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. 

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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

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Gartner cites recessionary fears, inflation and a talent gap as stoking concerns in the enterprise that have knock-on effects on marketing and marketing technology investments. Perhaps unexpectedly, although media allocation is flat, spending on digital channels actually showed a slight decline.

The state of martech spend. The bad news for the martech space is that no less than 75% of CMOs feel under pressure from other parts of the enterprise to cut their technology spending. The consolation is that 63% plan to resist the pressure, to some degree at least, and grow their martech spending. But almost one quarter, 23%, do expect to make cuts.

CMOs do propose to increase social advertising spend, but among the categories likely to take a hit are search advertising, SEO and digital OOH.

It’s necessary to “make a clear value case for martech investment,” said Ewan McIntyre, chief of research for the Gartner for Marketers Practice, presenting the survey’s findings. He also said, using the analogy of a voyage, that what was needed was “not a bigger boat, but a more efficient boat.”

Dig deeper: Digital ad spend growth drops to 7.8% this year

Catalytic marketing. His comments reflected the prominent theme of the Gartner keynote delivered by Lizzy Foo Kune, VP analyst and Carlos Guerrero, VP advisory in the Gartner Marketing Practice. They insisted that, despite pressures to realize growth in an uncertain environment, CMOs should not take the familiar route of increasing activity and taking on more projects.

They also questioned the value of “customer obsession.” “Customer obsession goes too far,” said Guerrero, “to unprofitable extremes that customers find intrusive.” Rather than trying to meet customers in every conceivable channel, leveraging customer data to deliver countless relevant messages, the keynote speakers introduced the concept of “catalytic marketing.” Gartner data shows, they said, that more important than quantity of engagement are experiences that bring about some change in the customer.

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In essence, catalytic marketing is not about “more.” “Progressive CMOs are breaking free from the cycle of more by embracing catalytic marketing and, in the process, shifting from growing marketing’s scope to growing marketing’s success,” said Guerrero.

Why we care. The pressures on marketing and martech investment are clearly real. It’s an environment that demands efficiency and demonstrable ROI. The catalytic marketing concept needs to be fleshed out (an example they cited was L’Oreal’s Skin Genius experience); that’s the positive part of the Gartner message.

The part that might be perceived as negative is the sense that attempting to develop a 360 degree view of the customer and apply it to engagement on countless channels, might be counter-productive, despite everything we’ve heard over the past few years.

About the survey. 410 CMOs and marketing leaders were surveyed in March and April 2023. Respondents were based in North America and Europe, representing various industries and company sizes, with most reporting annual revenue exceeding $1 billion.

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Perhaps your company has undergone a merger or acquisition, and you have duplicate tools that perform the same function. Maybe other tools in your stack might have added functionality, making a tool redundant. Or the tool just is not utilized enough to justify the cost. 

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

Whatever the reason, identifying what tools can be retired is a critical part of a martech audit. But what happens after you’ve made that decision? How do you retire a tool without causing an uproar among users or breaking automations? 

Retiring martech software requires a thorough planning process and clean execution. Here are five steps to follow.

Step 1: Identify system integrations and process dependencies

To avoid disrupting your operations, it is critical to identify what other systems and processes depend on the tool you are planning to retire. If you work for a large organization and the tool has been in place for many years, this may be more difficult than it seems. If your organization hasn’t been thorough about documentation, other systems may use API calls or data exports from the tool without you knowing it. 

Even more challenging than identifying systemic integrations is specifying manual processes that exist outside the tool but are dependent on it. For example, a report gets sent out of the tool that a different team is manually copying/pasting into another system. These types of manual workarounds happen more often than you might think. 

Start talking to everyone and anyone in the organization who has a connection to the tool. If possible, find the individuals involved in the tool’s initial implementation. They may have the institutional knowledge you’ll need to understand the downstream impacts of the tool’s retirement fully.

Dig deeper: Why marketers are replacing foundational martech

Step 2: Assess data migration needs 

You may need to account for significant data migration as part of the retirement process. Heavily regulated industries such as financial services or healthcare have mandatory data retention periods (sometimes as long as seven years!).

Document what data needs to be migrated and determine where that data needs to go. If you are moving from one similar platform to another, for example, a marketing automation system, you may migrate the data from your old tool into the new one. Ask your new vendor how other clients have handled their data migration needs. They may be able to offer professional services or point your IT team to solid documentation for best practices they have seen with other clients.

But what happens if you are retiring a tool and not going to replace it? Where should that data go? Work with your IT partners to devise a plan. The data may be stored on a SharePoint site or in a new database. The best solution will consider how accessible that data needs to be and who needs to access it. 

If the data only needs to be accessed rarely, it may be sufficient to store it in a database that someone on the technology team can extract once in a blue moon. However, if non-technical users, such as marketers or salespeople, need to access the historical data regularly, you will need a more user-friendly solution.

Step 3: Identify the right time to retire and build a project plan

After assessing your martech stack, you must identify the right time to retire the tool. This could be based on several factors, such as the end of a contract, the completion of a project or the end of a fiscal year. Whatever the reason, ensure that the timing will not disrupt your operations. 

