It’s time to move beyond advice like “become a better communicator” and use language that makes this actionable for everyone. Below are five key skills to help you tackle the challenges of a rapidly evolving industry.

1. Become a strategist, not a firefighter

Developing effective marketing leadership skills begins with learning to think and plan strategically. Part of this requires stepping past the reactionary day-to-day and taking proactive action for the sake of the business. 

This is a challenge in many environments if the marketing function has been understaffed or underresourced, leaving the team to merely react to the items. However, at some point, this shifts. It’s critical to see the potential for fires before they even start. 

Marketing leaders must hone their ability to address complex problems and make informed decisions. That also means considering factors beyond simple financial implications, including:

• Implementing new technology.
• Mitigating risks of business processes across the organization.
• Simply communicating about the MQL to SQL process between teams. 

Becoming a strategist means having the ability to do the following:

Analyzing business fundamentals

Call it “first principles” or whatever you want, but examine the core drivers of your business and be willing to challenge the status quo based on what you find. Rather than jumping on each new martech tool, consider the cascading effects of each new technology across your business.

Staying ahead of marketplace trends

Keep a close eye on emerging trends and anticipate their impact on your team’s work over the next 12 to 24 months. Proactively communicate this anticipated impact to your team. When your team is prepared and empowered, you can spend less time putting out fires.

Shift focus to long-term planning

Develop the capacity to pull yourself out of the weeds and move towards more of a planner/advisor role. For instance, these days, you might be asking, “How will our organization use AI? What are the implications? Drawbacks? Ethical concerns?” 

Dig deeper: Rethinking the marketing planning process for an agile world

2. Interpret and showcase data correctly

For better or worse, leaders can create a powerful effect on behavior by carefully choosing what to measure and what metrics they expect employees to use. To excel in marketing ops, you must possess a strong understanding of marketing analytics, be excellent at discerning valuable insights and communicate those findings in an impactful and concise manner.

Organizations differ in how they define data-driven, though Forrester sums it up nicely: “A data-driven organization identifies the insights it needs data to inform. It effectively manages that data and empowers its team to use it.” 

While data should help drive decisions, you must balance that with speed. In our organization, we often say, “Companies grow at the rate of decision-making.” You can accelerate your organization’s growth by optimizing the speed at which you gain insights from your data and empowering your team to leverage those insights.

But it’s hard to create any growth if you don’t know which metrics matter

Great leaders recognize the fluff of vanity metrics, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore them. Instead, understand the relationships between lead and lag measures and make sure your team understands.

People in your organization will have different opinions on which metrics matter and how to interpret them

Empathy and understanding are key. Strike a balance if you need to because different stakeholders will care about different KPIs. Some may give extra attention to lead measures, but these measures can still illustrate progress, even when bottom-line results are not yet apparent. It’s all about learning to tell a compelling story with the data in situations like these. 

Are you getting the most from your stack? Take the 2023 MarTech Replacement Survey

3. Practice empathetic change management

Change management becomes important when implementing new processes, tools or technologies — which, in the case of marketing, can be frequent.

Whether you’re adopting ChatGPT for SEO or trying to get the sales team to use HubSpot sequences, your goal is to ensure a smooth transition, minimizing disruption to your team. To achieve this, consider a few tips:

Education and buy-in

Practice empathy for those asked to make shifts and make sure they feel heard in their concerns. By securing their support (rather than just asserting your correctness), you can minimize foot-dragging and/or burnout.

Tailor your message

Just as in marketing a product or service, tailor your message to each specific group within your organization according to what’s important to them. Remember that people learn differently.

For example, create visual roadmaps illustrating anticipated workflow improvements and time savings when introducing a new project management tool.

Small wins

Focus on finding small wins that support the vision, whether they serve as a step in the right direction or simply as a morale boost to sustain motivation.

For instance, when transitioning to a new marketing automation platform, celebrate the first successful email campaign sent using the new tool, showcasing its benefits and boosting team morale.

4. Communicate and collaborate as a team

People tend to either retroactively realize they needed better communication or they’re the type to have meetings for the sake of meetings. But just like group projects in high school, you don’t want to be caught doing all the work or carrying the load alone. 

Effective cross-functional collaboration is key to aligning marketing efforts with other business functions, but better collaboration doesn’t mean more meetings (which could have been emails). It’s about asking the right questions and fostering free-flowing communication.

Create standardized processes across teams

For every decision, ask yourself: do we know the criteria we’re using to make those decisions? Start by identifying inconsistencies across functions. Pay attention to differences in response to the same questions. 

For example, receiving the same request from different departments in different ways may indicate a need to streamline communication and establish clearer guidelines.

Or you might find different teams have different webinar processes. This could mean that teams have different reasons for ignoring a standardized approach, have distinct processes or are unaware of shared resources like a documentation library. 

Identifying and addressing these discrepancies will lead to more effective cross-functional collaboration and a stronger, more cohesive company.

Don’t jump straight into the deep end with communication

It’s great to keep everyone on the same page and establish clear communication channels within/across teams. Sharing insights and best practices between departments can be hugely helpful too.

But avoid overdoing it in communication. Going from zero to 100 to compensate for communication lapses can be overwhelming, causing your team to tune things out and creating white noise. Leaders need to gauge effectiveness and pivot as necessary. 

5. Be flexible yet structured where it matters

Just as a goldfish grows to fit the size of its bowl, our tasks expand to fill the time we allow them to. Agile project management can help you efficiently allocate resources and adapt to changing priorities, ensuring you deliver timely results.

Clear communication

As with improving cross-functional collaboration, you must establish a decision-making framework to prioritize tasks effectively. Work on communicating goals clearly. 

Dig deeper: How to use decision intelligence to tackle complex business challenges

Efficient resource allocation

Adopt an agile mindset when handling technology transitions. Be prepared to back up your current tools, move to new ones and notify your company about changes in tool usage. Balance time and resources to manage these transitions smoothly since sunsetting old tools bring its own workload.

Adapt to changing priorities 

Ask better questions to understand priority and impact. Develop a plan that is flexible enough to avoid falling apart at the first sign of change. 

