4 Ways To Equip Your Marketing Department To Succeed

It's a challenging time for marketing. In both the business-to-business and business-to-consumer arenas, conventional methods and media channels have shifted. Marketing is in the midst of a revolutionary change that challenges its role within the organisation, and its direct impact on the success of the product or service offered.

Issues driving change include the business climate, globalisation, a shift in control over to the consumer and the need to get back to marketing basics. It falls on management to enable marketing teams to prove return on investment (ROI), integrate with new channels and engage customers in intelligent conversations.

Traditional marketing strategies are changing, with declining print circulation and the influx of news and industry updates online - blogs, websites and e-newsletters. The global financial crisis and the retail downturn have caused organisations to ask more of their marketing departments, often without equivalent budget increase.

Marketing is becoming more important to the success of the whole organisation, so it is vital that management ensure the marketing department is equipped to function in its most productive state. It's a marketing revolution, and there are four key actions that management must take responsibility for, to ensure their marketing is equipped to meet the challenge.

1. Marketing must be accountable
   
   Management are accelerating the changes in marketing with the need to see accountability, transparency and proof of customer acquisition and retention. As marketing organisations worldwide are forced to do more with less, they must become more nimble and able to respond quickly in today's digital marketing environment.
   
   ROI needs to be a priority in budget and results conversations, content must be compelling and the customer must be heard. To enable this, management must support marketing teams to modernise operations, simplify go-to-market processes and integrate messages and channels with intelligent, engaging conversations with customers.
   
2. The Chief Marketing Officer must be the change agent
   
   Innovation and thought leadership are vital for the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), both within the organisation and across the public sphere. The CMO must be able to chart a course for where marketing needs to go, help the department navigate change and compellingly storyboard from vision through to the results.
   
   It is increasingly important for management to see ROI, organisational alignment and deal with budgetary pressures. Ensure that the CMO acts as the change agent for the organisation and leads the marketing team through the fear of change. CMOs must redefine and restore the function of marketing to drive business results and measurable ROI.
   
3. Tear down internal silos
   
   Take a look around the marketing department. Odds are, it's divided into single-purpose, task-specific segments. Now widen your lens a little more, and look at the structure of the company as a whole. Once again, you'll probably find function-based groups working in relative isolation.
   
   Departments working in isolation within your organisation may be traditional, but this is no longer optimal for content creation, sales lead management and other marketing activities. Instead, management must encourage marketers to embrace a dynamic environment and drive revenue growth by improving cross-functional interaction across departments.
   
4. Prove ROI
   
   Marketing is more fragmented and complex than ever before. There are now over 30 channels, both traditional such as print (newspapers, magazines), broadcast (television, radio), point of sale and outdoor and digital tactics (email, mobile and social networks). This makes it difficult, yet imperative, to monitor ROI.
   
   While marketers are embracing and adapting to this explosion of new digital and social media channels, proving ROI in the evolving marketing landscape remains a nagging headache.
   
   Empower marketing departments to measure and analyse campaigns by embracing technology. Even though marketers are typically early adopters, most have been surprisingly slow to embrace technology that adds visibility and automates the measurement process. Put in place processes of data analysis so you can track marketing spend across all channels.

At stake in the marketing revolution is the opportunity to restore marketing to the art of driving business results based on the science of understanding and adding value to customers. This art-form must incorporate technologies of data measurement and integration in order to engage customers while being accountable, transparent and proving ROI.

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