Once you’ve set the target retirement date, it’s time to build your project plan. Considering all of the downstream systems impacted and the data migration needs from Steps 1 and 2. You should have all the information you need to build a project plan working backward from your target retirement date.

What happens if the project work to decouple systems or migrate data will push you past your target date? If your target date was based on a contract, negotiate with the vendor to see if you can extend the contract month-to-month to give you the time you need to fully execute your plan rather than get locked into a full-year renewal.

Dig deeper: 4 steps to take before hitting go on your new martech platform

Step 4: Develop a communication plan 

Communication is vital when retiring a martech tool. Identify everyone who needs to be looped in, such as employees, agency partners and sometimes external customers. Give them sufficient notice and be transparent about the reasons for retiring the tool. You should also communicate your plan for migrating data to a new tool and what support will be available during the transition. 

If you are retiring one tool and replacing it with another, focus your communications on the benefits the new tool provides. Share the training plan so that users know they will be given support to help them learn the new tool.

Try and have the tools overlap for a specific period so that users are given a soft landing where they can start to learn the new tool while still having the safety net of doing things the old way if they are on a hard deadline and struggling with the new tool.

When retiring a tool that will not be replaced, talk to users to understand the features and functionality they depend on and work to build a plan that addresses how those needs can be met through other tools or processes.

Step 5: Retire the martech tool and sell the wins

Once you have migrated your data from your old tool and trained employees on using a new one, it is time for retirement. The period after the tool is retired is crucial for communication. Be sure to communicate to stakeholders the “wins” from retirement. 

What’s the adoption rate of users for the new tool? What sales wins or positive client experience feedback have you heard about the new tool? How many days has it been since the tool was retired that there have been no errors or disruptions to operations? What new investments have been made with the cost savings from retiring the tool?

These are all key questions that can be used as a jumping-off point to remind stakeholders of why the tool was retired in the first place.  

Retiring old tools for a more effective martech stack

Studies have shown that marketing organizations use as many as 91 marketing cloud services, and the bloat in tools can drag down productivity. For many marketers, “less is more” and retiring duplicative or underutilized tools can be a team’s secret weapon.

When done properly with a strong plan, retiring solutions will result in a leaner, cheaper and more effective martech stack.  

The post A 5-step guide to retiring martech tools without disrupting operations appeared first on MarTech.

• Proposition. How do you align and concentrate your creative marketing firm’s or in-house agency’s services with a focused vision, positioning strategy and value proposition? 
• Principles. How do you unify your people with a shared set of operating principles that guide them on how to lead, collaborate, communicate and make decisions related to their work?

In this article, I’ll cover the third related point:

• People. How do you align your organizational structure, staffing and professional development opportunities to deliver on your vision, strategy and value proposition? 

The purpose of structure

The purpose of organizational structure is to guide your people down a pathway to deliver on your firm’s or agency’s vision and strategy. In other words, structure also prevents your people from going down other pathways that don’t support your vision.

Every organization will have a unique vision and strategy. In the environment we’re all operating in today, we should aim for three common goals when designing or evaluating our structure:

For your people to work in an environment where they can produce great work. That’s what your people want, so that’s what you should want. But, for that to happen, they need to feel heard and valued and have a sense of ownership over their work. They’ll need the right information, tools, resources and support to flow freely.

For your stakeholders and clients to be happy. For that to happen, they need to receive their work quickly and with the flexibility to change marketing priorities. Overall, they want to see business value from your relationship, which comes from your interactions, how you manage their work and the outputs and outcomes you can deliver.

For your firm or in-house agency to have the flexibility to quickly and easily adapt to any shift in the market, new disruptive technologies, business opportunities or crises.

3 categories of organizational structure

When thinking about the organizational structure of your in-house agency or creative marketing firm, consider three categories:

• Foundational structure.
• Departmental structure.
• Team structure.

Foundational structure

Foundational structure is the starting point for guiding how your people work to support your agency’s vision, strategy and operating principles. Agency leadership should define this layer of structure because it provides a critical level of business value, and it would be costly if anyone in the organization opted not to adopt it.

Some examples include:

• Reporting lines.
• Process maps.
• Project management software.
• Centralized file-storage.
• Internal company-wide policies.

Foundational structure should be adhered to by all staff. However, everyone should still feel empowered to propose improvements or changes. But guidance is needed. 

When proposing a change to your existing foundational structure, use the following questions to evaluate the benefits and costs: 

• How will the change impact our client’s experience?
• How will the change impact other teams?
• How will the change impact the integration of work across teams?
• How will the change impact the agency’s creativity, quality of work or ability to innovate?
• How will the change impact revenue or expenses?
• Is any of the above more valuable than other gains that the business is receiving from leaving the foundational structure intact?

Departmental structure

Departmental structure works to guide how groups like functional areas, disciplines or departments. These group members should define this layer of structure because they are the subject matter experts and closest to the work.

Some examples include:

• Roles and responsibilities.
• Department-level decision-making.
• Department-level meeting rhythm.
• Department software (i.e., Photoshop, DAM).
• Professional development/career pathways.

Team structure

Team structure works to guide how cross-functional project teams or delivery teams operate. Like departmental structure, the team should come together to determine their specific structure because the outcome defines how they will work together. Each subject matter expert on the team will know their craft and what they need to do their best work. 

