Discussing Challenges for Marketing Leaders
Hi, everybody. This is Ben from My Digital CMO. I help marketing leaders control their strategy and deliver their strategic vision. We do that at My Digital CMO by, producing a range of tools that help you, just do what you need to do as marketers and, improve process, save time, and make, those campaigns more effective and your marketing interactions more meaningful. So today, we're talking about, just some of the, top level challenges that marketing leaders face.
Ben:And, there there are a bunch of them. I'm not gonna suppose that I can tell you how to do your job right away. You got your experience, but, there's some unifying, things that that we can work to solve. One of the, really impactful, challenges I had in, you know, my experience marketing, especially with large teams is, or or and a large number of partners is how you, get adoption of a strategy across the board. So, you know, maybe you work out a strategy with your agency or with your, a marketing lead in the business, and getting that, change change in strategy adopted or new aspects to that strategy understood, throughout, you know, your stakeholders and your teams.
Ben:One of the really impactful studies I read, which was probably a few years ago now, but I still think is is as relevant today is, one around middle management or the middle layer of management within the business supporting the strategy. So when you've got these new processes to introduce or a new initiative to deliver, you're gonna be relying on just other people out there 1 or 2 steps away who may or may not even wanna change. And so having that ability to prepare your strategy, deliver it, get the buy in at a a a top level, the the killer, if you like, can be the middle layer that doesn't believe in it. So having, the ability to sort of work through that middle layer is really crucial. And a lot of the time, it it comes down to, relationships and communication.
Ben:So are those links there? Are they understood? Do you do you know who the stakeholders are? And systematically being able to work through those. And, unfortunately, sometimes you don't even know that resistance is there, till later on, and it's through reiterating the work with, those teams that that you find out there's there's a lack of support.
Ben:So, obviously, starting with a new client, it's really important to get that correct to understand who is in the team and who's gonna be delivering and having access to that person. So then the marketing role is pretty pretty, important strategically, that it includes communication, right through the delivery chain, actually, and access to to, people and individuals. And then, of course, as a a business leader, the the marketing CMO or the, you know, the agency leader, you know, have to take responsibility for owning owning that vision. So the communication and alignment of strategy for everybody is critically important, and, it can't it can't be overlooked. Especially as the team grows, it takes more and more time to get there.
Ben:So that's one of the, critical aspects that, over time, I just, for me, became more and more important. Like, how do you ensure, those people who are managing or responsible for functions actually are gonna, row in the same direction, and it has a cascading effect, through everything. So you can spend all your time at the top level getting the the, CFO or, whoever's whoever's signing the checks to agree with your strategy and and see what it is. But if if, you haven't got access to that middle layer, independent of what those people or positions or seniority are, if they're a decision maker in some of the some of those areas and they've got systems and processes that need to be changed or need to fire and deliver individual components for your strategy to work, it's worth, really sitting down and and working out how you can go from the top level of understanding the strategy right down to which tools and tasks and, people actually need to be on board to deliver. And, when you have confidence in that, that's gonna be, you know, one way you can move forward, you you know, to actually fleshing out the strategy, understanding, getting their input, and and so on.
Ben:And then once you have that, flow and communication in place, obviously, that's gonna that's gonna build trust, build collaboration, and, you know, change can scare some people. Change can be difficult, require extra work, or you might be adding extra workload. But if you've got that clear line of communication, you're gonna really be able to, lead lead from the front and have that trust to the team who are ready and pay attention to to what you wanna do and how you're gonna change that business. Because now more than ever, implementing a new marketing strategy or a new initiative is around is about propelling the business forward and solving a business problem. It's not just raising, new sales.
Ben:It can be improving process or or, activating new markets, whatever it is. You're gonna have that, through the Mime team on board. And one one, thing that you're really going to experience and I'm sure, you all have is the ability to demonstrate a strategy through the line from the concept. Who's our customer? Where is the market?
Ben:What's the market condition we're addressing, and having that in place, the visible line of sight from the strategy through to execution. If you can demonstrate that and then have a way of reiterating that, through the team, through the delivery network, you know, that's actually gonna get a lot more support and and, over time will become hugely important. So having that line of sight from strategy to delivery. So let's say you have a senior business, adoption of the strategy or acceptance. Yep.
