From Average To Elite. 7 Secrets of Today s Top Marketers

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1 From Average To Elite 7 Secrets of Today s Top Marketers

2 Marketing Is More Chaotic Than Ever Marketing has always been a world riddled with chaos. The advent of new methods of communication, changing consumer appetites for marketing, and increased expectations from clients has only amped up the chaos. It s made the job of senior managers in marketing harder than ever. They must effectively communicate goal progress to executive leadership, answer their questions, collect meaningful data from their teams, and understand roadblocks without disrupting team productivity. With today s management by job or project mindset, marketing managers and directors face a number of challenges, such as: Performing under increased pressure to show more value, faster Quantifying varying and difficult-to-measure return on investment Pleasing multiple stakeholders with different agendas, changing needs and requirements Ensuring successful campaign, asset, and design work delivery Staying in front of the needs of sales organizations Managing a distributed talent network located in various cities and countries across the globe These are just a few of the daily challenges marketers face. For the average marketer, managing all of this on top of other responsibilities turns into pure chaos. The average marketer: Misses deadlines Submits poor quality work Relies on inefficient processes But there is help. Read on to learn the seven secrets elite marketers live by in order to better plan, prioritize, measure and report on their work. Implementing these best practices is what separates the average from elite. 1 Plan For Collaboration, Don t Just Wish For It #1 CHALLENGE 50% of participants claimed organizational structure and the need to work with multiple vendors, agencies, and specialists as the #1 challenge to marketing integration. Often much of the planning of an integrated marketing campaign is done in silos. The average marketer operates as a loner without getting the input of other players in the campaign, isn t effective, and will invariably diminish team commitment. Under-motivated team members will not perform well, leading to additional morale problems. Planning in a silo, rather than collaboratively, can spell doom for even the best laid out projects. The work a marketing team does is collaborative and requires team buy-in and feedback from the beginning. A recent survey highlighted this challenge - 50% of participants claimed organizational structure and the need to work with multiple vendors, agencies, and specialists as the #1 challenge to marketing integration. 1 2

3 Most marketing planning is still done in silos that rely on campaign- or channel-level optimizations to make slight tweaks, without a real understanding of the mutual influence that different channels have on each other. Senior marketers must work to break down monolithic marketing processes, inject customer data and insights into decision-making, broaden the scope of optimization to multichannel attribution, and quickly test and measure the value of new marketing channels. - Michael Glantz Elite marketers break down silos and use collaborative planning to ensure better alignment from the first step in every integrated marketing campaign. Every campaign should start with a group kick-off where the requirements of all stakeholders are gathered. Once the work is initiated, collaborative planning based on individual commitments further ensures scheduling is realistic and reflects each team member s commitment to delivery. As the plan moves forward the collaboration continues through regularly updating stakeholders on progress. By adopting collaborative planning, the team can significantly improve the timeline, scope and resource estimates. Collaborative planning also fosters team development and inspires commitment % OF WORKERS Don t have enough time to get their work done. 2 Stop the Drive-bys and Organize Your Process Marketing requests come from everywhere. They come as an from the sales team asking why you aren t following a competitor s PPL strategy, a last-minute ask in the hallway for a polished presentation needed by yesterday, an off-hand mention in a meeting of an event that marketing needs to support. Sometimes it s enough to make you plot a secret path to the restroom just to avoid random requests. This is a good indication that an organization s work initiation process is out of control or non-existent. Average marketing teams quickly lose productivity when key resources shift to other suddenly critical projects and stakeholders become frustrated with unfinished progress. Explaining to a customer that the project is delayed because of a new, higher priority destroys credibility with business stakeholders. Resource management also becomes a nightmare as managers struggle with shifting resources while balancing stakeholder commitments. Even worse, employees become burned out as work is piled on and they are stretched in every direction. This has a direct correlation on work: 66% of workers don t have enough time to get their work done. 94% feel overwhelmed by information to the point of incapacitation % OF WORKERS Felt overwhelmed by information to the point of incapacitation. The secret to avoiding this common pitfall is to establish a request management process that supports marketing project management through the entire work lifecycle. Elite marketers refuse to entertain ad hoc project start-up by defining a request process and supplementing it with a simple brief or request form. Those same elite marketers then have a process to monitor and report on the progress of the project until it s completed. Depending on the number of requests your organization receives you may want to consider standardizing on an enterprise work management solution that routes requests into individual queues. 3

