No matter what your marketing firm is doing or how effective they are, there are certain circumstances that can impact the success of your marketing campaigns. Today, we’re taking a look at some of the main roadblocks that keep marketing from achieving its full potential and what you can do about each, particularly if you have the help of a marketing firm.
Like any department, marketing needs the appropriate resources to do effective work. These include the ability to invest in top employees with creative and analytical skills; marketing automation, analytics and design software; and digital and traditional media buys and collateral.
If your budget has been cut, you and your marketing partner will face significant challenges to perform at the same level as before. However, a marketing partner is a great resource in this situation. Your partner firm can help you make the case to your superiors for marketing’s resource needs and what can be achieved with an appropriate investment. Talk to your marketing partner about case studies, past data and other information that you can use to advocate for the importance of marketing.
Whether it’s the loss of one or two high-level employees or constant low-level staffing churn, employee turnover can impact your ability to develop and deploy consistent messaging. Turnover at a low level can redirect time and resources to training new recruits. At a high level, it can cause major changes to marketing’s direction, forcing your team and your partner firm to go back and revise your strategic plan.
For your internal team or a partner firm to do work effectively, there needs to be a certain level of stability. A marketing campaign’s impact cannot be assessed if it isn’t given the time to run its course or the investment to succeed. If there have recently been staffing changes at your organization or you expect some in the near future, talk to your marketing partner about how to establish some stability. Identify the campaigns that are having the greatest impact and make a plan for how you will show their importance to a new team. You may wish to also create some training documents or tools that can systemize and streamline the onboarding of new marketing team members.
When you’re working with a marketing partner, open communication is critical to success. Ideally, you’ve established a regular meeting or phone call to go through priorities, progress and sticking points, and communicate regularly by phone or email between those meetings. However, none of this guarantees good communication if you aren’t working to clearly and transparently share the information your marketing partner needs.
If you feel there’s a weak spot in your communications, you need to find a way to fix it. Address your concerns with your marketing partner, and they will work with you to brainstorm ways to fix the problem. They may recommend a project management tool like Basecamp or more frequent check-ins regarding your project. You’ll also need to take a hard look at your internal communications processes, and examine whether there are areas that you can improve.
While marketing’s ultimate goal is to increase sales, that goal can only be achieved when sales and marketing work together. If your organization lacks an integrated CRM, if sales goals are not clearly communicated or if sales expectations of marketing are unrealistic, the marketing team is being set up for trouble. The good news? Improving communication between marketing and sales can bring these issues to light and create opportunities to make them better.
Your marketing partner can identify the specific areas in which marketing-sales alignment can be improved at your organization, and share possible solutions. For more on this issue and how you can deal with it, read a few of our past blogs:
For more marketing advice, browse all our past blogs.
(Click here to expand)