Some examples include:

• Team-level agreements.
• RACI and similar frameworks.
• Project-level decision-making rights.
• Team-level meeting rhythm.

Striking the right balance of structure and agility

As your firm or agency grows, it’s common to introduce new structures and processes for scalability. But it’s critical to balance that structure with agility.

Too much structure can hinder creativity, innovation and adaptability, while too little can lead to chaos, inefficiency and misalignment. Encourage open dialogue and invite your people to propose improvements and adjustments.

Next steps

Designing a high-performing marketing organization requires a thoughtful approach. Begin by evaluating how your foundational, departmental and team structure work together to support your vision and strategy and achieve our original three goals:

• To create a supportive environment for your people to produce exceptional work.
• To create happy stakeholders and clients.
• To develop your organization’s ability to adapt to the market, new technology and current events.

Just know that the best marketing organizations don’t start that way. Instead, they begin by testing new working methods, learning and iterating. That’s what I’d like you to do.

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AI’s inflection point was OpenAI’s decision to provide free and unfettered access to ChatGPT — the result: 100 million users in less than two months. 

As martech and marketing operations leaders, this open access is both a blessing and a challenge. It dramatically changed our 2023 plans and priorities.

That’s where MarTechBot entered the picture approximately two weeks ago. Thanks to Marc Sirkin and the team at MarTech for allowing me behind the curtain of MarTechBot, providing insider access to how it’s being trained, the underlying tech, and the real-time learnings.

Sirkin and I discussed the implications of the contextual “MMM” prompt that he posted about. That experiment demonstrated that training MarTechBot with this site’s content would result in customized answers for marketers. The result was expected but impressive nevertheless. And led to further reflection. Here are some of the insights I walked away with.

• Start now. Learning how to train an AI bot using a company-specific language model should be at the top of your 2023 to-do list. It may not be released to the public, but the potential benefits demand that we all start taking tangible steps now.
• Echochamber effect. Watching MarTechBot respond within the bubble of marketing and martech was awesome — like a two-week-old baby already knowing how to say “mom” and “dad!” However, the implications are serious. Biases may creep in just as quickly. In the world of marketing tech, would MarTechBot soon conclude that the only solution to each marketing problem is to add a new tool to the stack?
• New marketing ops roles. We discovered that training a bot comes with all sorts of new guardrails. One example is operationalizing GPT token limits. While word counts are a rough metaphor, they are not exact equivalents given the predictive feedback loops that are the foundation of large language models (LLM). Another example would be new content ops roles to edit audio/video text transcriptions. Previously, slight inaccuracies produced by real-time closed captioning would’ve been overlooked. Those inaccuracies are consequential when text is fed into training bot models.
• Pivots. If a bot can be trained so quickly to take on a tone of voice, can it be retrained instantly? What if a brand has trained a bot on messaging and tone that’s now obsolete because of a new product direction or rebranding?

But wait, there’s more! The following are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to new MarTech and MOps challenges (e.g., unanswered questions!) that MarTechBot prompted.

• New stack without a how-to guide. Those creating generative AI systems admit that they don’t understand exactly why and how they respond the way they do sometimes. How does a marketing ops professional explain that to customers, the executive team, shareholders, etc.? 
• Balancing speed and responsibility. The race to innovate will unearth thorny legal, copyright and ethical issues. Will new content tags such as #train_on_this (or #do_NOT_train_on_this) be honored? 
• The potential rekindling of marketing-IT “infighting.” Over the last 10 years, we have established some norms in the role/responsibility splits between marketing and IT. But AI tools will be used by the entire enterprise. Will marketers need to renew their cross-functional partnership with IT, or risk losing access to important datasets that IT will and should always control for the enterprise?
• Rapid infusion into marketing automation. As I wrote and spoke about in March, these capabilities also drive reinvestment in core CRM and marketing automation platforms as the foundation of the martech stack. I’ll cover the impact on data management in part 2 of the series in June. How much will change again or be introduced between now and then? (I’ve already modified my outline three times!)

In the past, vendors and/or consultants could usually help us identify where something was awry in our stacks. That won’t be the case with the AI bot stack for the next 6-12 months. We have to be the operator behind the curtain. Start today.

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As marketing-oriented professionals, we’re all responsible for contributing ideas, regardless of where we sit on the organizational chart. Further, we are also targeted by our fellow martech practitioners. So, let’s learn from each other, even if we do so indirectly.

You, the consumer

We’re all in the market for a variety of items regardless if it’s in a B2B, B2C or D2C context. Thus, it doesn’t hurt to pay attention to all the various tactics and channels our counterparts employ to persuade us to purchase their goods or services.

For example, when I was involved with A/B testing years ago, I was visiting a website for my personal interests. One day I noticed a significant UX difference from when I was last on the site. For some odd reason, I decided to check the site on another device and it was what I last experienced. I caught that website conducting an A/B test.

Upon realizing this, I could examine what different design elements the organization was trying out. I could also consider my two different devices to surmise how the organization was potentially segmenting audiences, which could’ve involved factors like device type, anonymous/authenticated, referral source, etc. This situational awareness allowed me to develop new ideas for my job.

