runs dry. Ending a demand drought requires marketing innovation, and marketing innovation requires the ingenuity of skilled marketing managers.

The problem is ingenuity doesn’t scale. Sustainable revenue growth cannot rest entirely on the shoulders of a few creative marketing managers. To prevent recurring demand droughts, you must systematize marketing innovation. New marketing ideas, both big and small, must be sourced, brainstormed, prioritized, tested, measured and assessed on a regular basis. Successful new ideas then become ongoing marketing programs, and innovation shifts to marketing program optimization. If you want to be a revenue rainmaker, you must build a marketing innovation machine.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #1

Source new marketing ideas broadly and routinely by conducting regular surveys of customers and sales, publishing request and feedback forms, and soliciting suggestions from throughout the entire company. The wider the net you cast, the better your chances of catching that next great marketing campaign idea.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #2

Create a running backlog of all marketing ideas that you can draw on at any time. Set a standard for prioritizing ideas based on relative value and level of effort required to implement them. Groom the backlog on a regular basis to refine good ideas, remove outdated ideas and reprioritize those that remain. By keeping a running idea backlog, you simplify marketing planning and make sure you never lose a good revenue generating idea.

To capture the attention of busy buyers, marketing managers plan global campaigns, product launches, seasonal promotions, and spectacular events that routinely fill marketing departments up with a deluge of work. If you don’t brace yourself for these foreseeable floods, quality will suffer and marketing teams will drown in a sea of work. Marketing management at scale is a process, not a project, and marketing managers must master important process management principles to open the floodgates when the tide runs high.

If you like these marketing management survival tactics,
then check out the complete Marketing Manager’s Survival Kit and get all 18 tactics.

Handling a deluge of work with limited marketing resources requires scalable, efficient marketing production processes based on increased standardization, automation and quality. The more your marketing production processes resemble a factory, the more marketing output you can generate per marketing team member. Most marketing projects from websites to trade shows require the coordination of cross-functional marketing teams. While these people-centric processes cannot be fully automated in the same sense as sending an email, their production capacity can be dramatically increased by implementing a marketing project management system with standardized workflows, formalized hand-offs, deliverable templates, reusable assets and proactive management of resource bottlenecks. Once standardized, routine tasks can be automated and end-to-end processes can be optimized through continuous improvement.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #3

Increase the efficiency of people-centric marketing processes by focusing on the handoffs. Define specific process stages, such as draft, copy, design, proof, etc. and create outlines and templates for deliverables that get handed-off at each stage. Track marketing projects by stage to ensure a smooth work flow. Just like you do with the purchase funnel!

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #4

If you monitor marketing projects by workflow stage, then you can identify bottlenecks in your marketing management process when a particular stage backs up. Bottlenecks in any stage reduce the output of the entire process. Remove bottlenecks to keep your marketing projects flowing and increase efficiency.

Budget cuts, competitor moves, PR crises: sometimes unexpected bolts from the blue shock a well-organized marketing plan into complete disarray. When things change rapidly, does your marketing organization absorb the shock and rebound nimbly? Or, does it end up in a panic that puts everything else on hold until the crisis passes? Insulating your marketing organization against sudden shocks requires a flexible marketing management process that expects change and adapts quickly.

If you find it difficult to plan because you are constantly dealing with unforeseen changes, then you should consider adopting agile marketing best practices, such as working incrementally. When you know your marketing plan will change each month, then you should not commit to projects that will take longer than a month to implement. Break big projects up into smaller ones that fit into your known time horizon. Don’t make rigid plans that extend out several quarters. Set long term goals and prioritize your backlog of projects accordingly. Focus on producing a steady stream of work based on your backlog. When lightning strikes, you just have to adjust your priorities, not your plans.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #5

Big projects reduce flexibility, while small projects increase it. Implement big projects incrementally by breaking them up into smaller ones. When lightning strikes, you can easily shift to something else without lowering productivity.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #6

Once you start working incrementally, you can fit projects neatly into weekly, bi-weekly or monthly work ‘sprints’. Each sprint cycle, you strive to complete projects assigned to the current sprint, then realign priorities for any changes as you plan the next sprint. Sprints increase your flexibility, strengthen your focus on tangible results, and establish a regular heartbeat within your marketing organization.

The post Surviving Marketing Management Natural Disasters appeared first on Markodojo - Marketing Management Software - Agile Marketing.

Let’s Start with Agility

If you look up the word agility in the dictionary, it says things like “nimbleness”, “the ability to move quickly”, and “the quality of being resourceful and adaptable.” All of which are good, but all of which beg the question: What are you moving quickly to do and what are you adapting to?