Deliver results on time (and don’t hide it)

People may forget when you deliver on time, but they will remember when you’re late. Don’t forget to remind and celebrate your team’s successes externally.

Staying agile is key

By implementing agile project management, you’ll be better equipped to handle the dynamic nature of marketing operations, ensuring that you can adapt and deliver results efficiently.

Excelling as a marketing ops leader requires a unique blend of skills. By nurturing these skills, you’ll be better positioned to tackle the challenges of a rapidly evolving industry. It may seem like tired advice, but remember that continuous learning and adaptability are crucial to staying ahead in marketing, so embrace the challenge.

Dig deeper: Agile marketing: What it is and why marketers should care

The post 5 critical leadership skills every marketing ops pro needs appeared first on MarTech.

Newest jobs in Martech:

Marketing Technologies Director @ Midan Marketing (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $105,000 – $133,000 (est.)
• Provides functional management and leadership to the MarTech team. Provides vital cross-functional contributions and serves as team leader.
• Work with Human Resources in the recruiting process of new team members. Provide new hire overview of creative functions.

Marketing Engagement Lead @ Humana (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $55,000 – $80,000 (est.)
• Engage with business stakeholders to gather, analyze requirements and map them to solutions that leverage Marketing Technology capabilities – primarily Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
• Maintain a good understanding of Marketing Technology landscape and take advantage of emerging capabilities.

Marketing Manager @ Fastpath (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $65,000 – $75,000 (est.)
• Driving accelerated growth through the design, creation and execution of high-quality lead generation programs, and customer advocacy through effective nurture programs, including content development, launch, measurement, and optimization.
• Collaborate with creative partners, SME’s and Product Management to write marketing content that advances the Fastpath brand and directly impacts pipeline/ROI goals.

Director of Marketing Operations @ R1 RCM, Inc. (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $115,000 – $130,000 (est.)
• Shepherd the adoption, management, and ongoing review of operational processes in pursuit of efficiency.
• Support the marketing team’s planning, budget management, project management, and platform/tools management.

Director roles:

Head of Go-To-Market @ KeyBank  (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $135,000 – $200,000 (est.)
• Lead baseline industry and competitive research to develop comprehensive view of target markets and marketing strategies. 
• Develop and manage a yearly marketing and external communications plan that supports and informs KeyBank’s Payments product and revenue goals.

VP of Marketing @ Zaelab (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $130,000 – $160,000 (est.)
• Define and implement a marketing strategy that results in increased brand awareness and increased demand.
• Identify and define Zaelab’s ICP and industry trends to ensure Zaelab is appropriately positioned and communicating to the marketplace. Maintain and improve messaging across all channels.

Senior roles:

Senior Data Product Manager @ Home Depot (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $190,000 (est.)
• Seeks to empathize with and understand the end user deeply and use that knowledge to determine the fastest path to deliver value.
• Translates business goals and end user needs into product strategy; communicates direction and product priorities to the development team, other matrixed teams, and third-party partners.

Sr. Manager of Digital Analytics @ 85SIXTY (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $105,000 – $120,000 (est.)
• Maintain accountability for the overall data quality, conduct audits and troubleshoot tracking gaps to maintain data confidence and implement data standardization.
• Establish and maintain best-practices for tag management including design strategy, technical documentation, approvals workflows, and quality assurance

Product Marketing Manager – Europe @ Radancy (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $104,000 – $132,000 (est.)
• Creating and delivering internal and external communications for product / enhancement releases to EU markets. This includes:
• Understanding each global release; and then modifying materials and delivering to each local EU market to ensure they are optimal/appropriate (in terms of message, language and product capabilities) 
• Ensuring messaging separates our solutions from competitors in EU markets

Demand Generation Manager @ Verato Inc. (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $85,000 – $108,000
• Help plan and drive execution of the digital lead gen strategy and end-to-end campaigns that clearly demonstrate and articulate value and achieve business objectives.
• Cross collaboration with marketing operations, content, product marketing, sales and other departments to deploy and optimize campaigns across the U.S.

Associate roles:

Growth Marketing Strategist @ New Worth (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $80,000 – $120,000 (est.)
• Be the main point of contact for 5-10 CMO’s/marketing heads at B2B tech companies.
• Collaborate with marketing strategy specialists in those fields to ensure the success of New North’s clients.

Marketing Technology Specialist @ SmartAcre  (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $80,000 – $95,000
• Successfully execute auditing, consulting, and implementation tasks for clients using marketing automation (HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo). 
• Help clients execute major marketing automation tasks and implement best practices.

Marketing Technology Associate @ SmartAcre  (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $75,000 – $85,000
• Play a role in auditing marketing technology and sales technology platforms. Report results to the Director of Marketing Technology.
• Contribute to client communication, responding to MarTech questions within the same day.

The post The latest jobs in martech appeared first on MarTech.

Far too many MOps folks are left feeling exhausted and stretched thin. The marketing operations talent shortage leaves businesses to wrangle the three-pronged problem of hiring, training and retaining skilled professionals.

The situation has put a strain on management resources and forced a lot of seasoned marketers back to completing entry-level tasks, especially in areas like content production — rather than strategic planning or performance optimization.

Burnout and turnover

“Without a source of new talent, MOps teams are becoming top-heavy,” according to Demandbase. “The ideal MOps team is structured like a pyramid. A concentrated number of experienced practitioners focus on strategic initiatives and are supported by more junior team members who are responsible for day-to-day operations and execution. But we found that junior-level employees are outnumbered in the average MOps team, leaving higher-level team members to pick up the slack.”

With such a huge part of the marketing operations role being the tasks and projects inside of the ops function, it’s difficult to find time to get the strategic work done. 

As a result, senior and mid-level staff are either bored doing work that’s too easy or trying to balance this work with larger strategic responsibilities. This has led to burnout and high turnover, leaving companies stuck hiring and training replacements instead of driving the company’s marketing vision forward.

