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Why radical transparency is key

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Why radical transparency is key

Why does marketing not get the focus and support it truly requires? And how can we earn more respect for marketing as a function while delivering outstanding results at the same time?

Marketing is often treated as an ancillary activity of the organization when it should be the primary activity. The lack of proper emphasis on marketing—and the incorrect precedence placed upon it—leads to unreliable growth and shortened CMO tenure.

The key to solving this problem is transparency. Marketing teams must operate more transparently, both internally and externally, to realize their full potential.

As Peter Drucker famously said, “the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.” Achieving this aim requires transforming marketing from a mysterious black box into a radically transparent organizational function.

It might seem like a buzzword or an HR initiative, but transparency is the missing link to sustainable growth.

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The marketing black box

Marketing has a reputation problem. Most people outside of marketing see it like a slot machine in a Vegas casino. You sit down with a bucket of quarters, feeding the machine and pulling the arm repeatedly, hoping to win big. As your budget dwindles, you become frustrated that there hasn’t been a payout in what feels like forever.

Unfortunately, this is the general view of marketing: a black box that eats money and haphazardly spits out lackluster results on an unpredictable schedule.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Marketing operations is responsible for opening the box and showing everyone what’s behind the curtains. Doing this is the only way to earn the trust and support necessary for sustainable, predictable growth.

The benefits of transparency

When marketing organizations become more transparent, they can better articulate the effort and investment required to achieve the objectives and results set before them. But transparency can also help marketing teams operate more effectively and produce better results.

Here are five of the most impactful benefits of marketing operations adopting radical transparency:

Motivation and engagement

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It may surprise you that most teams don’t know how the business performs. One study found that 75% of employees truly cared about the business performance but did not have sufficient insights to generate increased motivation and engagement. 

Marketing teams are no exception, primarily because of how often they operate in silos. Breaking down those walls and building a shared understanding of overall performance and trajectory can dramatically boost employee motivation and engagement. Creating deep engagement and aligning the teams is integral for encouraging cross-collaboration.

Cross-collaboration

Marketing is an interdisciplinary function that requires the coordination and collaboration of many different people who each have unique skillsets. Including everyone in the process and sharing information openly is one of the easiest ways to facilitate cross-collaboration. A great example of transparency leading to cross-collaboration is pair programming, a practice common in the software industry.

With pair programming, two programmers with different areas of expertise share one computer and work on a single task together. There is no greater transparency than letting someone see exactly what you’re working on and how you approach it from start to finish.

Having two people do one person’s job may sound counterproductive, but it’s genius. The task gets completed faster and with fewer mistakes, thanks to the oversight of the second person. And the second person learns someone else’s area of expertise while developing a more holistic understanding of what their team is doing.

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Creating radical transparency in this way can open the doors to more opportunities to cross-pollinate skills and provide a holistic perspective for your team. As marketing continues to evolve and grow with more platforms, technologies, and channels, effective collaboration among your team will be a byproduct of greater transparency.

Improved decision making

When everyone can see and participate in decisions, the result is a better decision. Not everyone should have an equal say, or any say at all times. But making decisions clear to the team, explaining the rationale, and listening to feedback are easy ways to raise awareness and the quality of decisions.

For example, marketing teams that embrace experimentation and testing often neglect to include others in the brainstorming process of what to test. Involving other marketers, even if they lack experience with testing, can lead to better ideas and more successful tests. Additionally, leveraging insights from people outside of marketing, namely customer service or sales, can also produce significantly more powerful results.

Transparency is the gateway to better observations, insights, and decisions. Marketing teams who accept this truth and build it into their way of working will make higher quality and more profitable decisions.

Less ‘failure work’

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One of the biggest wastes in marketing is duplication of efforts, rework, or missing opportunities. These can be classified as failure work — work that didn’t happen as it should have. There’s no excuse for this to happen at all, let alone regularly, and yet it continues to occur in virtually all marketing organizations. 

The cure for failure work is transparency, because as the saying goes, “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” The more we can expose problems and reveal the areas where things didn’t go as they should, the more successful we can install processes to address them.

Many costly and unproductive things are happening in the dark corners of your marketing operations. Before you can fix them, you first have to find them.

More efficient spend

How much budget do you think most marketing teams waste on any given day? Without proper checks and balances—and visibility—I can guarantee you it’s a lot. 

Creating an “open startup” dashboard is a smart move if you’re serious about improving spending and increasing performance. Companies like the email marketing platform ConvertKit have a public dashboard where you can view all of their key metrics, including their number of active customers.

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This holds the team accountable and allows anyone within the organization or externally to view their real-time performance. How much closer do you think your team would pay attention to every dollar spent if their metrics were on public display for all to see? Now everyone can identify areas of waste or opportunities for improvement, and those conversations can now happen in an open environment.

This type of radical transparency can fuel the focus and accountability required for sustainable growth.

The clear path to growth

Too many marketing teams are operating as the epitome of “the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing,” and continuing in this way is unacceptable. More importantly, too much of our marketing operations happen in the dark corners where time, budget, and effort are being wasted in various ways.

Radical transparency is a requirement for marketing operations to become more effective and reduce waste. But transparency in marketing goes beyond finding and resolving problems; it’s a requisite for reliable and sustainable growth.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About The Author

Why radical transparency is key
Tim Parkin is a consultant, advisor, and coach to marketing executives globally. He specializes in helping marketing teams optimize performance, accelerate growth, and maximize their results.
By applying more than 20 years of experience merging behavioral psychology and technology, Tim has unlocked rapid and dramatic growth for global brands and award-winning agencies alike.


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MARKETING

How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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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.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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