Imagine a construction team showing up without a blueprint to tell them what to build? Imagine a ship without a captain or a bus without a driver. Without someone with a map or plan, your marketing team may be busy but going in too many directions that aren’t effectively serving your business. Someone needs to guide a marketing team.
Every CMO or VP of Marketing has to create a plan that aligns with the overarching goal of the organization.
Since I have been charged with running marketing organizations from 2-15 people, I am sharing my own approach.
How to Guide a Marketing Team
Understanding the Business Vision: Marketing has to fit and align with the overall goals and strategies of the business. Before trying to create a marketing blueprint, you have to first get clear about the organization’s objectives. This means understanding priorities and goals. It means being crystal clear what success looks like for the organization. Are you launching a major product, entering new markets, growing margins through price increases, etc.? This is always the starting point for me. And, I like to speak to several senior leaders to see if they are all on the same page. In some cases, not everyone understands the same critical goals and may have divergent agendas.
Assess your Resources: How many team members do you have, what are they jobs and what are their strengths and weaknesses. What type of financial resources do you have to spend and how has it been spent historically? Do you have agency partners that are part of your available assets to deploy?
Establish Marketing Aligned Goals: The next step is to create at least a working plan that identifies how the marketing goals fit with the organization overall plans. If growth is key, then lead generation may be a critical marketing activity. If building awareness is key for a new product launch, then determine how to communicate news and information about this product to the right targets.
Define Success: Without a clear picture of what success looks like, it is hard to know if you are achieving your goal. Whatever the KPI (key performance indicator) or metric, you need some way to say that your activity is working. For example, if you have 5 quality marketing leads per day and your metric is to increase it by 25%, then you have a clear way to confirm success or failure. And, you want to gain consensus among key senior leaders that the metric is agreed to with management. You don’t want the marketing team high fiving each other only to find the rest of the organization seeing your work as failing. Define and get agreement to what success looks like.
Create a Blueprint: Once you have an understanding of the business vision, understand your resources and establish marketing goals, then you need to create a tactical, execution plan. I like a simple one-page document that aligns the strategic initiative and ties it directly to major tactical activities. You must identify who owns each step along the way. Maybe one person is the owner for upgrading the SEO work while another is managing lead generation. Assigning clear owner or leads really help give the organization a point of contact for each major actions.
Say No to Lots of Distractions: Another part of managing is saying no to requests that are off-strategy. If it doesn’t fit with the major goals, someone has to say no and give a reason why. The CMO or VP has to lead the charge and force the organization to not get distracted. You can’t get pulled into too many directions and someone has to keep the team focused.
Measuring Success: As the year winds down, have you met your agreed goals? How do you report this out to the organization? Celebrating the success is important to motivate the team. And, doing a post-mortem on failures is equally important.
Guiding Your Team
If you are given the honor to lead a marketing team, you need to have a clear vision and plan. Keeping busy with work is easy. Keeping busy with the RIGHT work is tough. Organizations without clear lines of authority can muddle this approach because of difficulties in setting corporate goals or in agreeing who is responsible for what activities.
I always like to start this type of assignment by listening to lots of people within the organization so I can create a clear path forward.
If you need help creating a blueprint, email me at jeffreylynnslater@gmail.com and let’s get out our #2 pencils.
Photo credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanotype
