This is a guest post by Rishi Ghai

Most businesses review their marketing health at least once a year. Your business probably does the same, adhering to an annual planning cycle. One would think that such reviews are more than sufficient to keep you on course and set new marketing goals. The truth is that despite frequent reviews, the marketing function of your organisation may still be due for a reset.

Here’s why:

The frequency of marketing reviews is NOT the problem.

It’s what the reviews focus on that determines your marketing health.

 Frequent marketing reviews are mostly well intentioned, but not well focused. The most common trap for businesses is to focus their energies on short-term fixes, instead of planning and solving for the long term. “Patchwork Marketing”––fixing things only when the need arises, reactively––keeps the systems going seemingly smoothly, until incoherent results and friction with larger business goals start to surface, forcing a major reset of marketing.

Fortunately, there are telltale signs, which if read and addressed in time, can spare your organization the pain of a marketing overhaul. The following are a few examples of what these signs may look like. As a marketing leader, examine them in the context of your organisation, and evaluate how you can address their root cause.

 

Sign 1: Your Business Has Silos Between Digital and Traditional Marketing

Digital and traditional marketing may require different skills, but both must be directed towards achieving common business goals. Silos arise mostly from legacy organisational structures, wherein team leaders differ in the marketing agendas that they want to drive. It is never good to have multiple ‘parallel universes’ within the marketing function, each heading in a different direction. The result is disparate outcomes, and scattered decision-making and accountability, which neither helps the marketing team, nor the organisation.

 

What You Can Do: Align digital and traditional marketing to common goals. Simplify the marketing team structure to allow for clear ownership/accountability, partnership, and coherent decision-making.

Align digital and traditional marketing to common goals. #marketing #strategy Click To Tweet 

 

Sign 2: You Get Frequent Requests to Approve Unplanned Investments

Projecting every single piece of your annual market spend accurately may be impossible. However, if as a marketing leader, you are seeing frequent requests to approve unplanned investments––such as those for events, campaigns, sponsorships, headcount, and training––it may be a sign of flawed planning practices.

 

What You Can Do: Bulletproof your planning and budgeting processes. Ask your team the right questions. Find out the assumptions factored into the projections, and apply research and your experience to fine-tune the investment estimates.

 

Sign 3: You Rely Too Much, Or Too Little, On Data

Without question, marketing today is data-driven. Yet, demonstrating ROI has become harder for businesses due to two reasons:

(i) You don’t know which metrics to use––in which case you are likely relying on too much irrelevant data (especially, in digital marketing)

(ii) You don’t have a culture of data-driven marketing––in which case you are underutilising your data assets that should be powering your marketing decisions

 

What You Can Do: Hire the right talent and, for the most part, that will help you plug the gaps in both situations (i) and (ii). Separate vanity metrics from those that really matter. Additionally, if your business aligns very strongly with (ii), it may be necessary to drive a long-term cultural change supported by the top management. Prepare for some––or a lot of––internal evangelising and learning!

 

Sign 4: Customer Experience Is Not a Part of Your Marketing Strategy

This one is somewhat controversial––should customer experience (CX) be a part of marketing? Yes, absolutely! Traditionally, CMOs developed a brand promise, and product and customer service teams ensured the delivery of that promise to customers. With customers engaging with brands directly through digital and social media channels, marketing has a far stronger role to play in the success of businesses today. According to research by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a whopping 86% of CMOs and senior marketing executives believe they will own the end-to-end customer experience by 2020.

 

What You Can Do: Start by looking at Customer Experience as a strategic element of business success. Next, calibrate how the marketing function within your organisation can drive or support CX. Collaboration is the key here, and you will need to find the sweet spot of working in tandem with a range of stakeholders, such as the CIO, and customer service, sales and delivery leaders.

 

Sign 5: The Products and Services You Offer Are Changing, But Your Marketing Materials Are Not

This is a conspicuous, yet often-ignored sign indicating that your marketing systems are not keeping pace with the changes in your business. Refreshing your product or service portfolio bears results only when your customers know what your new offerings are. Even casual visitors to your website do not expect to see out-of-date information. There is no excuse for your messaging and marketing channels not to reflect your current products and services.

 

What You Can Do: As soon as you update your product or service portfolio, revise the corresponding messaging for all your marketing channels. Don’t wait for the next planning cycle to kick in to make the changes. Be fluid. Poor/incomplete communication may translate into lost opportunities.

Poor/incomplete communication may translate into lost opportunities. Click To Tweet

 

Sign 6: Your Marketing Team Is Chronically Under-resourced

If your organisation is experiencing a seemingly perpetual resource crunch on the marketing front––whether for skilled people or money––it may be time to re-evaluate your priorities. Businesses work with finite resources, so some level of rationing is understandable. However, chronic resource constraints can weaken the marketing function, and compromise its ability to produce the desired results.

 

What You Can Do: Question whether your organisation considers marketing as a serious, strategic function or a ‘necessary evil’. Honest introspection should reveal to you that while marketing is resource intensive, it is also indispensable to connecting with customers and nurturing relationships. Like product development or sales, marketing requires committed investments, discipline, and top-management enthusiasm.

 

Sign 7: You Jump On Every New Marketing Trend for the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)

Marketing is being marketed exceptionally well! On some level it taps into organisations’ fear of missing out, which is camouflaged as their ‘zeal to stay ahead of the competition’. Compounding the variety of new digital marketing options available is the difficulty in discerning game-changing trends from fads. It takes some time to test what works and what doesn’t for different kinds of business. For instance, live streaming on Facebook may be a great option for a consumer-goods influencer or a business coach, while recorded videos and other forms of content may serve the marketing objectives of an oil company just fine. If you find your marketing team jumping on every new trend, it may be time to slow down a little bit and adopt a more measured approach. The idea is to encourage innovation in marketing, without scattering your energy on unproductive initiatives.

 

What You Can Do: Experiment! Before going full throttle on new marketing platforms, functionalities and tools that emerge every few months, use scaled testing to find if the outcomes serve your business goals.

As always, marketing requires an integrated approach to be truly successful. The above signs, if analysed only individually, will still yield short-term fixes. To evaluate the need for a comprehensive marketing reset, businesses must zoom out more than they think is necessary, and review the complete marketing ecosystems they operate in. This lays bare the different interdependencies, which then must be dissected in greater detail, and streamlined. Again, the focus of marketing reviews matters more than their frequency.

Has your business undergone a marketing reset recently? What signs led you to it?