Re-shaping the marketing team
Technology has fundamentally changed marketing. Customer insight through technology platforms makes our job easier than ever. Although it can also complicate. What data do you want to collect and do you have anyone in your team who can interpret it and turn it into value? And once you have these two things in place, which of the hundreds of platforms do you invest in?
The first step is the hardest. It's getting your team thinking about data in the right way. Most of our decisions these days should be data-driven and your team needs to understand this. It's a fundamental step change in how we approach marketing and it's changed more in the past two years than it did in the previous twenty.
In my experience, Generation X understands the technology but lacks experience to apply it. Generation Y has experience, but lacks technical capability to execute. This is why collaboration and having the right talent in the team is vital. But it is a cultural shift.
And it's not optional. Your competitors are doing it, your customers are feeling the benefit. Get involved or get left behind.
I inherited a large team at Xchanging. The issue was they were nearly all generalists. Lots of marketing managers and marketing execs, but very little specialised skills.
When you start a new role, it's important you make a mark, this helps gain positive traction with internal stakeholders. Over the first few months I made a lot of changes. I built an internal marketing shared service, comprising of social, digital, PR and events. The social and digital roles were integral to my success at Xchanging. Bringing first-class talent into the team that understood the digital landscape and could educate the rest of the team was crucial.
We rolled out SalesForce.com, Marketo and Turtl across the business, all seamlessly integrated. The three products working together enabled marketing to provide the sales teams customer-centric data and it shifted the perception of the team. We were adding real value. We understood the customer journey and buying cycle implicitly and my team were perfectly positioned to advise the sales team like never before.
You need to get the right skills in your team, it's time to shape up in the digital world and move marketing to the next level!