MarTech first discussed the shortage in 2022, and the problem hasn’t gone anywhere since then. It may have gotten worse as ops leaders are supposed to continue to do their jobs while also figuring out the role of new tech. 

Unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence is poised as the shining knight in digital armor, ready to face the talent shortage head-on and help companies overcome these challenges. 

But how exactly can AI improve the marketing ops talent problem? And should we entertain that?

Use AI to stay focused on strategy — not busywork

AI technologies like ChatGPT are making significant progress in addressing the MOps talent shortage. By automating repetitive or straightforward tasks, AI can reduce the workload for higher-level marketing operations professionals. 

This frees their time and energy to focus on more strategic and higher-level tasks, ultimately leading to a more efficient and effective marketing team.

Jessica, a MOps professional at a large technology company, enjoys finding technology that can help her bring more value to her work and the company. 

She mentions she’s been using tools like Rev, a sales development platform, to help find look-a-like target accounts to seed lists. 

“It is a great tool to help you really focus and prioritize your CRM data. It continues to monitor your pipeline / funnel and the AI adapts and changes the algorithm as new deals enter and leave the sales cycle. It goes deeper than just firmographic details like industry, company size etc and looks at custom filters that matter to your ICP and not just the general information.”

She also points out tools like Regie.ai with custom personalization in outreach to prospects, helping the productivity of sales reps. It ties in things like hobbies or a prospect’s use case creatively. There are many more to list, but the ability to designate time to find and test the applications is important.

It’s not about being tool-heavy but more about identifying good places to bring AI to level up the strategy and execution of functions inside sales and marketing operations. Companies are seeing the value of an integrated system because it’s easier to define workflows, automate processes and identify bottlenecks with everything connected.

Dig deeper: AI in marketing: 7 areas where it shines and struggles

Where AI can play a key role in marketing operations

With the sheer number of tools on the market, it may be helpful to navigate this wild west landscape more from the perspective of task categories and where we can “delegate work” to an AI team member.

Process mapping

With the right combination of AI tools, you can develop processes that are efficient, organized and scalable. This can start with something as simple as using ChatGPT to turn meeting notes or transcripts into an itemized checklist of tasks. 

Ultimately, you should be able to take an inbound request and turn it around in a 24-hour timeline without creating additional work, panic, or rush among your team.

Planning

From forecasting and budget allocation to campaign optimization and targeting, AI can increasingly automate the button-pushing associated with these tasks.

Data flow

Disconnected systems are so 2019. You will fall behind if you’re not automating the data flow through your company. 

From CRM, email and social metrics to cleaning and updating customer data along with automating reporting and visualization — nobody should be doing these things manually anymore.

Code outlines

Don’t have a large dev team? Marketing operations professionals with development expertise can use ChatGPT (or tools like GitHub Copilot or Ghostwriter) to quickly write up the initial project code before handing it off to a dev to finish.

Data extraction

Have a bunch of text or a CSV you’d normally want to hand off to someone for simple tasks? Use ChatGPT to pull out names, dates and keywords or to answer questions based on the source text.

Faster content marketing

From social scheduling tools like Hootsuite or HubSpot to writing tools like ChatGPT, AI can reduce a ton of legwork for creating and distributing content. 

You shouldn’t have ChatGPT write your whole blog post or landing page, but you can quickly draft the bare bones using your expertise.

Personalization

Whether it’s customer support or lead generation, using large language models like ChatGPT to build custom chatbots for your business can lighten the load. 

These bots have been limited in the past. Still, newer options allow businesses to teach the bot everything from brand guidelines to customer profile data, creating a personal conversation that can get passed off to a team member when needed.

Summarizing research and briefs

While ChatGPT can’t reliably give you factual responses yet, you can paste text from articles, research, or white papers, then have it summarize the findings, implications and potential course of action based on that information.

On top of this list, keep an eye on the latest tools to help provide better resource allocation for marketing managers, stronger predictive modeling for strategists and easier sentiment analysis for marketing analysts.

Dig deeper: 5 AI writing assistants in action

Balancing AI and human expertise

With more AI tech, marketing operations has the opportunity to evolve from simple reporting teams and spreadsheet warriors to full-fledged technology strategists who help shape marketing and sales technology vision in the long term.

But automating away all the “laborer” tasks won’t replace your need for an architect. Execution without strategic design is a great way to build a house that collapses at the first sign of wind.

With everyone else using AI, what sets you apart in this tech race will be your frameworks and processes for using it effectively. Once these standards are established, it becomes easier to communicate to your team when to lean on AI and when you need humans involved.

Meanwhile, if you lean too heavily on AI in the wrong ways, you risk making many costly mistakes that damage customer trust.

To strike a better balance, companies should help their current MOps teams learn to work more effectively with AI in all its forms, so they can harness its potential while maintaining the strategic human judgment that sets great marketing apart.

The post How AI can help address the marketing ops talent shortage appeared first on MarTech.

In this article, we will explore the significance of marketing and sales alignment for business success, discuss the benefits of alignment, such as increased revenue, enhanced customer experience, and efficient operations, and provide actionable strategies to ensure your organization operates cohesively.

Building a collaborative environment

Establishing a collaborative environment is fundamental for marketing and sales alignment. A shared sense of purpose and mutual respect can bridge the gaps between these departments. A workplace where both teams feel valued and supported fosters trust and boosts overall performance.

Developing a service level agreement (SLA) is one way to stimulate collaboration. An SLA clarifies expectations, outlines roles and responsibilities, and sets key performance indicators (KPIs) that both teams can strive towards. This promotes accountability and simplifies expectation management.

Frequent check-ins enable both teams to communicate openly, exchange insights and data, address challenges, and realign goals and strategies. This continuous dialogue facilitates improvement and fortifies the relationship between marketing and sales.

Aligning on the buyer’s and workforce’s Journey

Synchronizing marketing and sales efforts around the buyer’s and workforce’s journeys is crucial for delivering outstanding customer experiences. This shared understanding allows for identifying key touchpoints where marketing and sales teams can collaborate, providing a consistent experience for prospects and customers while addressing the needs and concerns of the employees serving them. Considering both aspects, you can craft a seamless experience for prospects, customers, and your internal team, resulting in higher conversion rates and a more unified organization.