Broad horizons

When looking for inspiration or conducting “secret shopper” research, consider more organizations than your employer’s obvious competitors. 

For instance, while conducting a shopping cart SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis, my boss challenged me to broaden the definition of competitors. In that case, we explored possibilities for our lead forms and shopping cart journeys. My then-employer wasn’t an ecommerce organization, but she instructed me to consider large companies like Target, Amazon and Priceline. They have shopping carts as well, right?

Although there are apparent differences between sectors and contexts, most organizations have many similarities, especially with martech. Websites, email, social media, SMS texts, databases and lead forms are just a few elements and components of martech-enabled campaigns that a broad swath of organizations employ. Thus, don’t limit yourself to apparent competitors. There’s inspiration in all sorts of places.

Direct competitors

Occasionally, we all find customers of our employer’s direct competitors. This can happen for a whole host of innocent reasons. When you find yourselves in such a situation, remember how your interaction with them proceeds. Look for opportunities to test things out. For instance, instead of directly speaking with a representative in person, why not test communicating via the mobile app, chat or other messaging channel? 

Consider different types of UX decisions. What triggers an automated message? How is that message drafted and delivered? How do your inputs and actions affect your customer journey? It also doesn’t hurt to look to see what vendors they’re using, and sometimes that is easy as paying attention to fine print or looking at available source code (like in browsers).

There are plenty of safe and ethical ways to go about such research. You might also employ them, as any competent competitor is already checking you out.

We should act in good faith when conducting such research. It’s not fair to needlessly fill a database with bogus data. Nor is it fair to give bad ratings to see how an organization will respond or distract a customer-facing employee from their duties for mere research. As the Golden Rule states, do unto others as you would have done unto you.

Keep those eyes and ears open

Inspiration and ideas are out there for the taking. With some awareness, they’re easy to find. However, maintain some work-life boundaries. Not every transaction needs to relate to your day job.

The post Where to find marketing ideas to boost your performance appeared first on MarTech.

What is a martech stack? 

A marketing technology (or martech) stack is the collection of technology and software tools a company uses to manage and execute its marketing activities. Here’s a list of typical components. 

• Email service provider (ESP) 
• Customer relations management (CRM) 
• Marketing automation 
• Tools for A/B testing 
• Content management system (CMS) 
• Analytics 
• Social media tools 
• Adtech tools 
• Customer data platform (CDP) 
• Customer experience tools 
• Data visualization tools 

But I’m not starting from scratch

You probably already have some of these technologies unless you’re a start-up. But whether you’re starting from scratch or building on an existing system, components of your stack are likely to have overlapping functionality. An ESP might have marketing automation components or social media tools, and a CDP might have built-in analytics and its own ESP. 

So even if you did start from scratch, you’d still run into the problem of duplicative functionality. After all, nobody mandates the capabilities any marketing software provides. Just because a vendor calls their technology a customer data platform doesn’t mean it has the functions you want or expect in a CDP. 

Creating your map

One way to navigate this confusion is to map what you need and what various services provide. Here’s a very simple example. 

The objective is to create a comprehensive map showing your capabilities and those you want. To create the map you’ll need for your own custom martech stack, start by making a list of all the stack components you think you might need. Use the list I provided above as a starting point. 

In each of the rows, list the functions you need. In the columns, list marketing tech applications. This sounds difficult, but you can get a head start using MarTechBot. For example, you can ask MarTechBot to list the top 10 functions and capabilities of an ESP. Here’s the list MarTechBot came up with: 

1. Email creation and design: ESPs offer a variety of templates and tools to create visually appealing and engaging emails.

2. List management: ESPs allow you to manage your email list, segment it based on various criteria and maintain its hygiene.

3. Email automation: ESPs offer automation features that allow you to send triggered emails based on subscriber behavior, such as welcome emails, abandoned cart emails and more.

4. Reporting and analytics: ESPs provide detailed reports and analytics on email performance, including open rates, click-through rates and conversion rates.

5. Integration with other marketing tools: ESPs integrate with other marketing tools, such as CRM systems, social media platforms and landing page builders, to provide a seamless marketing experience.

6. A/B testing: ESPs allow you to test different versions of your emails to see which one performs better.

7. Personalization: ESPs offer personalization features that allow you to tailor your emails to individual subscribers based on their preferences and behavior.

8. Deliverability: ESPs have tools and features to ensure that your emails are delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes and not marked as spam.

9. Mobile optimization: ESPs offer mobile-responsive email templates and tools to ensure that your emails look great on mobile devices.

10. API access: ESPs provide API access to allow you to integrate your email marketing with other systems and applications.

https://martech.org/martechbot/

The list won’t be perfect. For example, I don’t see “send my email campaigns” on this list. But it will provide a good starting place. 

Review and optimize

As you go through the AI-created list, do two things. 

• Highlight the functions you require (don’t delete the others). 
• Add your own requirements to the list. 

There are a couple of reasons not to delete the functions you don’t need. First, they’ll keep coming up anyway, so you might as well have a place for them. Second, just because you don’t need or want them now doesn’t mean you might not in the future. Creating a comprehensive document will help you in the long run. 

