Let’s imagine something, shall we?
Let’s pretend that you’re about to launch your new marketing campaign. You want to bring all the teams together to work toward the same objectives and help achieve the company’s marketing goals.
But how can you do it without knowing what everyone’s tasks and deliverables involve? It’s tricky, isn’t it?
Well, this is when marketing process management comes in handy. If you’re about to set up or improve your marketing process, this post will guide you through all the steps you need to follow from start to finish.
Table of Contents
Defining Marketing Process Management
Before we dive into the stages of marketing process management, it’s useful to explain what we mean with the term.
Typically, when talking about marketing process management, we refer to the series of steps that the marketing teams need to follow to streamline everyone’s work, improve efficiency and achieve success.
But I admit that marketing process management is a broad term. It incorporates people, technology, strategy, and actions that will help you scale your marketing activities.
Different marketing teams can work on different areas in the marketing mix. That’s why a marketing process can help you collate all tactics to measure the success of them towards your objectives.
Why Do You Need to Manage the Marketing Process
A documented marketing process will help you to:
- Be clear on your business goals
- Get everyone on the same page
- Encourage transparency across different departments
- Improve collaboration between different marketing teams
- Understand the marketing mix and its potential gaps
- Streamline your marketing technology and the needs around it
Marketing process management can also help you establish from the very beginning the opportunities and also the challenges your company might be facing.
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Challenges You’ll Face During the process
When you’re about to set up or review your marketing process management, it’s useful to be aware of potential obstacles that you might face. And unfortunately, there are many:
Working in silos: It’s common for teams to work in silos when each team focuses on their own tasks, making it harder to see the bigger picture of the whole campaign.
Too many assumptions: There might be assumptions around your team, the product, or even your customers that can cause a discrepancy between what you’re doing and what you should be focusing on. That’s why you need to start researching your resources and the need of your audience to validate all your future decisions.
Lack of resources: It’s easy to assume that you don’t have the capacity to take on a new marketing project. It might be true but it’s still important to map out the areas that need further support.
Different tools in different teams: Working in silos can also lead to additional expenses when investing in different tools. Smart workflows around content creation or digital asset management can help you to be more efficient and collaborative, while also saving money from using different tools across teams.
It’s good to remember that you don’t necessarily need to have a solution to all the problems right now. But you need to acknowledge them to find the best way the marketing process management can address them.
What Should the Marketing Process Include?
A documented version of your management process can include:
- Your company’s mission,
- SWOT situation analysis indicating your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats,
- Your target audience and what you know about them as personas,
- Your marketing mix, everything it involves and how you will improve it,
- The tactics and the channels you will use in your campaigns,
- The metrics you’ll focus on to track the success of your work.
Having a clear process for managing the marketing campaign can help you get a clear picture of your needs and your potential wins both in the short and long term.
It should be able to help you improve your internal workflows but also your external success.
Finally, it can also involve planning on how different marketing teams can improve their efficiency. Content marketers, product marketers, designers, or brand strategists can all come together not only to improve their daily productivity, but also the company’s overall objectives.
Five Steps to Developing a Solid Marketing Process Management System
Your system is nothing else but a strategic plan that guides you on how to identify and reach your goals within the marketing team.
Here are five steps to get you started with the process.
#1. Define Your Mission Statement
The first step to improving your marketing process is to get all the senior stakeholders to work on the mission statement. You need to know the company’s mission to be able to define your goals.
If you have already set up your mission statement, it’s time to explore how it can define your marketing activity. Think of how your company’s mission will translate into actionable marketing campaigns. Make sure you involve the right people in the conversation to confirm that your actions will match the company’s overall objectives.
#2. Perform a SWOT Analysis
After setting up your mission statement, it’s time to conduct a SWOT analysis for your business.
You want to look at the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) that could affect your marketing planning.
A situation analysis can help you take into consideration all the internal and external factors that will determine the success of your marketing efforts.
As we’ve mentioned in the challenges earlier, make sure you start with no assumptions. Review your current positioning in the market, explore the potential opportunities and the challenges that you might face trying to reach your target audience.
#3. Set up a Marketing Strategy
A strategic plan for your marketing process should document the goals and the objectives, but also the tactics that all marketers need to know. You should also include the available budget so that you know the opportunities and the potential limitations.
Your marketing strategy is not a marketing calendar, but it can still include an overview of the channels and the tactics that you’re planning to use to achieve the set objectives.
The strategy should serve as the document that everyone can refer to when trying to find out more about your marketing teams and your next plans.
It also serves as an easy way to align everyone’s work towards a common goal, making it easier to feel part of the bigger picture.
#4. Organize Your Marketing Mix
Now you’re ready to look at the tactics on how you’re going to achieve your goals.
This is a very crucial stage in the marketing process management especially when it involves many different marketing teams.
Your marketing mix should look at all the elements that will affect your ultimate success:
Product: Are your products or services matching your audience’s needs? Competitor research can help you understand your strengths and weaknesses and how you can improve your positioning in the market.
Tactics: After setting up the strategy, you want to look at the tactics that will help you reach your goals. It’s time to explore how all marketing teams can contribute to the bigger objectives. Let’s bring marketing, brand, product, content, digital, search, comms teams together to align everyone’s tasks for the next campaign.
Channels and distribution: The channels and the general distribution will help you spread your message and increase sales. You need to consider the channels that you’ll use based on your target audience, your product, your objectives and your available resources.
The ideal marketing mix should take into consideration your strengths and weaknesses to help you improve your marketing process. Use your SWOT analysis to improve your marketing mix along with your team’s efficiency on a daily basis.
#5. Implement and Measure Your Tactics
This is the time to execute your marketing process to measure the results.
How can you practically implement your marketing process management then?
- Confirm your available resources
- Finalize your budget
- Get everyone to work towards the same objective
- Set up a marketing calendar to keep track of the deadlines
- Streamline everyone’s work based on your marketing strategy
- Set up the tools that will bring all the teams together
- Review the success of your tactics daily/weekly/monthly
Make sure that everyone knows how you define ‘success’ so that you’re able to track your progress accordingly.
Conclusion
Marketing process management is essential if you want to improve your internal and external workflow.
An early look at your marketing process management allows you to future-proof your tactics through a plan that takes into consideration all the internal and external variables that affect your success.
Agile team collaboration towards common goals combined with the right tools can make your marketing mix even more successful than expected.
Remember, keep your strategic plan simple and reasonable.
Good luck!