Developing detailed buyer and workforce personas is an effective way to understand and target the right audience and shape your internal culture. Marketing and sales teams can pinpoint their ideal customers’ common characteristics, pain points, and motivations, crafting personalized and relevant messaging that resonates with prospects. Simultaneously, comprehending your workforce’s personas enables you to cultivate an environment that promotes employee growth, engagement, and satisfaction.

Streamlining processes and leveraging technology

Optimizing processes and employing technology can significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing and sales teams. Adopting the appropriate tools and implementing well-defined processes empower both teams to collaborate more seamlessly, ultimately driving exceptional customer experiences.

Defining the lead qualification and scoring process is a critical area to address. Establishing the criteria for qualifying leads enables marketing teams to pass high-quality prospects to sales, saving time and increasing the chances of closing deals. Sales teams can then prioritize leads based on their likelihood to convert, ensuring their efforts are focused on the most promising prospects.

Implementing CRM and marketing automation tools is essential for keeping both teams organized, sharing information effectively, and maintaining alignment on their goals and strategies. Integrating these tools into workflows streamlines processes enhances communication, and fosters collaboration.

Measuring and analyzing shared key performance indicators (KPIs) is crucial for understanding the effectiveness of the strategies in place. Regularly tracking these metrics allows both teams to identify areas for improvement, adjust their tactics accordingly, and ensure their efforts are aligned and focused on delivering the best possible customer experiences.

Crafting consistent messaging and content

A consistent and coherent brand story is vital for building trust and resonating with your target audience. Sales and marketing teams play a crucial role in shaping this narrative by aligning their messaging and collaborating on content creation.

Both teams should collaborate to ensure their messaging is consistent across all channels, including emails, social media, website content, and other touchpoints where prospects and customers interact with the brand. Maintaining a cohesive and compelling brand story can create a solid and memorable impression that sets you apart from the competition.

Sales and marketing teams should also join forces in content creation. Collaborating on developing relevant and engaging content enables both groups to leverage their unique insights and expertise better to address their target audience’s needs and pain points. This not only helps to nurture leads but also aids in closing sales and fostering long-term relationships with customers.

Lastly, it’s essential to encourage a culture of feedback and continuous improvement. By maintaining an open line of communication, marketing and sales teams can learn from each other’s experiences, adapt to new challenges, and continually refine their approach to deliver the most remarkable customer experiences possible. Regularly reviewing and updating strategies ensures that both departments remain aligned and focused on achieving their shared goals.

The key to marketing and sales alignment

Marketing and sales alignment drive business success and create remarkable customer experiences. By fostering a collaborative environment, aligning efforts around the buyer’s journey, streamlining processes through technology, and maintaining consistent messaging and content, mid-market and enterprise sales and marketing leaders in B2B companies can achieve better results and drive growth. Implementing the strategies outlined in this article will equip your teams to face the challenges of today’s competitive landscape and deliver an exceptional customer experience.

The post How to align B2B sales and marketing teams appeared first on MarTech.

Those members of the marketing operations team more focused on tech and operations (“maestros”) than the design and execution of campaigns earned, on average, $25,000 more than their campaign-focused peers.

More maestros promoted. A marginally higher proportion of maestros were more likely to have been promoted over the last year than marketers (49% vs. 46%); and 61% of maestros said “demonstrating/proving a positive impact on the business from martech” was the most rewarding aspect of their job (against 58% of general marketers).

Responding to these findings, Scott Brinker said:

Marketers design and run campaigns. Maestroes manage and integrate the stack, design
the processes and workflows, and — importantly — train and support marketing staff on using martech.
Maestros are the giants whose shoulders marketers stand upon.

Scott Brinker, VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot and Editor at chiefmartec.com

Dig deeper: What is marketing operations and who are MOps professionals?

Graduate degrees no impact. It was no surprise that, the larger the employer the higher the compensation. Perhaps less predictably, having a graduate degree had no impact on salary. Directors earned, on average, much more than managers and other staff.

Why we care. It’s important to us to take the industry’s pulse each year and track the opportunities opening up for marketers and maestros and their levels of satisfaction with their work, their compensation and their promotion prospects.

What we clearly see is an industry in which two predominant self-identified types are emerging — those individuals primarily concerned with operations and techology and those primarily concerned with devising and executing campaigns. The place where those professional capabilities intersect is what we call — martech.

Download the survey here (no registration required).

The survey. The survey, conducted jointly by MarTech and chiefmartec.com, was taken by 419 marketers in December 2022 and January 2023; 401 of those provided salary information. Nearly 70% (286) respondents live in North America; 15% (63) live in Western Europe. The report’s conclusions are limited to responses from those individuals only. Others were excluded due to the limited number.

Respondents answered more than 20 questions related to career roles, salary, technology and job satisfaction and challenges/frustrations. They were from all job levels — C-suite to managers and staff.

The post Marketing technologists are well-rewarded appeared first on MarTech.

Thinking about what my perfect roster would look like got me thinking about what it takes to build a winning baseball team. How would that apply to building a great marketing operations team?

The five essential MOps roles

The mandate for marketing operations is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the marketing department through people, process, technology and data. When building a marketing operations team, an ideal situation is to have dedicated roles focused on each of those pillars. For most marketing operations teams, that results in five essential roles:

1. Marketing Operations Manager. Oversees the entire marketing operations team and ensures that the team is working towards the overall goals of the company. They are the primary point of contact for the CMO and other senior leaders in the organization and are responsible for developing the team’s strategy, managing budgets, and ensuring that the performance of the marketing department is effective and meeting targets.
2. Marketing Technologist. Manages the marketing tech stack and ensures that all systems are integrated, as well as trains team members on how to best utilize new and existing technologies. This role must have deep expertise in platforms such as CRM, marketing automation, and analytics tools.
3. Marketing Automation Specialist. Manages the marketing automation platform and ensures that it is integrated with other systems in the marketing tech stack. This role creates and executes email campaigns, lead nurturing and scoring programs, and ensures that all campaign data is accurate and up-to-date.
4. Data Analyst: Analyzes marketing data and provides insights to the marketing team. This role creates dashboards and reports that provide actionable insights to the marketing department and other stakeholders in the organization.
5. Project Manager / Process Specialist: Manages the project lifecycle from start to finish and optimizes workflows. Ensures that all projects are delivered on time, within budget, and meet the quality standards set by the organization. Focuses on helping the organization meet their productivity goals. 

