MARKETING
4 strategies to help marketing teams improve workflow and collaboration
There’s nothing virtual about the sea change marketing teams have experienced in the last two years. The fact that marketers are working remotely over digital channels is a very concrete reality calling for new approaches to workflow.
Here are four tactics to help your team adapt.
Improve visibility and centralize
Virtual meetings, chat apps, automated calendars and workflow management software all became necessary to bring together teams from remote workspaces. In many cases, these remote work tools brought better visibility to small or subtle tasks that slipped under the radar in a traditional work environment.
The next step is to make sure all the key people can see into the workflow.
“You would want to have visibility across the board about what’s happening and who is delivering what at which time,” said Annie Schneider, senior product marketing manager for Wrike, a Citrix company, in her presentation at The MarTech Conference (scroll down to watch the video of their session).
The work can be consolidated into a calendar or united around a specific project, like a campaign or major content project.
“It could be looking at some sort of bird’s eye view or dashboard, or things that are coming in, so you have the view of things that are coming and things that are already live,” said Schneider.
This unified view into the work can also be divided by regions, according to the specific countries or timezones where a global workforce is doing their work.
Read next: What is digital transformation?
Encourage effective collaboration
At each step in the creation of a project, individual team members have to be able to mark their progress and move the project forward.
“There needs to be an easy way to collaborate on asset creation, including proofing and approvals,” Schneider said. “There also needs to be an easy way to control versions of the assets, and the ability to track who made the change.”
One especially important tool for effective collaboration is an audit log that team members can sign, and also have the ability to revert and go back after a change is made in the project.
It’s up to leadership, in coordination with IT or a committed martech team, to make sure that members have the right access to the workflow, and that the user experience is seamless.
“Marketers thrive when they’re able to do their work all in one place instead of toggling between multiple tools,” said Schneider. “So on the back end of this, it means the tools and processes in martech are connected in a way that the transition from one tool to another is seamless to the user.”
Remove bottlenecks
The traditional office environment is very dependent on meetings, where everybody stops work and waits for the next cues to happen. This creates bottlenecks with a truly remote team that is dispersed in different regions and timezones.
“Because of the evolving global workspace, work often doesn’t get accomplished in the same location or pretty much never does anymore,and it usually doesn’t get accomplished at the same time,” said Schneider. “People have to sometimes wait 12 hours to move along on a project collaboration with their counterparts across the globe.”
When team members can’t have conversations about the work, the technology that manages the project should be able to guide members instead. Individuals will have the ability to see directly for themselves at what stage the project is, instead of learning this indirectly through other team members in conversation or meetings.
Track results and optimize
When marketing projects are centralized using digital tools, this also makes it easier for the team to track the project’s results.
“It’s important to be able to track results of your marketing activities and the impact that they actually make,” said Schneider.
By comparing the impact of campaigns and projects with the individual tasks that go into creating it, the marketing team can get a better handle on ROI and optimize the workflow with fewer steps on future projects.
“It’s all connected because data gives you the information that you need to optimize your content and the use of your marketing channels in an effective way,” said Schneider.
She added, “This means that because marketing has such diverse functional teams within one department, companies have to be very thoughtful when selecting a work collaboration tool to ensure that it has the capabilities to address the needs of the entire marketing workflow and enable marketers to complete the whole process — from content creation to publishing, as well as including optimization, all in one place.”
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Reimagining collaboration: Removing barriers to better output from Third Door Media on Vimeo.
MARKETING
Trends in Content Localization – Moz
Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.
Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.
Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.
MARKETING
How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy
MARKETING
More promotions and more layoffs
For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.
The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.
Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes
Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643.
Here are the median salaries by role:
- Senior management $199,653
- Director $157,776
- Manager $99,510
- Staff $89,126
Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.
One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%).
Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.
Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams
Employee turnover
In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”
Men and Women
This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.
In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.
Methodology
The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents.
Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.
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