Consumers want to feel a deeper connect with the brands they admire, be it endorsement of brands such as Nike that leverages the popularity of athletes or founders of renowned organizations who can inspire. Humanity is the key element to successfully market the brand. It is ironic that human touch has become critical to brands more than ever alongside behind-the-scenes technology that decides scalability of marketing and has exploded in past couple of years.
As per Gartner’s prediction CMOs will be investing more resources on technology than CIOs after 2017. Currently, in over 30% of businesses – be it sales, IT or customer services they report into the CMOs which reinforces the Gartner’s predictions.
The bottleneck is to ensure the implementation of right technology in the right way, in order to boost marketing and creative excellence, rather than stifle it.
Marketers are interacting with consumers by positioning the brands using omnichannel approach which brings them to greater accountability while assessing the performance of each channel.
The extent of customer targeting today in conjunction with the measurement capability of most marketing tech means marketers influence to make a huge impact on the commercial success of the businesses they work for – and businesses are demanding all-inclusive tactics.
If aligned together, the commitment to streamline processes within the marketing department is a perfect storm that could prove to be a true game-changer for all marketers and the businesses they cater to.
Process is the catch
As per an article by Harvard Business Review, “firms with strong managerial processes perform significantly better on high-level metrics such as productivity, profitability, growth, and longevity”. Top performing teams are three times more creative and efficient, and businesses that implement best-in-class management practices experience a quarter of faster YOY growth.
Naturally, the main investment in a marketing team is its employees. The best way to drive efficiency is to reduce the cognitive drill i.e. the everyday repetitive tasks these teams indulge in to make place for the actual value-add tasks. Doing this will need visibility into the work that is being done and an approach to efficiency that is more akin to the assembly lines of old.
The term ‘assembly line’ would rather sound obsolete for modern marketing firms but delegating workers the ability to execute work efficiently as it arrives to them should not be an archaic notion. Amid the available technology milieu – from project management to collaboration platforms, helps the marketers work in a more agile way and streamline processes. These systems leverage the CMOs with confidence to work in high-demand work environment, understanding that the deadlines are being hit and output is qualitatively very high.
Sync technology and marketing discipline
A quick search will list out more than 5,000 marketing technology tools which makes the CMOs all the more difficult to pick the right tool and when to deploy them. If CMOs are going to dawn on the hat of one of the main technology purchasers / users within an organization, it needs to be carefully treaded with a steady tab on the business needs.
Let’s discuss how to head start by answering these questions:
- What are the problem areas? Carefully assess your marketing team operations and keep a tab on the deadlines keeping over-service at minimum, measure the ROI of campaigns. When you need to pull out the data – is it easy to retrieve or takes long hours.
- Are we working in tandem alongside all the teams across all business units? The best of marketing teams interacts across the business units which is crucial while delivering high quality service to customers. While chat tools may be better in some respects than email, neither may be enough to bring organization to your workflow and collaboration
- How can you work for more without exhausting resources? Making your team own up to accountability of work and ensuring they are in the right direction is the crux to productivity. In order that to happen the team needs to have access to the right information and context for better decision-making at every level. Collaboration technology can add a layer of transparency to facilitate this decision-making. Finding solutions that empower the team also helps boost their morale.
- What are the real challenges? The main question to be exactly answered is what to do now and how technology can help you achieve that. Then you need to look at your organization’s culture around deploying new technology and understand if the collaboration tool is genuinely adding value to your business productivity.
Let Operational Excellence take the center stage
Technology is undergoing transformation which is directly impacting the marketing industry, and this will last for a while in the future too. From audience analysis tools, sophisticated chatbots, to team collaboration platforms, marketers are adopting new technologies to accelerate the speed of delivery, enhance the output quality and capability to provide customized offerings to every customer.
However, amid the aggressive embrace of streamlining the operations and using the technology marketers should not lose their line of sight of their ultimate driver – business success.
Chasing a culture of operational excellence in all aspects of a business’s operations in a managed, synchronized and seamless way will be an important key to that success.
Recent Comments