4 MARKETING MANAGERS Whose role it is to ensure work is delivered on time, on budget, and of high quality, already have the odds stacked against them. 13% 13% over budget 20% 20% missed deadlines 7% 7% underdelivered scope 3 Don t Spend A Dime Without Data Marketing budgets vary greatly from company to company, averaging 10% of a company s budget. 3 With such a significant spend, it s imperative that marketing budgets be forecasted, tracked, and reported throughout the life of a campaign. A root cause of budget problems is poor estimation and a lack of initial planning. The average marketing manager s process doesn t include gathering subject matter expertise or past project estimates to include in the budgeting process. This leaves the campaign with a weak financial foundation. Marketing managers are challenged with providing financial estimates quickly and do not always have the luxury of unlimited time to complete a bottom-up estimate. The result will be a hastily formed campaign budget that lacks any contingency for much needed creativity. Sometimes it can feel like marketing managers have been set up to fail. In fact a study of 412 managers indicated projects overshot budget by 13%, schedule by 20%, and under-delivered scope by 7%. 4 The frequently cited Standish Group Chaos Report reveals 24% percent of all projects surveyed failed and 44% were challenged in achieving project objectives. 5 Marketing managers, whose role it is to ensure work is delivered on time, on budget, and of high quality, already have the odds stacked against them. Elite marketing managers review past costs and estimates to support more realistic estimation. The secret is they inject data and analysis into all facets of spending decisions. By comparing past costs, budgets, supplier contracts, and previous schedules, marketing campaign managers can develop comparable estimates for similar projects down the road. It s important to keep in mind that the process needs to allow for budget refinement based on the initial estimate. Marketing work, in particular, often goes outside initial expectations as creativity flows and bigger and better ideas work their way into a project. 4 Kill The Spreadsheets And Throw Out The Post-It Notes Average marketing organizations seek to solve marketing work management issues by cobbling reports from a wall of post-it notes or sifting frivolously through mountains of spreadsheets. The problem is, most centralized reporting solutions are designed to appease the needs of the executive management team rather than the marketing team doing the work. The executive team typically finds a tool and requires managers to update the system on a regular basis. This doesn t encourage buy-in on a team level. In these situations, the campaign status reporting and schedule updates are disconnected from the solution that tracks, manages, and helps project teams deliver the project. The average marketing manager analyzes the project schedule and incorporates the key risks and issues into the campaign management tool. The inevitable result is a disparate system that isn t kept up to date with realtime work activities. Marketing work needs a reliable management system that facilitates the job instead of stifling it with a separate administrative reporting tool. In fact, spreadsheets and post-it notes make it feel like work is being tracked, but are highly unreliable. 4

5 72+28X 72% OF USERS SAY No one checks spreadsheets for accuracy. 72% of users say no one checks spreadsheets for accuracy. Leaving the door wide open for embarrassing errors. 6 Actuarial Post The secret of elite marketing managers is to provide team members, executives, and stakeholders with one source of truth, by consolidating sporadic and inefficient tools into one. By doing so, an elite marketing organization obtains a real-time integrated performance view. Team members can use the enterprise work management solution to communicate, collaborate and produce work while management reporting is based off of real-time data, rather than stale and incomplete status updates % 59% 29% SINGLE PROOFING SOLUTION 56% faster speed-to-market of your projects, 59% less time spent managing proofs, and 29% reduction in number of revisions. 5 Break The Bottleneck With Optimized Workflow Tracking Marketing teams work with a lot of assets that need both internal and external review and approval. This can be a monumental challenge when stakeholders are scattered and have other pressing needs demanding their attention. Tracking a workflow through the proofing process can be a nightmare when there is no version control and really no way to force someone in another office halfway around the world to open your proof and look at it. Average marketers hope people will check their , update an outdated spreadsheet, and rummage the waste bin for the information they need. What s needed is the ability to take a proof, compare it side-by-side with the latest version while capturing comments and feedback from others right on the proof. Using a single proofing solution results in: 56% faster speed-to-market of your projects 59% less time spent managing proofs 29% reduction in number of revisions 7 Elite marketers track the workflow in one place. The review and approval process is expedited when all invested parties are working on the same proof in the same place. When the asset owner is able to capture meaningful feedback right on the proof there is less room for error and a faster turnaround time for revisions. All while maintaining full confidence that everyone is working on the right version and all feedback has been considered. This way stakeholders can give the green light without ever having to arrange a meeting, schedule a phone call or chase down an old or file. Accurately tracking the workflow nets faster approvals while increasing stakeholder satisfaction with the final result. 5