Follow this same procedure for each of the technologies on your list. You’ll quickly notice lots of overlap between these lists. ESPs, CRMs and CDPs might all have marketing automation capabilities. You’ll also notice that some of the technologies you use will have functions that don’t fit in their category. For example, your ESP might be able to make limited content recommendations or have SMS capabilities. 

That’s fine. Just decide where you want each function to live according to your understanding of how that technology should work. Again, there’s no official list of what each technology is supposed to do. 

You can readily imagine that this burgeoning technology map is going to become a big spreadsheet. 

Once you have all the capabilities in rows, list the technologies you use at the top of each column and fill in the intersecting boxes. You could use a checkmark to indicate that the technology has that capability and use cell colors to indicate things like: 

• This is what we use and we like it.
• This is what we use and we don’t like it. 
• This technology can do this, but it doesn’t meet our needs.
• We should move this function here. 
• Etc. 

You’ll devise plenty of ways to characterize each of these entries. 

Getting all the details about how a particular technology provides a given capability in a single spreadsheet cell will be hard. Using colors as a guide will help, but you’ll need additional notes and explanations. You could put the additional information in a comment field, or you could provide it in a second document, with a reference to the appropriate spreadsheet cell. 

Now you have a chart that visually overviews your current tech stack. From this chart, you can see a few things: 

• Capabilities that need to be upgraded. 
• Technologies with more capabilities than you need or use (possibly because they’re already done by something else). This might indicate an opportunity to find a cheaper option that only does what you need or to negotiate a cheaper rate for that technology. 
• Desired capabilities that don’t currently have a home. This indicates where you need to start looking for new services. 
• Capabilities you have from an incumbent technology but aren’t using. These might represent simple opportunities to improve how you run your business. 
• Capabilities you haven’t considered.

This document you eventually build will become a useful tool for internal use and reference (especially when there’s staff turnover!), but it also helps you to evaluate prospective technologies. What gaps do you need to fill? What services can fill those gaps? 

By the way, MarTechBot can help with that as well. Ask something like, “What services can help me track user engagement on my website?” 

As long as you don’t include proprietary information in this map or any accompanying documents, it can be a useful addendum to an RFP. When prospective vendors see what you’re currently doing, they can make more intelligent recommendations about how their services can fit in. 

The post A practical guide to building a marketing technology stack appeared first on MarTech.

Agile marketing emphasizes speed and flexibility, collaboration, communication, and data — the qualities needed to navigate today’s constantly shifting marketing ecosystem. It allows marketers to adapt their campaigns and test new strategies in near real-time. It’s popular because the approach is helping companies become more efficient at managing the entire marketing process — from swiftly changing priorities and increasing brand visibility to improving marketing’s productivity.  

In this post, we’ll cover:

• What is agile marketing?
• Core values of an agile marketing framework
• Why should marketers care?
• Who uses agile marketing tools?
• What types of tools or software enable agile marketing?
• How agile marketing can help marketers succeed
• The future of agile marketing 
• Additional reading

What is agile marketing?

Agile marketing is a framework that uses self-organizing, cross-functional teams that work in frequent small bursts (called “sprints”). This allows marketing teams to adapt campaigns and strategies quickly based on continuous feedback and data. 

Agile marketing borrows some of the principles of agile software development methodologies and tools like Kanban, a system of visual project planning (think sticky notes on whiteboards) and Scrum, a sprint-based approach to team collaboration. But marketing is not software development, which is why agile experts like Stacey Ackerman, MarTech contributor and agile coach, are developing frameworks like the Agile Marketing Navigator, specifically for marketing teams.

Gartner’s official definition of agile marketing, which they refer to as “agile marketing project management” is:

“A method that applies tools, processes and organizational design concepts, inspired by software development methodology, to make marketing programs more relevant, more adaptive and efficient.”

Core values of an agile marketing framework

According to the Agile Marketing Manifesto, which outlines the values and principles of agile marketing, an agile marketing approach incorporates the following core values: 

• Outcome over output. Agile marketing prioritizes customer and business needs first versus simply engaging with marketing for marketing’s sake. It requires input from all team members, who must agree on a desired outcome before any work begins. Initiatives and tasks are done with purpose. Team members work together and collaborate to finish all aspects of a project.

• It dispenses with perfection. Agile marketing uses an iterative approach that seeks to deliver value early and often versus attempting to achieve a flawless campaign right out of the gate. It leverages efficiency and viability, focusing on what’s executable now, what can be repurposed, and if a simple (versus complex) approach will suffice to get something launched quickly. The goal is to seize opportunities as they arise and refine as you go along.

• Data and experimentation. An agile approach is data-driven, with learning derived from constant experimentation and strategy driven by actual results versus opinions or adherence to outdated conventions.

• Cross-functional collaboration. Agile marketing depends on collaboration using self-functioning teams. It seeks to eliminate silos by with a cross-functional approach that unifies departments and fosters collaboration. Agile teams are aligned with their organization’s goals and objectives rather than a single department’s goals. It dispenses with hierarchies, though team leaders help drive projects and ensure workflows are maintained. 