The size of your marketing team will likely determine how specialized these roles can be.

In a smaller organization with less headcount, you will need to have more generalists who can do a little bit of everything. For example, you may not be able to hire a dedicated data or process specialist, so everyone on the team may have to figure out optimizing their own reporting and processes. But if you are fortunate enough to be in an organization with more resources, hiring for these dedicated roles will enable those resources to dive much deeper into their areas of expertise. 

Dig deeper: What is marketing operations and who are MOps professionals?

Experience plus skill-sets

When a general manager is putting together a baseball team, they’re looking for the right mix of experience and complementary skill-sets. If there’s a shortstop that excels defensively but is a below-average offensive player, then there needs to be another above average batter in the lineup to balance out that weak spot. But no matter the players’ individual strengths, they all have to be bought into the team’s philosophy and underlying style of play.

Those same team-building philosophies apply to putting together your marketing operations team. First, you need the right blend of technical expertise and hard skills. Striking the right balance in this area is even more critical if you’re on a smaller team with more generalist roles.

For example, imagine you’re on a three-person marketing operations team that consists of a marketing operations manager, a marketing automation specialist, and a marketing technology specialist. All three of those resources have robust experience around demand generation and are skilled in campaign planning and lead generation, but everyone on the team only has basic Excel skills and lacks expertise in data analysis.

In that situation, it may prove difficult for the team to effectively communicate the impact of their demand generation programs, because they would struggle to build the type of robust reporting and dashboards that would demonstrate the positive impact they are making on the organization.

On a small team like this, hiring T-shaped employees is important, but even more critical is making sure that everyone on the team doesn’t share the exact same “T”. When building your team, you must ensure that your resources don’t overlap with their depth of knowledge concentrated on the same skill(s), thereby leaving holes in other skill-sets where you need coverage. 

Dig deeper: MarTech’s marketing operations experts to follow

Inter-personal skills are important

However, there is another aspect of team building where you do want to make sure there is heavy overlap amongst all team members, and that is in the soft skills and personal characteristics.

Going back to our baseball analogy, in Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball,” the Oakland A’s transformed their team by ensuring that everyone on the team was focused solely on getting on base. It became their core team-building philosophy, and every player they added to the team had to embrace that style of play.

When building a marketing operations team, there are a few characteristics that everyone on the team, no matter their role, absolutely has to have.

• Business acumen and strategic thinking: Everyone on the marketing operations team has to have a solid understanding of the business objectives and be able to think big-picture about how to achieve those goals. Evaluating every decision based on its potential to impact those goals is the key to the team’s success.
• Adaptability: In a fast-paced and constantly evolving marketing environment, marketing operations team members need to be adaptable and flexible. Priorities change quickly and conflicting demands from various stakeholders requires marketing operations professionals to be able to pivot quickly.
• Problem-solving: Marketing operations teams face a lot of challenges: data cleanliness across multiple platforms; decreasing or flat budget and resources despite increasing demand for the team’s services; optimizing processes in an environment where people may be resistant to change… the list of challenges is long and constantly growing. This requires marketing operations team members to be skilled at finding creative solutions to solve complex problems.
• Customer-centricity: In order to design campaigns and experiences that will resonate with the target audience, marketing operations team members need to be focused on the customer experience and have a deep understanding of customer needs and preferences.

A team that shares these core characteristics has the right foundation in place to become a powerful marketing operations organization. If your team is still facing challenges, such as talent gaps in certain skill-sets that or being understaffed, it may be a multi-year journey to get to exactly where you want to go.

Still, you can be confident that your team is headed in the right direction.  Just like a baseball team, your team may steadily progress from being a playoff contender, to a playoff team that has an early exit, to eventually winning it all. And with the right culture in place, it might not take as long as you think. This could be the year that it all comes together for your team. After all, spring is the time for optimism.  

The post Moneyball your marketing ops team appeared first on MarTech.

While there’s little difference in managing an email nurture campaign, for example, to sell blenders or airplanes, that doesn’t mean understanding the specific product is not essential for the folks administering the marketing automation platform.

Knowing the company’s products helps us understand stakeholder motivations, needs and requirements and better tie their work to the organization’s goals and performance metrics. Here are some examples from my career where making an effort to understand the product led to greater marketing results.

B2B Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

A high-level understanding of the product is always handy in B2B SaaS. While working for Zuora, I learned what the company’s products are trying to solve for revenue professionals. This doesn’t require taking a finance or accounting class or earning an MBA.

Keywords, for instance, play a key role in digital marketing — from paid ads to running an account-based marketing platform. When the product marketing and creative folks provide a list of relevant keywords, knowing about them helps with system administration. 

If a system allows for keyword ranking, it helps to know which ones are most relevant to the target audience. This can also help when designing messaging (webpages, emails, text messages, etc.) by ensuring they are visible or providing guidance for A/B testing of email subject lines and landing page UX. 

Learning about such topics made it easier for me to grasp direction from my colleagues and translate that into system configurations or coordination with vendors. That makes things easier for everyone. Understanding — and speaking to — prospective customers’ pain points isn’t just for the business development, account executive and customer success folks.

Dig deeper: Product-led growth: 3 important lessons from the front line

Hospitality

As part of my current gig with Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, I learned that hospitality has significant similarities with fast food. The vast majority of properties are franchised. Wyndham manages the overall portfolio of brands, provides guidance and support to franchisors, builds overall brand awareness and offers other services. Thus, I’m helping sell far more than hotel rooms and amenities — including opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Along those lines, although the B2C side of the travel sector is very apparent, there’s more to the picture. Understanding how our martech systems are useful to our franchise partners who deal directly with guests in person when they’re at a property is beneficial.