6 6 Live In The Now: Never Be Satisfied With Stale Status 4 Hours WASTED Office workers spend an average of 4 hours a week in meetings and feel more than half of that time is wasted. Projects are dynamic, but status reporting tends to be static and risks becoming stale based on the timing of reviews. The average marketing manager collects status reports at the beginning of the week but generally doesn t report them until a few days later because of the time it takes to organize the updates into a discernable report. The team often pulls status from multiple data sources including s, verbal reports from status update meetings, conversations in the hall, and even managerial intuition. These data sources may also be out of date and unreliable. Not to mention office workers spend an average of 4 hours a week in meetings and feel more than half of that time is wasted. 8 Combine that with the various ad-hoc requests managers are blind-sided with on a daily basis and the inordinate amount of time wasted in status update meetings. Inevitably, the wrong or, at best, outdated, version of the status report is submitted and the average marketing manager is left explaining status that isn t accurately reflected. Trust is damaged once inaccurate status reports are submitted, and stakeholders will be hesitant to believe what s presented to them. Marketers need to be able to accurately integrate granular data streams from internal sources into their marketing mix models, increasingly in near-real time. In addition to offline sales data, senior marketers expect to process data streams from live media campaigns, social media metrics, trade show promotions, coupons, as well as unique internal marketing organization data streams, like sales force effectiveness and supply chain efficiency. 9 - Forrester Research Elite marketers avoid stale status by relying on real-time status updates. Instead of combing status reports from a dozen different sources and compiling a half-baked PowerPoint presentation, elite marketing managers generate status reports in real time. Relying on realtime reporting ensures the status of a job accurately reflects its true progress. By doing this, managers can dive into the specific details based on executive review questions. Instead of simply talking to the data, elite managers actually show supporting data that represents the project status. More proof and less talk will gain credibility with stakeholders and confidence is increased in the status reports presented. 7 Don t Be So Quick To Move On: Learn From Mistakes and Build On Successes Another challenge for marketing managers is illustrating success after a project is complete. Given the varying timelines of campaigns, it can take weeks or months to comb through data and paint a picture of success or failure. Average marketers tend to quickly move on to the next project and leave the data mining to someone else. It is critical to understand the success or failure of a campaign, particularly in marketing where internal resources need to be justified along with campaign results. Marketing moves quickly, almost at warp speed, and this can be difficult for average marketers who don t take the time to analyze whether campaigns were 6