• Responsiveness. Agile’s iterative approach makes it inherently responsive to changing needs. Rather than being tied to a static strategy or plan, it allows for perpetual deviation based on changes in the market, customer needs, or campaign performance.

Why marketers should care about agile marketing

Agile marketing focuses on quantity over quality. It’s outcomes-driven, allowing marketers to measure success in early intervals and pivot quickly when something’s not working. By following agile methodologies, marketers can try lots of new things, repeat what works, and support their decisions with data-backed evidence. 

Since agile teams are collaborative and self-guided versus siloed and hierarchical, marketers can develop and modify campaigns by coordinating with multiple teams and departments. This allows people to work outside of their job title, taking responsibility for all aspects of the campaign rather than a specific piece of it. It also enables quick pivoting and responsiveness based on what’s happening with your customers and market in real time. All of this helps you remain competitive while increasing efficiency and productivity.

Who uses agile marketing tools?

Agile marketing tools focus on collaboration, data management, task management and team communication. Multiple teams and employees use them to facilitate an agile marketing framework. Here are some of the teams and people most likely to use these tools:

• Stakeholders and practice leaders – to align marketing objectives with company goals, ensure team members have a vested interest in marketing output, and review progress. 
• Marketing, sales, and team leaders – to foster collaboration and facilitate execution.
• Project/program managers – to create plans, prioritize work, track progress, and liaise with team leaders. 
• Developers and tech managers – to maintain tools, develop digital assets, and optimize content/workflows.
• Content creators and marketers – to develop content assets, execute plans, and optimize campaigns.
• Analysts – to collect campaign data, create actionable insights, and inform campaign strategy based on data and results.

Which technologies support agile marketing?

Agile marketing uses a combination of technology solutions and tools to facilitate team collaboration, break down silos, track performance, and maintain project workflow. Here are some of the different tools you might encounter as an agile-enabled team:

• Marketing work management platforms. Platforms like Adobe Workfront and Airtable help distributed employees collaborate and communicate, track hours, provide visualization tools, and often have other features like data asset management (DAM) to help with seamless communication and workflow.
  
• Project management tools. Tools like Jira and Trello support agile frameworks with Kanban-style interfaces that help teams implement and manage agile workflows.
  
• Data gathering and analysis tools. Tools like Google Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager help teams collect data, create actionable insights, and inform campaign strategy.
  
• Collaboration and work management tools. Tools like Slack and Asana act as collaboration hubs, allowing teams to track progress and check-in without having to be in the same physical space.
  
• Customer data platforms (CDPs). Tools like Blueconic and Tealium collect, organize, unify, and activate customer data from different sources. This is the technology that enables marketers to create personalized experiences and test new channels.
  
• Digital experience platforms (DXPs). Tools like Acquia and Contentful help teams manage their content assets and provide a central content repository that allows for content collaboration and access. They also allow teams to orchestrate customer journeys, personalize and optimize messaging, and support multiple customer experiences.

• Marketing automation platforms (MAPs). Tools like Salesforce and Acoustic help teams automate marketing and sales processes like lead nurturing, email marketing, lead scoring, landing page creation, and more. 

Most companies are already using some tools and tech that facilitate collaboration, data analysis, and asset sharing. Thus, use the above list as a starting point when assessing your agile marketing readiness. Be sure to consider the solutions that you may already have in-house and what’s needed to augment them to support an agile framework.

How agile marketing can help marketers succeed

Agile marketing helps marketers succeed because it’s inherently more flexible, responsive, and customer-centric than traditional marketing models. Since one of the main values of agile marketing is collaboration, it facilitates close alignment and communication with company stakeholders and customers. This makes it much more likely that marketers will align the goals of their campaigns with their organization’s growth objectives.

According to AgileSherpa, marketers who use an agile approach are more satisfied—and confident— with their outcomes versus those who take a traditional or ad hoc approach. Benefits include a greater ability to handle fast-paced work, clarity around marketing’s contribution to their organization’s success, and the confidence to experiment with new and emerging opportunities.

When MetLife’s pet insurance division implemented an agile framework, they began selling more policies than ever. They were able to use this this successful approach as a model to roll out to other departments throughout MetLife. This is another big benefit of agile—since it’s iterative, it enables marketers to test and experiment different approaches until they find a formula that works.

What’s next for agile marketing?

Agile marketing is still in the early stages of adoption. Marketers need more training, certification, and confidence around what tools to use and how to use them. But it’s growing in popularity, with 31% of respondents in AgileSherpa’s latest report stating their marketing departments are fully agile and another 62% of respondents who have partially agile marketing teams preparing to go fully agile in the next year.

Agile frameworks are also extending beyond marketing teams, to total organizational agility. Per AgileSherpa, organizations that embrace an agile framework in other departments are seeing much greater benefits from implementing an agile marketing approach. Their data reveals that when finance uses agile, marketers are 2.5 times more likely to report success and when human resources uses agile, they’re three times more likely to report success.

Keep in mind that for agile to be truly successful, executive buy-in is needed. AgileSherpa notes a strong correlation with agile success from marketers who stated they had executive support. Agile marketing has matured significantly over the past five years and we anticipate even more exciting developments as more companies pivot away from traditional marketing frameworks that make it difficult to adapt to shifts in customer behaviors, market trends, and organizational needs.  

