What expectations should you have off your marketing resource?
With a new year beginning, many companies are reevaluating their marketing function within their business, and based on the resources available, are setting expectations for their marketing resources.
Why this is so important, is that by setting expectations, business leaders are able to better understand marketing ROI and ensure that they have the right resources to be able to achieve the goals that are set out.
When setting expectations, there are some factors to consider:
- Financial position: Do you have budget for marketing allocated so that a marketing professional can best allocate budget to achieve the goals that are set out. It's hard to do marketing without a budget in place.
- Market position: If you are the industry leader, it is much harder to "double your business" for instance. However if you are challenging the leader, there is more opportunity to grow. If you innovate and do something that no other company in your category does, where does that place you in terms of market position?
- Innovation: Are you an innovative company with a story to tell, or do you lack innovation and that impacts marketing efforts?
- Perception: What is the market perception of your brand?
- Resources: Do you only have one marketer that is expected to wear many hats; design, content, strategy, social media, digital, lead generation - or do you have resources across the entire marketing mix and various disciplines?
- Branding: Is your brand current, relevant and appealing to your customer base?
When identifying marketing expectations, ensure that they are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time sensitive
- Develop a marketing strategy: They may use platforms like Robotic Marketer to do so, or manually develop a marketing strategy. This will largely depend on how much time they have and how soon they need to 'hit the road running'. A Robotic Marketer marketing strategy takes approximately 2 hours of your time versus manually, if done correctly will take a couple of weeks to a month.
- Present marketing strategy to management and sales: A marketing professional will be capable of presenting the marketing strategy to key stakeholders in the business to get buy-in and also to ensure that everyone plays their role. Marketing isn't simply a marketing function, but instead it is a area of the business that every employee is responsible for.
- Develop marketing campaigns: It is a fair expectation for management to expect a marketing professional to develop marketing campaigns and be capable of writing content associated with these compaigns. What is not a fair expectation is that they would be able to design the campaign at a professional level. While business leaders are being told that CANVA solves all design problems, the reality is that a professional company would not be using CANVA to design marketing campaigns. There is a reason why graphic designers go to college to learn how to do graphic design for four (4) years, and it's not just how to use the technology. Marketers should not be expected to design campaigns, but they should be expected to run campaigns, measure results, and adapt campaigns according to response rates.
- Set cadence for marketing activations: A cadence for marketing might be each month to develop 4 email marketing campaigns, develop social media calendars, write blogs, produce case studies and send out one press release. Every company is different and it depends on resources available, but setting a cadence will help manage expectations.
- Report on marketing activities: A marketing professional is required to report on marketing activities and understand the analytics behind digital marketing and traditional marketing activities.
Too often the expectations that are set for marketers are not communicated. By ensuring that they are communicated, you will not only perform better from a marketing aspect, but your business will also be much closer to achieving goals.
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