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Are you expected to deliver the BAU while continuing to innovate and improve the maturity of marketing efforts, all with limited resources and skill gaps? You are not alone.
Today’s Modern Marketer has it tough – they are expected to deliver the BAU, churn out an endless supply of high-quality leads, coordinate events, be a Photoshop wizard, understand and be able to execute campaigns in Marketing Automation, all while continuing to innovate and improve the maturity of marketing efforts, slicing and dicing data to provide valuable insights.
All this with limited resources and skill gaps and oh yes that’s right, 50% of the database in the bin because of GDPR.
The first thing to understand is that if you are reading this, you are not alone. Having worked at B2B marketing agencies for 10+ years, I can tell you with confidence that 90% of B2B organisations face these challenges.
Quite often, these challenges are a result of a lack of streamlined process and alignment between marketing functions, other times it is a simple lack of time and possession of the relevant skills.
So how do you go about ensuring all the necessary marketing functions are joined up in their approach and fill in the resource and skill gaps?
- If you don’t have a marketing request process in place, that should be the highest priority. Finding a way of aligning the marketing functions to make the most of the skills available to you is not easy and while there are many point solutions on the market – project management, resource management, scheduling platforms – there are few, if any, that will help you to manage the end-to-end marketing request process from planning a campaign through to requesting the copy, building the assets, uploading the data and reporting on the performance of the campaign. This very gap is the reason CRMT developed Demand.Center – a platform which enables Intelligent Global Campaign Orchestration at scale.
- Ensure each function understands their roles and responsibilities. This sounds like a simple one but with the ever-blurred lines between Social, Digital and Operations teams this is key to avoid duplication of effort and confusion.
- Outsource the skills you are missing to an agency, contractor or hire them in.
- Build up your database by any means you can – capture registrations and opt ins via a form on an iPad at events, build an engaging destination for inbound traffic to convert those unknown visitors to known contacts, invest in platforms like TechTarget to bolster contacts at your key accounts, invest in intent technologies to ensure the accounts you are targeting are actually interested in your products or
- Educate the business on the difference between a high quantity of leads that will never be followed up in a timely manner and a smaller quantity of highly engaged leads from within your target accounts.
- Invest in the infrastructure to turbo charge your demand generation efforts to develop those high-quality leads.
How on earth do I focus my time and energy on overcoming these challenges and still get my campaigns out the door? I hear you – it’s not easy. The first step is to break it down into manageable tasks with some immediate quick wins, delegating tasks to the relevant teams with the right skill sets. Of course you can also consider involving an agency to guide you along a roadmap to achieve these goals or to take care of the BAU so that you can focus on the innovation.
Don’t forget if you’ve read this article you are already part way towards overcoming these challenges.
Written by Joanna Mills – Account Director, CRMT