Ben:They can see it. They see the strategy, see the customers, know what the product is, all of that. Being able to simply and easily demonstrate what are the tools you're gonna use to deliver. What are the customers you're targeting? How does that campaign differ from, you know, what the day to day marketing is and what the KPIs and objectives are and how you're gonna measure that over time.
Ben:If you can simply deliver that vision and, have it visible, get a format that allows collaboration, and then, you know, you're gonna be on the front foot. And that cascades throughout all all of your initiatives because you've got the strategic alignment upfront. It's repeatable. You do another campaign in 3 months. It's gonna have the same format.
Ben:You can repeat that, process. You can with multiple layers in the business, it's share a shareable strategy that has visible outcomes, and, you know, it also allows you to get feedback on it. If people wanna throw rocks, well, let them let them do that. Let them let them give you their feedback on the initiative as well and move forward as a business. So the, you know, the unique position of marketing is that you're gonna have everybody's an expert.
Ben:Everybody's an expert right up until it comes to understanding what the implication of what they're asking is, and then it's your fault. So having a simple process where you can, continue to work through all those issues is is gonna be really important. And also having tools that help help dynamically deliver that vision, are equally important in your process. Once you have that process, aligned, you have your teams, your delivery partners all on board, well, really, everybody's on the same page. So doing that work upfront, getting that strategy understood before even and then I would say before you even activate any of the tools, the core business fundamentals, the purpose of the campaign, the objectives of the campaign, what tools you're gonna use, what the budget is even for how each tool individually.
Ben:If that's all mapped out, you can let those teams run. They know what the guardrails are. It's gonna be much simpler long term aligning over time and ensuring that everyone's understanding what that purpose is. The flip side, of course, is strategy is not understood. The individual delivery components do their own thing.
Ben:They might optimize to the wrong elements. They might, find a new tool they really like. The creative might be optimized for the wrong reasons, might be optimized for clicks instead of optimized for engagement. Who knows? But, there's many, many ways, you can lose effectiveness without aligning first on the strategy.
Ben:So aligning the team, critically important. I suppose, there are different versions of that, different character types. It's we're not gonna go into culture today, but, as a as a marketing leader, you really need to let your team do their role, deliver to expectations, and not have to micromanage, aligning on the strategy, understanding what what the purpose is, understanding what the KPIs and milestones are. It goes a long way to helping, just delegation and ensuring that you're not overspending time on on that micromanagement. And you can just deal with issues as they arise, making best use of your time.
Ben:One of the really, exciting areas of marketing was when when it became more customer centric. And there's a lot of work done, in the last few years around changing the orientation of marketing to being customer centric. And I think the most impactful, way that it changed business operations, and the ability for teams in different business units to work together is because the customer and let's let's say the end user of the product you're selling or the end, the end customer, not an internal business customer. The end customer focus, their experience is the most important. And that customer experience, can be backed up by data, by research, by feedback, whatever it is.
Ben:It is really easy to align with other colleagues, delivery partners around what that experience must be. So there are lots of different ways to get there. There might be redundant or old or, you know, existing processes that need to be used. As long as they can deliver the end customer experience, you know, then then you can align around that and you're still on the same page with your business partners and and anyone who's helping deliver that experience. And that I believe is true from receiving, promotion by text to walking into a storefront and and, having a expected customer experience.
Ben:So one of the ways of understanding a customer experience obviously is customer research, but mapping that out to a visible, pathway. What happens with a customer at a certain stage and having a view of that can really help align your marketing practice. So what, you know, we're talking about customer life cycle, of course, and some customer life cycles are really, really complex. Some are quite simple, might be awareness, interest by ownership. For others, there might be 10 stages of ownership.
Ben:There might be pre ownership. There might be important things that need to happen after a product is purchased like, servicing a machine or some other input where the customer and that ownership doesn't doesn't get the value they want without, without understanding that. So being able to map the customer from before they buy and through product experience is really, really important. And when you're talking about how we deliver and build and, optimize a strategy from, creating that strategy and then the line of sight through what happens with the customer interaction, how you convert in that buying moment and aligning around those things. Understanding the customer experience is really, really important.