Further, like many other companies, loyalty programs are a big part of the business. They’re a huge deal. “The disclosed pro-forma valuations of AAdvantage and MileagePlus exceeded the airlines’ [American and United, respectively] own market capitalizations,” according to the Harvard Business Review.

These programs provided associated airlines with financial cover as travel plummeted during the pandemic. They also allowed companies to continue engaging customers and generating revenue through partners like associated credit cards and retail affiliations. 

Dig deeper: Why we care about loyalty marketing

Product understanding informs your efforts

When martech and MOps practitioners better understand their company’s products, they can skillfully partner with colleagues to coordinate marketing campaigns and better tie efforts to corporate goals.

This helps decrease the time butting heads with others to decipher the target audience and broader organizational needs, providing informed insight that can garner success for all

We’re the practitioners with technical acumen. A significant part of our duties is to help translate our colleagues’ persuasive brilliance into the digital realm.

The post Why understanding the product is a must in martech, MOps appeared first on MarTech.

Instead of creating a request in a project management tool then waiting for new versions of an existing image to be uploaded to the MAM, a marketer could create several versions in the DAM workflow within a few moments. This simple change could save many hours. 

Given that the largest percentage of marketers are millennials or Gen Z who’ve worked five years or less, business process concepts may be misunderstood. When asked to describe their day-to-day workflows, some may be unable to explain the term. 

Dig deeper: We’re implementing DAM! Where do I start?

What is a workflow?

A workflow is the path one takes from the beginning of a project to the end. For DAM administrators, it represents all the steps between a request for a new asset and the delivery of its final version. 

Most of us don’t think about the steps we take to perform common tasks, especially the ones we do most often. Could you write down the steps you take between deciding to go to the grocery store and putting purchased goods away in your pantry?

Marketing work boils down to a collection of projects containing tasks that are performed repetitively. While the creative process — inspiration, perspiration and activation — is often difficult for writers, designers and developers to articulate, the work products they deliver are not. 

How to sketch out a DAM workflow

Here’s an example of the workflow for a typical marketing project:

• A project request ideally comes in the form of a brief with detailed instructions about the messaging, look and feel and specific assets required for the project.
• An initial draft for the client, which may be  a single piece or multiple pieces depending upon the complexity of the request. A client might request separate copy and design drafts or a full mockup of the asset(s) with copy and design in place.
• A feedback and revision round in which the client returns comments and edits to the creative team.
• A second draft delivery with subsequent feedback and revision rounds, if necessary, until a final proof can be obtained,
• A final proof process where one or more stakeholders review the final asset(s) and sign off on all changes.
• Delivery of the final asset(s) to the client.
• Completion of the project and migration of final asset(s) to a corporate archive. 

Each of these stages can contain one or more individual tasks, such as:

• Producing graphics.
• Implementing templates.
• Getting brand manager approval of particular items such as logos.
• Editing and proofing of copy.
• Internal Q&A prior to delivering drafts and revisions to clients.
• Legal or other regulatory review of certain aspects of copy or design.
• Other steps within the approval flow to ensure agreement across different operational or organizational departments.

Reviewing a process such as this can help your team map out their own processes. Using these stages as milestones, they can discuss the tasks they perform to move from one stage to the next.

Making a workflow diagram

There are many templates and flowcharts available to assist you with mapping workflow. Some are available in your desktop software, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Keynote. Even a simple list of tasks in Notepad can suffice. For example:

1. Project Request
   1. Assign project lead
   2. Assign copywriter and graphic designer
   3. Assign web developer, if required
   4. Choose & verify templates and brand guides
   5. Write first copy draft
   6. Create three graphic mockups for creative team review

A project management platform such as Adobe Workfront, Confluence, Trello or Asanar, can convert these into forms and templates that automatically populate, assign dates and deadlines and send emails to appropriate project members. 

Setting up workflow tasks in your DAM

Some DAMs have features that will help speed tasks and eliminate speedbumps using automated workflows.

Adobe Experience Manager Assets, for example, has  a proof approval workflow  that sends links to internal or external clients and stakeholders, allowing them to OK proofs without needing access to the DAM.

Once the project management tool is linked to the DAM via API, the DAM will capture and retain all comments, revisions and updates and automatically email a copy or a link  to relevant parties. 

This can eliminate the final step of packaging and migrating final files, because they immediately become a part of the DAM system. This also makes it a simple matter for your team to share updates of works in progress to clients without  countless emails or uploading sensitive documents to clouds outside your firewall. 

DAM workflows boost productivity and efficiency

The steps to get things done mostly reside “in one’s head.” But teams cannot benefit from each other’s creativity and skill without common workflows that save everyone time. 

Once workflows are hammered out, DAM administrators can ask relevant questions about what steps take.

The post Here’s why you need a DAM workflow — and how to map it out appeared first on MarTech.

• Proposition: Aligning and concentrating your marketing firm’s or in-house agency’s efforts with a focused vision, positioning strategy and value proposition. 
• Principles: Unifying people with a shared set of operating principles on how to lead, collaborate, communicate and make decisions in their work.
• People: Aligning organizational structure, staffing and professional development opportunities to deliver on vision, strategy and value proposition. 
• Process: Employing lightweight processes and tools for nimble ways of working.
• Performance: Measuring, analyzing and improving how your firm or in-house agency works. 

In this article, I’ll dive into “Proposition” and explain why aligning your organization’s efforts with a focused vision, positioning strategy and value proposition matters. I’ll also chart a course you can use to get started.

Building your foundation for focus

There is such a low barrier to opening a creative marketing firm today. Droves of talent are leaving agencies and opening their own firms or joining innovative talent communities and matchmaking marketplace. The market is saturated with creative and marketing service providers. 

We also have CMOs bringing increasing amounts of work internally. As a result, many in-house production studios have grown and evolved, expanding their services and becoming better known as in-house agencies.

