Marketing processes act like your car’s engine. If you neglect them long enough, they sputter and eventually stop running.
You don’t think about how you work as long as marketing efforts progress. Unspoken rules and unwritten assumptions govern how things are done.
Sometimes, the proverbial check-engine light comes on. You stop for a minute, make a quick fix, and get on your way. But mostly, you race from one campaign to the next without thinking about what’s happening under the hood.
That operational neglect can get expensive. As budgets tighten and uncertainty looms, marketers can’t afford to lose money by working the wrong way. Process improvement may not be the shiniest item on your to-do list, but it could save so much that you don’t even notice the impact of a budget cut.
Common dysfunctions in marketing ops
In the 2023 State of Agile Marketing Report (gated), the most popular priorities for marketers this year include:
- Producing higher quality content (40%)
- Prioritizing the most important work (40%)
- Better aligning with organizational goals and objectives (39%)
- Improving the customer experience (38%)
- Increasing the productivity of our marketing departments (36%)
Also making the list: increasing employee satisfaction and morale (35%), releasing marketing work more quickly (32%), and changing direction in response to feedback (18%).
- Everybody is busy, but nothing gets done. Anyone inside or outside of a team can recognize this problem. Emails go out at midnight; nobody ever really goes on vacation; weekends are a time to catch up, etc. But despite that frantic effort, all the work just drags.
- Priorities aren’t clear (or change all the time). The work starts and stops a lot. Something critical on Monday falls out of favor by Friday. The marketing plan created at the start of the year gets ignored after February.
- Work lacks visibility. Even if priorities are clear, the operations can undercut the work if it isn’t visualized. Since no one can see what everybody else is working on, two people replicate the task or spend weeks creating collateral for the same purpose.
- Speed and quality don’t get along. You’re always up against deadlines, so you eliminate review rounds or hit publish the minute content is ready. You think you have to choose between speed and agility or quality and excellence.
- Lots of activity occurs, but nobody knows the purpose. Your company thinks the graphics team exists to create pretty emails, or the videographers are too into TikTok. When you can’t tie the content’s purpose to the business goals, you risk losing budget and being excluded from strategic conversations.
Too few marketers see these check-engine lights as an opportunity to improve their processes. Yet, that’s the answer….Read More