Ben:I have seen a few variations of this. Some businesses focus on pain points because the customer experience can be hugely impacted by something going wrong. So you might find a whole schedule of focusing on a pain point. Okay. Here's our process, 1 to 10.
Ben:At step number 3, you know, the customer might experience, a pain point that was when I walk into the shop, I don't like the person selling to me or the method isn't great or the, you know, there's a pressure cell or whatever it is. I don't actually like focusing on pain points, although I think it's really important to understand what they are. A better method in my view is focusing on, what's going right or, understanding what the pain point is, but enhancing, the solution to that. You can, define a, define your customer journey in terms of a problem. You're probably missing out a bigger opportunity for branding and bigger opportunity for the things that do work well to really go right, and and that can be a focus.
Ben:But having said that, it's important to know, you know, what can go wrong. It's important to understand, but instead of trying to fix that key problem, often a better way is to look at what the customer experience should be and remove that step altogether. That's why digital and online purchase is so rampant. Customers wanna look from their lounge room and buy something online if possible. And that's a great example.
Ben:Like, they don't try and improve the in shop experience. If the customer really wants to sit on the couch, why don't we just make the couch experience fantastic? And so it gives rise to some other issues, digital marketing and technology, and how do you keep up with that technology and make sure you're communicating in the right way. But, understanding that customer journey, is critically important. Sometimes when getting started on that, it's hard to have the data to back up what you really need.
Ben:So, you're gonna have to survey the business, understand the customer, understand the the business itself, the purpose, what the product's for, and you you're gonna need to step through that and sometimes make an assumption that can be validated later on just just to get going. But, again, through especially creating new campaigns, new mechanics, you're gonna need to understand how that business works, what the previous practice is, and how to identify what's happening with the existing customer journey. And back to where we started, the alignment of the strategy to the customer journey is gonna be really important. And as long as your delivery teams, partners, and, individuals helping with with the execution of that strategy, they understand the customer journey. They understand which, strategic element, which tactic applies to which piece of the customer journey.
Ben:You're gonna get a lot more effective delivery of that. Your campaigns are gonna be more efficient. You're gonna take less time to set up something that's, able to be measured, and you can be able to be more tactical, and get results quicker. The so then then we've got our major components. You get the strategy.
Ben:You got the the customer centric orientation. You understand your customer journey, and that really is gonna help a lot ensure that you can prioritize your activities. You understand which tactics are more important. You might be dealing with a pain point. You might have a a campaign that or or a process that needs to be improved to get around a certain area, but all over, a 360 view of what the direction is, where you're trying to lead, and where your campaigns and strategies are gonna, be focused really is gonna combat waste of resources, spending your money in the wrong place, getting your team members or having your team members chasing some other mechanic or tool or execution that's not really aligned to strategy.
Ben:That may happen, but, when that strategic framework is there, it really helps, evaluate as you go. And then any any areas that come up, maybe some tactics aren't as effective, they're pushing towards a different KPI, or or they're push pushing success in a way that's not meaningful for future sales. It's gonna be much easier to make decision on what you what you cut or what you enhance. Yeah. So, just having that framework, for strategy, having the customer centric outcomes, having the ability to measure that, then those individual, KPI is gonna be much more meaningful.
Ben:Are you gonna be able to more quickly, evaluate whether or not your campaigns, your your tactics, or what have you is going well, and that in turn is gonna lead to a much, higher higher responsiveness and flexibility. So it's quite it's obviously hard to change things that are in in in flow or connected, but if they can be broken down into manageable pieces, it'd be easier to make those decisions. So the ultimate, result of having great strategy framework, and aligned team around that for customer centric outcomes, it's much easier to move within that framework to change when you need to. Maybe one tactic is not working, one channel isn't getting a response, another is. Simply move a budget from one area to another if that's a digital digital, advertising channel, for example.
Ben:There might be some hands on customer activities getting great results, and you can enhance one and reduce the other. And that way, having that really strong strategic framework helps you prioritize, helps you meet your objectives, and, you know, it also makes that back to where we started, makes that really easy to socialize amongst the business partners, amongst your delivery partners. It's an easier conversation. It's very focused. It might be 3 months later, you're you're talking to your client or a delivery partner, and and you're gonna be able to easily explain where you're at, why the change is coming, and or and or what change needs to happen.