To thrive in this environment, your organization must become a unique provider of focused expertise that others can’t replicate. It’s the only way to secure a market position safe from the sea of sameness.

Marketing clients seek well-positioned “best-in-class” partners with narrow and deep expertise more than a range of lower-value services. The days of providing all types of services to all kinds of clients are behind us.

Today, offering a wide variety of services doesn’t scale. It’s costly, inefficient and creates chaotic operating environments. 

Focus is what scales. With it, you can:

• Concentrate resources toward a coherent strategy.
• Quickly improve the skills of your people, your services and your internal ways of working because they’re focused on just one or a few specific solutions or services.
• Deploy people’s expertise across a large client base because they replicate the same focused service areas.
• Easily maintain alignment between strategy, operating model and day-to-day decisions.

Focus makes running your organization much easier and more profitable. You can produce better work, which helps with recruitment, employee morale and retention.

Developing a focused, differentiating positioning strategy

Successful creative marketing organizations align their resources around a focused and differentiating positioning strategy. They invest in expanding their unique expertise and what they’re best at, while shedding or outsourcing other costly or distracting capabilities. 

As a result, they gain a variety of benefits.

• For creative marketing firms:
  • A well-defined criteria for targeting ideal clients.
  • A stronger win ratio in new business because you are playing to your strengths.
  • Stronger pricing power.
  • Reduction of costs.
  • Better margins.
  • Clearer direction for how to spend time, money and resources.
  • A broader — not narrower — geographical market from clients seeking your expertise.
  • Fewer competitors saying they can do what you do.
• For in-house agencies:
  • Clarity on which internal clients you are best at serving.
  • Stronger client alignment on when and how to work with your team.
  • Easier to create opportunities to work on higher-value projects.
  • Increased credibility amongst stakeholders and clients.
  • Likely to be seen as a strategic partner.
  • Reduction of agency-wide costs.
  • Greater support and funding for staffing and tools.
  • Less overlap and competition with external firms.

Charting your course forward

To develop a focused, differentiating positioning strategy, start by answering these four questions. 

1. Who are our best customers? What markets or audiences do we know best?

Defining an effective positioning strategy means clearly defining and understanding your ideal customer — the types of clients you’re best suited to serve. 

This requires exploring your experience within different business categories, market segments, audiences and even business models, depending on the clients you’ve served.

It may help to identify the following:

• The product or service categories you serve and perform well.
• The distribution and delivery channels you serve best.
• The internal and external stakeholders you know best.
• The types of audiences and market segments you know better than anyone.
• The types of brands you serve best.

Creative marketing firm example

Agency Sacks has defined its who as “affluent consumers.” They can influence the affluent as the audience they know best. 

In-house agency example

ESPN’s CreativeWorks defines their who as sports fans, which makes perfect sense.

2. What are our core competencies? In which areas are we truly best-in-class?

You need to beyond identifying capabilities and find what it is you can deliver better in a dependable, differentiating way. 

Look into:

• Unique skills your team may possess.
• Communication channels you know best.
• Customer points of contact who you know best along the customer journey.
• Unique strategic assets you own.
• Outcomes your clients consistently seek from you.
• Benefits you can deliver repeatedly.

These are different ways of looking at the same question. Often, we can find a pattern by separating services into different skills and abilities. Then, we can reorganize them to tell a compelling story about where you are truly best in class.

Example

Tribe has focused their what to be on internal communications. Their direction also works with their who — the audience they know best are the employees of global and national brands. 

3. How are we different in the way we think? Do we have distinguishing approaches or philosophies?

This is how you identify the standards, values and beliefs by which your agency operates, serves clients and makes day-to-day decisions. It’s also about the proprietary approaches you bring to solving client problems.

Consider:

• The philosophies or beliefs that fuel how you work.
• The methods and approaches you use.
• Your “firsts” and major organizational milestones.
• Your access to specialized resources.
• Your beliefs about organizational design, structure or work environment.

Creative marketing firms and in-house agencies might be tempted to pick the answer to these questions as the basis of their strategy. It requires less focus and sacrifice than basing your strategy on the who or what questions. But going the easy way makes for a weak strategy. 

Only a few organizations truly have a philosophy or approach to their work that is uniquely their own.

Example 

TBWA is a great example of a positioning strategy that hinges on the question how. The firm owns the idea of disruption. No other agency can say they are the “Disruption” company as TBWA does. They have created disruption workshops, tools, a consultancy, disruption days and four books on the subject.

4. Why do we exist in the first place? What is our calling?

Without exception, the most notable marketing organizations have an ambitious reason for existing. They don’t let the market, competition or financials drive their reason for existing. 

What drives your group from the inside? Your purpose must be the center of who you are as an organization.

Why is the most difficult question to answer. To help define your calling, think about the following: 

• Beyond making money, what is our purpose?
• If our people were volunteers instead of employees, what would drive them to volunteer?
• What are the things we will always do?
• What are the things we will never do?
• What do we preach? 
• What are we against?
• What do we fight for?
• What would we want to achieve if we knew we could not fail?

Example

Common Good’s why is to make health and happiness accessible to anyone, so they fight for the brands that share this purpose.

Other examples of in-house agency positioning

In-house agencies will base their positioning on who they know best, which will be their company’s brands and respective customer bases. Some examples include:

• BBC Creative
• Anheuser Busch’s Draftline
• Google’s Creative Lab 5 or their Brand Studio EMEA

Many in-house agencies also design their organizations to be “full-service.” Therefore, they won’t typically limit their service offering to the degree that the what question requires to develop a strategic advantage against other service providers.

However, the question of what is still essential because it can be used to communicate the type of creative work an in-house agency is best suited to deliver. For example, are you best at production work or strategy and creative concepting?

Unfortunately, I’m unaware of any in-house agencies that answer how or why in a differentiating way on a publicly accessible website. If you have any examples to share, please let me know.

Next steps to becoming a high-performing marketing organization

By answering the questions above, you can define a positioning strategy to increase your organizations’ value and relevance. It will point the way toward how to design your operating model and bring your strategy to life.