Since agile marketing has its roots in agile manufacturing, it’s illuminating to take a look at how agility is defined in manufacturing. The definition of agility in manufacturing is crystal clear. It is the ability to adjust supply to meet changing demand. The more agile your manufacturing process, the faster you can do this. If you can produce a product in a month, then it will take you one month to adapt to changes in market demand. If you can produce it in a week, then you are four times more agile, because you can adapt to changing demand four times faster. Now consider the competitive difference this makes if you are producing fashionwear or holiday gifts. The more agile competitor always wins in a fast moving market.

Marketing Agility Defined

Marketing departments, unfortunately, don’t manufacture products. Marketing supply and demand are much fuzzier concepts. Marketing is often described as the process of identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer needs to deliver value and make money. Marketing management is the process of adjusting the marketing mix to this purpose. Therefore, marketing agility is the speed at which you can adjust the marketing mix to deliver greater customer value and make more money. It is not the speed at which you execute your marketing programs; it is the speed at which you can take new marketing mix ideas and turn them into results. How fast can you change your product, adjust your price, deliver a new promotion or shift your channels to anticipate and satisfy ever changing customer needs? This is your marketing agility.

Agile marketing increases marketing agility by accelerating the marketing management process. By applying the five agile marketing disciplines, agile marketing speeds the process of turning marketing mix ideas into the concrete business results that increase customer value and drive company growth.

Agile Marketing Accelerates Marketing Management

The goal of agile marketing is to increase marketing agility. If marketing agility is the speed at which you can adjust the marketing mix to deliver more customer value and make more money, then by definition the goal of agile marketing is to increase that speed. In a previous post, I made the case that all marketers follow a fundamental marketing management process characterized by sourcing ideas for optimizing the marketing mix, then working inside and outside the marketing department to implement those ideas and deliver increased customer value. And finally, measuring the business results of that work and doing it all over again.

Agile marketing increases marketing agility by accelerating the marketing management cycle: ideas, work, results, ideas, work, results, etc. through the practice of the five agile marketing disciplines:

1. Measure value through the eyes of the customer
2. Minimize waste by reducing uncertainty
3. Maximize flexibility by working incrementally
4. Foster alignment and collaboration through transparency
5. Improve iteratively and continuously

When viewed in the context of the marketing management process, the buttons pushed by the five agile marketing disciplines to increase marketing agility become obvious. Customer value is the fundamental axis of alignment for marketing; producing anything that is not valuable to the customer is waste. The process of transforming ideas into results is rife with uncertainty, so it must be managed rigorously, or again there is waste. Delay is the enemy of agility; small, incremental adjustments to the marketing mix take less time to complete than large, monolithic adjustments. Marketing is not a black box. Marketing managers must reach well outside the marketing department to align customers with the company by facilitating marketing activities in sales, engineering, manufacturing, finance, etc. The more transparent the marketing management process, the more effective the facilitation. Finally, making more money implies that marketing results should always be up and to the right. This will only happen if marketing builds upon past successes and learns from past mistakes.

The Future of Agile Marketing

When change is the norm, marketing agility becomes a strategic business weapon. However, current agile marketing methodologies only scratch the surface of agile marketing’s potential to increase marketing agility. While they are incredibly useful for improving marketing team flexibility and productivity, agile methodologies like SCRUM that were designed for software engineering focus almost exclusively on the work within the marketing department. Marketing, unlike engineering, is an extremely outward-facing business function. Agile software methodologies do not adequately address the sourcing and evaluation of new ideas, the impact for constant customer interaction, the importance of collaboration outside the marketing department, or the accountability for concrete and often real-time business results. Software engineering teams are intentionally shielded from these highly uncertain, external marketing realities by product owners and backlogs, so they can focus on the process of producing quality software.

While early agile marketing methodologies have focused on internal marketing teams, future agile marketing methodologies should address the complete, end-to-end marketing management process to increase true marketing agility. They must encompass the complete, end-to-end marketing management process from ideas to results and take into consideration frequent, external marketing interactions with customers and the company.

Marketing managers must constantly source new marketing mix ideas, groom marketing mix backlogs and set marketing mix priorities. Then, they must oversee the implementation of those ideas, both inside and outside the marketing department, for example through a software engineering team. And finally, marketing managers are accountable for marketing mix results; results that may take months or minutes. To realize the full potential of agile marketing for increasing marketing agility, we must evolve current agile marketing methodologies to incorporate these characteristics.

Agile marketing should help marketing cast a wider net to capture better ideas and increase the speed at which those ideas are evaluated and implemented. It should streamline the work processes by which marketing managers facilitate marketing activities both inside and outside the marketing department. It should incorporate pervasive marketing metrics and direct customer feedback to not only adapt to customer needs, but to anticipate them. And, it should close the marketing management loop by focusing on business results that drive marketing performance and enable continuous improvement. In short, agile marketing methodologies should encompass the full end-to-end marketing management process. The goal of agile marketing should extend beyond marketing team agility to true marketing agility.

The post What is Marketing Agility? appeared first on Markodojo - Marketing Management Software - Agile Marketing.