Ben:So all these things stem from having a great strategic framework that's, got full stakeholder collaboration at the beginning. So the execution and the, delivery can take quite a long time, but with the work upfront on the strategy, really monitoring and maintaining that that delivery is much more manageable. Of course, that immediately brings into, top of mind, well, how does that management happen? What are the KPIs? What what should be measured?
Ben:And the fewer things that have to be measured, the better in some instances, but then you need to be able to set up clear goals that relate to the purpose of the marketing and campaigning, and then have, some smart smart goals, and KPIs to measure that and deliver that framework. So once you've worked out the your objectives and strategy, all that stuff, obviously, you need to be able to measure that for the delivery over time. And you're gonna have competing priorities and objectives. One really good method, that's pretty well recognized, a great place to start is writing SMART goals. So SMART is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound.
Ben:So setting up overall overall objectives, that's fine. You know, we wanna increase sales by 20% this quarter, whatever it is, but what are the individual KPIs and goals for the tactical components under that? So it can be pretty challenging if you have limited data over time, but as long as your goal at the beginning is is clear, once your marketing is rolling out and you're starting to get data, you can revisit that, to ensure that it's laddering up to the right things. So, obviously, data and insights, making database decisions is really, helpful. It also helps a lot in stakeholder management.
Ben:So once that pattern is set, distributing that KPI using the same metrics for the whole team to be across. Don't let one team use sales per quarter, another sales per week, and have arguments around that. Just aligning around how you're gonna report, what are you gonna what are you gonna look at, and try to identify just a couple of key metrics from one phase to another, from, lead to, sale and from sale to usage of product, whatever it is. You gotta be able to reduce you might have 20 different KPIs you look at, but from a management point of view, you might have, 2 or 3 top metrics that you share and discuss and distribute over time, to keep everyone focused on delivery and make sure that, overall, the marketing strategy is being delivered. Obviously, you can get more granular.
Ben:The individual tactical components, that roll out different channels, different, activities. That's your role to keep that all in play, and, you know, put that data in one easily digestible package. And so one thing that really does happen a lot is, you know, marketing is one of those areas where you're gonna have a 100 experts telling you what should and should be done. They don't really understand the mechanics. They don't really understand the results, and they may not really understand the the metrics.
Ben:So having that consistent, having it explained at the beginning and reiterated is gonna be really important because at the end of the day, as I said earlier, you know, we're not marketing for fun. We don't do these things that cost money because we like doing them, although that can also be true. The purpose is to deliver results for the business. So those results need to be measurable. If they're not measurable, you gotta sit down and work out what data and information you have got.
Ben:If you haven't got enough, you gotta reiterate, regularly, weekly, daily. Daily is often too much, but till you get a pattern that you can track, it might be important. But we're all under pressure to deliver results in marketing. So, having that clear framework set out early on, how that ladders up to or is a product of your strategy is really, really important, and spending some time understanding how you're gonna deliver that and how you're gonna distribute that, and what the milestones and marks of success for those campaigns and marketing efforts are is gonna be really important. It is a huge, huge challenge keeping up with all the changes in technology.
Ben:I've gone from is it one of my first digital files was putting too long a code in an email link. So coming from sending out an automated email with an actionable link to just digital platform, customer experience platforms, and and the layers and layers and layers of technology is just phenomenal in, the last 15 years, 20 years, and then, you know, we'll see what happens in the next few years with AI and all that side. But, choosing technology, understanding technology, finding tools that suit and are fit for purpose, very important area, but, again, ensuring they match the business process is gonna be key. So, obviously, one of the most important things is, how how you choose the right tools, how you align those tools with your business, how you build that business manageably, reducing cost for technology, and understanding strategy framework, business purpose, and and that whole, area is gonna help lead from the front and ensure you're efficiently, creating a customer led experience, not a tool led experience, and help you deliver your business and marketing goals. So having said all that, I hope it was useful, and I look forward to sharing some strategic insights with you soon.
Ben:Great. Thanks for listening. Enjoy creating that strategy. More soon from the team here at My Digital CMO.