Additional reading

Everything you need to know about agile marketing, plus a guide to the Agile Marketing Navigator — an approach to agile designed specifically for marketers — dive into the MarTech archive for articles written by agile coach Stacy Ackerman.

You can also download a free eBook on the Agile Marketing Navigator.

If you’re interested in the broad history of agile development that sets the context for agile marketing, here are a couple of good guides:

• “To agility and beyond: The history—and legacy—of agile development.”
• “The Complete History of Agile Software Development.”

The post Agile marketing: What it is and why marketers should care appeared first on MarTech.

As a coach to marketing executives and their teams, I’ve been talking with lots of them to understand what they’re struggling with and how they’re overcoming the challenges facing marketers today. These include hiring freezes, budget cuts, unrealistic targets, reduced awareness and increased price sensitivity, to name a few.

Some of these are the same challenges marketers have faced forever. But many are heightened to a new level given the economic difficulties that have disrupted corporations and consumers alike.

The post-pandemic timeframe has been just as volatile and unpredictable as its predecessor. There’s a lot of uncertainty, chaos and confusion around what’s happening, what will happen and what to do about it.

Across all of my conversations and coaching sessions, here are the three common patterns I’ve heard from marketing leaders about what they’re facing right now and how to overcome them.

1. Talk to customers

When times are good, talk to your customers. When times are bad, talk to your customers. You can never talk to your customers enough.

Especially in the current environment, it’s more important than ever to regularly talk to them. They want to give you feedback, share their opinion, feel heard and know you really care about them. Having conversations with customers helps build loyalty, increase retention and can even lead to upselling them on additional products or services.

All of these benefits are important, yet few marketing leaders are actually talking with customers on a regular basis. They don’t actually put any effort into starting conversations. It’s a shame since nothing bad can happen from talking to your customers. 

Dig deeper: B2B marketing budgets stalled out in 2022

I firmly believe in customer proximity: Whoever is closest to the customer wins. And this often comes down to the companies that spend the most time in conversation, connection and community with their customers.

Talking to your customers will also help you identify what’s important to them. It’s your job to listen, synthesize and help translate this to the senior leadership for the company to focus on what really matters.

2. Prioritize ruthlessly

Marketing is like raspberry jam — the more you spread it the thinner it gets. This applies to your team, your budget and your efforts.

If you want to move the needle, you have to focus. It turns out that’s one of the hardest things for marketing leaders to do. Most leaders I spoke with had an overwhelming list of “priorities” and insufficient time or resources to invest in them.

We must accept our limitations and embrace them rather than hoping “it will all work out somehow.” If your budget was cut or your team has been reduced, you can’t continue at the same pace.

This requires a new level of decision-making and commitment, one that I refer to as ruthless prioritization. It prevents wasted time, money and effort and keeps the team on track to achieve their goals. And, most importantly, it’s fairly simple to adopt.

An important first step in this direction is communication. Marketing leaders must communicate these limits and fight to protect themselves and their teams. It’s your responsibility to draw a line in the sand and explain what it means to everyone in the company. If you don’t set boundaries and realistic expectations, no one else will.

You can always do more in the future … when you have more time, a bigger team and a new budget. Until then, you must prioritize ruthlessly.

And most marketing leaders agree that optimizing for conversions is one of the most important things to prioritize right now.

3. Optimize for conversions

Every marketing leader understands the importance of revenue. We must close deals, make sales, generate opportunities and capture leads. All of this comes down to conversions.

Unfortunately, most marketing simply doesn’t convert. Consumer behavior, price sensitivity and increasing competition are just a few of the reasons that driving conversions is hard, especially in today’s environment. 

In addition, most marketing teams are too preoccupied with producing more content or launching the next campaign instead of optimizing for conversions. My conversations revealed that this is partly due to a lack of skills and a team to support it but also because of a lack of ruthless prioritization. We know that optimizing for conversions is essential, yet we ignore it because there are too many other things to focus on.

Instead of launching and moving on to the next campaign, it’s imperative to iterate and improve. To analyze and optimize. To invest in optimizing and improving your conversion rate. 

This allows you to get a better result (and more revenue) with the same or fewer resources. Higher conversion rates lead to greater engagement, more leads, more sales and more revenue. Not to mention higher profit margins.

And, small improvements compound quickly. A slight improvement in the conversion rate of several areas of your marketing can add up to massive gains. Plus, your team will start to understand what works — and why — so they can continue to create marketing that converts from the beginning.

It should come as no surprise that optimizing for conversions relies on talking to your customers and is an effort you must prioritize ruthlessly. Regardless if you have a sizable budget and a sufficient team — or if you don’t — you’ll find the highest ROI from focusing on optimizing for conversions.

All of the marketing leaders expressed a constant challenge of balancing short-term wins versus long-term gains. How can we show results now while also driving future growth? This is where optimizing for conversions is the holy grail of marketing since it delivers both short-term and long-term results from a minimal upfront investment.

Focusing on the fundamentals

Regardless of the economic climate, competitive pressure, or consumer demand, marketing leaders will continue to face the same challenges. Doing more with less seems to be the constant.

