How many of these phrases have you heard during your marketing department’s planning meetings?

  • Eliminate silos!
  • Be agile!
  • Measure everything!
  • Bring relevant messages to the right people in the right channels!
  • Get these new technologies online ASAP!

Marketing operations teams are faced with the unique challenge of not only making emotional connections with customers but also breaking down internal silos and creating an aligned marketing department. These frequently used phrases have little meaning if not backed by a strategic plan that is aligned with your brand story and systems. Instead of throwing around buzzwords, consider shifting to an action-focused conversation during your next meeting.

  • How might we eliminate silos?
  • How might we become more agile?
  • Do we need to measure everything? What are the most important metrics to measure?
  • In which channels does our audience engage? Does our brand story speak to customers, and make them the hero?
  • How does new marketing technology impact our current systems? Do we have the conditions for success in place?

While shifting the conversation is a good first step, sifting through the marketing mayhem is the real challenge. Marketing mayhem can appear in many forms— from managing capacity to delivering a consistent brand message to measuring return on marketing investment. Sometimes mayhem is a necessary evil but if these issues are left unresolved, they will become crippling (and eventually break down) as the complexity of meeting customer expectations increases.

Learn more about how you can manage the chaos in our recent webinar with Aprimo: What’s Your Marketing Mayhem? How to Overcome Complexity to Meet Customer Expectations. We share research from our recent marketing operations survey and discuss how to effectively break down silos and mitigate risk to eliminate your marketing mayhem.

3 Key Takeaways from “What’s Your Marketing Mayhem? How to Overcome Complexity to Meet Customer Expectations”

Marketing ROI is still a huge challenge

Measuring the returns on your marketing efforts has always been viewed as a massive challenge for marketers. In our research, we found that two-thirds of marketers struggled with measuring returns on their marketing investments. This comes as no surprise considering the complexity of the marketing technology landscape. Scott Brinker (@chiefmartech) recently cited the average marketing organization has 91 marketing cloud services. Quite a task for the average marketing department to seamlessly integrate all of those cloud services to prove the return on marketing investment.

It’s important to take the time to ensure your systems – people, processes, and platforms – tie back to your strategy and are clearly aligned with business KPIs. Here are some tips to help prove marketing ROI.

  • Establish a single database that contains all pertinent campaign information
  • Cleanse customer information to accurately market and evaluate campaigns
  • Develop response algorithms to understand marketing effectiveness
  • Follow customers through their lifecycle and measure the impact of your marketing along the way
  • Generate executive-level reports
  • Develop a learn-act-learn culture

Mayhem requires a holistic approach

Stop playing whack-a-mole!

If you treat each moment of mayhem as an individual event, you’ll never win. You have to take a holistic approach to controlling the chaos. It’s imperative for marketing operations to first get aligned internally. By having an aligned team and a more transparent structure, organizations can eliminate duplicate tasks and reinvest the time, money, and effort in activities that drive the most ROI.

Organizations must take an agile approach to marketing and have a deep understanding of the 5 essential activities to manage marketing mayhem: plan, spend, create, distribute, perform. Our research pointed towards a multitude of pain points across the 5 essentials of the marketing value chain. Mayhem is such a challenge because of its pervasive nature across the five essentials. Just when you think you’ve mastered the mayhem of getting budgeting and planning aligned, mayhem pops up within your distribution processes.

Mayhem is here to stay

I hate to burst your bubble but marketing mayhem is not going anywhere.

Demands on the marketing department will only continue to grow as marketing’s reach extends to the IT department, the sales department, and the rest of the organization. New challenges will bring new forms of mayhem. By approaching marketing through our 3S methodology, we have found that our clients are better prepared for the mayhem they face. This is because we start with the creating a compelling brand story, then we clearly align strategy and systems to execute flawlessly. Bringing simplicity, clarity, and alignment to your marketing efforts is essential to mitigating mayhem.

By knowing the common signs of marketing mayhem, you can take proactive measures to prevent the chaos from getting out of control. Learn how to identify and overcome these problems in our whitepaper Overcoming Mayhem: 5 Common Marketing Challenges and Their Solutions.