7 done well, or if they fell short. The average marketer doesn t realize a campaign took way more people than planned or cost the company significantly more than bargained for. A 2011 Forrester Research report puts it this way: With media consumption continuing to fragment amid an unsteady economy, senior marketers are under more pressure than ever to prove return on investment (ROI) across their entire marketing budget. With media consumption continuing to fragment amid an unsteady economy, senior marketers are under more pressure than ever to prove return on investment (ROI) across their entire marketing budget. Forrester Research Elite marketers add a benefit realization process after the project is completed and ensure that proper resources and prioritization are provided. Verifying and reviewing a project s benefits will take time and will not be immediately apparent. However, when the work has been tracked and updated throughout its lifecycle by management, team members, and internal and external stakeholders, all in one place, extracting important information is much easier and significantly less time consuming. Elite marketing managers can quickly show facts to justify the budget spent on projects past as well as more accurately forecast budget needs for future projects. They can also spot problem areas or resource vacuums and address those issues in the planning phase. Having this kind of information at their fingertips allows elite managers to recognize standout achievements and key milestones and give credit where credit is due. Conclusion Marketing is complex and takes on the fierce task of integrating people and processes while aligning with strategic objectives in order to make better decisions and drive greater value. The seven secrets of elite marketers don t exactly require CIA level clearance; it s a matter of putting them into practice - all of them, all of the time. These are just a few of the challenges marketing managers face in a continually changing business environment. Anticipating potential issues and supporting the management process with integrated tools improves the overall standardization and effectiveness. What once took hours of thought, weeks of planning, and months of stress will quickly become second nature. Marketing teams want to deliver. Team managers want to help them deliver while supporting executive management with better decision-making. By integrating the tools and data used to support delivery and campaign management, average marketers become elite. Emerging and even mature marketing organizations can take advantage of today s collaborative work technology and integrated campaign management solutions to make better decisions with fewer headaches. 7

8 About Workfront Workfront, the leader in cloud-based enterprise work management solutions, helps marketers rise to elite status by leveraging the combined power of social collaboration, increased engagement, accountability, visibility, and recognition making it possible for people to take ownership of their work and perform at a higher level. Workfront is the secret weapon of today s elite marketers. Plan For Collaboration Workfront was built for collaborative planning. Teams can leverage best practice project plans as templates to kick-start accurate, efficient, and collaborative planning. Stop The Drive-bys Workfront puts the brakes on drive-by, ad-hoc work requests. Easily create online project request forms you can customize and route to the right people. Don t let your day be derailed or lose focus on top priority strategic objectives. Workfront request management ensures teams are working on projects that provide the most value. Inject Data and Analysis Workfront gives you more than a best guess. Tracking past, current and future campaigns in Workfront gives you the concrete data you need. With Workfront s customizable fields and robust reporting features you have virtually limitless ways to analyze the information. Kill The Spreadsheets Workfront gives you a license to kill spreadsheets that is. Marketing managers need a comprehensive overview of campaign progress. Workfront empowers teams by giving them a real-time integrated view. Rather than introducing yet another system to track progress, elite marketers can use Workfront as a single source of data for connecting programs, projects, resources and tasks. Workfront s social media-inspired tools let everyone leave feedback, record progress, report obstacles and contribute updates so everyone on the team, including executives, stay on the same page, in real-time. Break The Bottleneck Collaboration and approvals are easier than ever with Workfront in-line, digital proofing. Attach an image to a job and anyone you tag can see the proof, leave comments, mark up the proof and compare versions side by side. No more bottlenecks waiting for approver comments while the proof sits in their spam folder. Move forward faster and with confidence. 8

9 Live In The Now Throw out old stale status reports like you would curdled milk. Workfront gives you a single place to keep track of all work without the unnecessary fluff tools that make progress reporting difficult and scattered. Executives will get reliable data about team performance, accomplishments, timelines, and budgets in a consistent format. And because elite marketers update progress throughout the work lifecycle there s no need for the usual fire drill of weekly information gathering. Learn Your Lesson Workfront makes you smarter, clairvoyant almost. Executives, senior managers, and the whole marketing team get full visibility into the history of a completed project or campaign so they can make sure objectives are met and forecast the future. Elite marketers use project templates in Workfront to ensure this important final step is not missed before the project is closed out. Rise above average and contact Workfront today. Call: Click: marketing.workfront.com info@workfront.com Endnotes 1. Zeta Interactive, June 17, Marketing Synergy Survey 2. Spira, Jonathan, Overload! How too much information is hazardous to your organization 3. Moorman, Christine, November 15, How Much Firms Spend on Marketing 4. Communications of the ACM Journal, Volume 50 Issue 11, November Standish Group Chaos Report, Cluster Seven Research, June 6, New Research Points to Systemic Failure of Spreadsheet Risk Management 7. ProofHQ study conducted by Intellilink 8. Opinion Matters, for Epson and the Centre for Economics & Business Research, May Glantz, Michael, December 27, Boost Marketing Returns With Model-Driven Insights 9