It’s important to realize that there is no silver bullet. AI, TikTok and influencers won’t save your marketing. You’ll probably never have enough resources, a big enough team or sufficient support from the top. But don’t let that dissuade you.

Marketing is a job for those who are passionate about their audience, believe in their value proposition and will dive in head-first and face great challenges to achieve even the most ambitious goals.

Despite the limitations and difficulties, remember this: you’re not alone. Every marketing leader is facing a similar set of challenges. And all of us can step back, take a deep breath and revisit the fundamentals. 

By talking to customers, being ruthless with our priorities and optimizing for conversions, marketing can become a bit easier and more manageable.

The post How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes appeared first on MarTech.

This article is about marketing’s future, which AI may or may not play a role in. Marketing leaders must think about how to future-proof their teams and keep up with whatever comes their way. In other words, they need to innovate.

There are three decisions all marketing teams need to make to design a future-friendly version of themselves. They must breathe, be ruthless about value, and identify timeless skills.

‘Keep calm and carry on’

You might have seen this phrase painted on mugs or t-shirts. It originated in World War II when the British government used it as a motivational message to help citizens survive horrific situations.

Today, it serves to remind us to slow down. Seriously, marketing teams need to take a breath. I started the article by talking about serious challenges, but before we jump into solving problems, teams need to be in the right state of mind.

While things change rapidly in marketing, that doesn’t mean you need to run around anxiously. It is far better to think about issues systematically and slowly. Decisions made out of fear or panic are never optimal. They put too much weight on the worst-case scenarios and completely disregard the upside and possibilities.

Look at how the travel industry reacted to pandemic lockdowns. Most airlines started to lay off people left and right. When travel demand rebounded, many were short-staffed and couldn’t deal with the demand. The outlier here was Ryanair which avoided doing major layoffs, rotated their staff through the small number of available flights, and was able to rebound to full capacity rapidly.

Ryanair didn’t make decisions based on fear or panic. They correctly assumed that travel restrictions wouldn’t last forever and were better off being optimistic. There are always options even in the worst situations, but you will only see them if you’re relaxed.

Before you start hiring prompt engineers, buying the latest AI technology or firing people, take a breath. Get some sleep and come back to the problems with a fresh mind.

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

What is marketing actually producing?

Somewhere along the way, marketing has forgotten what they are actually generating for the business. It’s not just writing funny social media posts, designing beautiful landing pages or developing clever taglines.

If that’s all you think marketing is, then I understand why technology like AI can be scary. If your entire job is to write social media posts and then schedule them, you’re bound to be replaced.

Marketing is about helping the customer buy. That means educating the customer, helping them make a decision and then reinforcing the positive elements of their purchase.

Marketing will never go away because we love to buy things. I love to visit Nordstrom — even though they are leaving Canada — but I wouldn’t say I like shopping at their stores.

Nordstrom stores have 20-30 employees, so you’re constantly being interrupted by someone offering to help. I can’t go more than two minutes before a sales rep approaches me. We love to buy, but we don’t like being sold to.

Marketing leaders need to fight for the appropriate perception internally. If other units view marketing as fluffy or a cost center, you have lost. Marketing is a partner in driving revenue and is essential for keeping a company growing at a healthy pace.

Everything else is optional. It doesn’t matter if people or AI write your social media posts or your content or create your images. The big picture doesn’t change. Let the robots take over. It gives humans more time to think deeply about tackling the big picture.

Dig deeper: How to make revenue generation a company-wide effort

What are timeless skills?

The world is obsessed with change. We breathlessly talk about how X will change the world, how X will remove 25% of jobs and how we will soon find ourselves living in a Black Mirror episode.

The reality is that we overestimate the rate and depth of change. Despite the advancements in smartphones, some people still use cheques. I was actually paying my rent by cheque until a couple of years ago. 

We may forget that smartphones are phones, but plenty of people still make phone calls. It may seem like everyone is moving to electric cars, but I bet we will see gasoline cars for the next 100 years — maybe even longer.

Some things are timeless, even in a world of robots. People generally prefer to interact with humans, people need help making choices and people want to be entertained.

As you build the marketing team of the future, think of the skills that will always be in demand. Here are a few for you to consider:

• Customer experience: How do consumers like to buy and how can you optimize the buying experience? This skill is part psychology, part empathy and part creativity. 
• Listening: In a world where everyone is talking, who’s actually listening? What do customers actually want but aren’t saying? 
• Branding: Forget about hacks like mispronounced words and look for people who are obsessed with building 100-year-old brands. 
• Value mindset: Tools are ephemeral, but providing value is not. Look for people who can make the distinction and aren’t caught up in seeing themselves as tool operators.

Conclusion

The death of marketing may be premature. Despite the buffeting winds of change, marketing will be around for a long time. It does need reinventing, though. For too long, marketing has been obsessed with technology. It is losing touch with the human element of marketing and how that can help drive value for the business.

Low-difficulty marketing tasks are going away, and that’s a good thing. It will force good marketers to adapt and think hard about their roles. At the end of the day, we are all in the people business. The challenge is seeing that through the pixels.

The post Designing the marketing team of the future appeared first on MarTech.