The post Why focus is the way forward for high-performing marketing organizations appeared first on MarTech.

Digital asset management (DAM) stores and organizes all of an organization’s digital assets — images, PDFs, photographs, audio, video and even virtual reality or other cutting-edge formats.

It is the “single source of truth,” where marketers can find every relevant version of media assets created for the brand. A DAM also adds metadata that can provide information on anything the marketer might want to know before using it. These include things like does the company have perpetual rights to use a photograph, whether the legal team has approved a video, and if an infographic or whitepaper was checked for brand design standard compliance.

How do companies use DAM?

Marketing agencies might leverage DAM technology to maintain consistency across in-house content and creatives developed by partners. B2B businesses might draw on the benefits of a centralized hub for sales collateral and event marketing materials. DAMs are being integrated with other technologies, especially content management systems and digital experience platforms, to unify marketing asset management and distribute digital content directly to the channels where they’re consumed.

Why are so many organizations using DAMs?

First is consumer expectations.

Nearly three quarters of customers expect companies to understand their unique wants and needs — up from two-thirds in 2020, according to the fifth edition of Salesforce’s The State of the Connected Customer. The benefits of this personalization are clear. Companies using more granular personalization experience significant gains in conversions, revenue per visitor and average order value, according to an Incisiv Adobe study.

Second is the expanding number of channels and devices consumers are using.

DAMs make it easier to create and repurpose marketing content according to the different needs of the medium and format. They also support the entire content lifecycle – from upstream creative to downstream delivery. They support work-in-progress for content, speeding asset workflows, reviews and approvals, as well as connecting with tools like Adobe Creative Cloud, Canva and Microsoft Office.

This guide is for marketers who are looking to enhance their campaigns with digital assessment management technologies. Here’s what’s inside:

• Capabilities of digital asset management platforms
  • Workflow management
  • File formats and handling
  • Asset conversion, editing and customization
  • Distribution and user permissions management
  • Search and metadata
  • Digital rights and corporate governance management
  • Reports and analytics
  • Data storage and security
  • Integrations

• What are the benefits of using a digital asset management (DAM) system?

Capabilities of digital asset management platforms

Digital asset management platforms have everything from legacy features, like file management, to emerging capabilities due to the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Here is a detailed look.

Workflow management

DAM systems differ in the extent of their workflow management capabilities. Some allow collaboration through @ tagging, while others have more full-fledged project management offerings. This can help marketing teams, along with outside creative resources, communicate about changes while an asset is in development or being updated.

Later, they can allow for approvals to be obtained from brand managers, execs and the legal team, while some systems also facilitate asset distribution. These capabilities may be built into the core platform or offered as an add-on or integration. Most DAMs are SaaS and can be accessed from browsers, but some have developed native apps.

File formats and handling

One area of differentiation is the ability to manage a variety of file formats. Most support common popular video, image and audio formats. However, if your workflow requires the use of a specialized format you need to ensure any system you’re considering can handle it.

Asset conversion, editing and customization

Some platforms allow an asset uploaded in one format to be downloaded or distributed in another — with conversions happening on the fly. Also, some have lightweight editing capabilities within the platform. To be clear, connections with common image editing software (Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, etc.) are typically more useful.

Distribution and user permissions management

The content production supply chain can involve many departments, agencies, freelancers and more. The ability to provide flexible permissions, so the right people have access to the right assets –– and only the right assets –– is very valuable.

Within agencies, in particular, these capabilities can give clients/customers convenient self-service capabilities. It also lets large enterprises maintain a consistent brand message across geographies and verticals, while still letting marketers and salespeople can help themselves to the materials they need.

Search and metadata

One of the most important benefits of a DAM is the ability to find assets after they’ve been created and filed away. Most providers now use artificial intelligence, either proprietary or through a partnership, for image and video recognition and tagging. Vendors are also exploring ways to use AI and machine learning to find insights and automate content transformations based on usage patterns.

Digital rights and corporate governance management

Most marketers license content from individual creators or stock libraries. DAMs can keep track of the specific license terms governing each piece of content, ensuring they’re not used in the wrong market, an unapproved context or after license expiration.

Corporate brand guidelines, as well as timelines associated with particular marketing campaigns, can also typically be managed with DAM functionality.

Reports and analytics

Analytics capabilities allow marketers to trace the return on the investment made in the development of digital media. They can also determine which assets are used most often and in what ways, proividing insights for planning future content creation.

Data storage and security

The majority of DAM providers partner with Amazon Web Services or Google to host their software and their clients’ assets. This means following those companies’ policies for geographical distribution, backups and security protocols. However, some players offer clients a variety of options for data hosting. This is useful for enterprises working with strict data governance regulations.

Integrations

Since a DAM is meant to be the central “single source of truth” repository for all of a brand’s assets, it must integrate well with the rest of your martech stack. Vendors differ greatly in terms of the number and types of integrations they offer. Some are beginning to specialize in serving a specific sector with unique integration needs, such as online retailers using product information management systems.

Explore DAM solutions from vendors like Acquia, Widen, Cloudinary, MediaValet and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on digital asset management platforms.

Click here to download!

What are the benefits of using a digital asset management system?

Digital asset management systems can play a vital role in your marketing organization, unifying online and offline marketing channels and leading to more efficient marketing resource allocation.

The specific benefits of using a digital asset management platform include – but are not limited to – the following:

• Improved communication between in-house and freelance/contract workers.
• Improved distribution of assets to clients, partners or other outsiders.
• More efficient utilization of existing resources.
• Increased efficiency in the workflow for internal approvals.
• Speed the conversion of assets into different sizes, aspect ratios and file types.
• More efficient creation and distribution of assets to martech and adtech systems.
• Easier compliance with changing brand standards and licensing terms.
• Ease of presenting a more consistent brand face to the customer.
• Ability to quantify the usage of each individual digital asset, and therefore track ROI on the cost of creation and distribution.

Read next: Does your organization need a digital asset management platform?

The post What is digital asset management and how can it help you? appeared first on MarTech.