In an ever changing world, marketing changes too. But marketers need the right tools. So it’s time that marketingtools change too, says Jive Software in their whitepaper ‘Marketing Transformed’. Most marketers still depend on the same tools and methods they used 20 years ago: email, meetings, phone calls and desktop apps, leading to a lot of disconnects, inefficiency and pain. But change is finally at hand. New social business technology has the ability to knit cross functional teams together and empower marketing productivity in ways never possible before.
According to a recent study of over 1700 chief marketing officers, four out of five CMO’s anticipate a high or very high level of marketing complexity over the next five years, but only half feel ready to handle it. Those CMO’s have every reason to be concerned, according to Jive. The sheer size of the task has grown, with a more diverse market landscape to master, more communication channels to leverage, and a lot more data to take account of. The expectations have grown, too. Marketing departments are under greater pressure to develop more agile and precision targeted campaigns, generate more leads and ultimately contribute more to companies’ bottom lines.
Unfortunately, Jives states, marketing methods and tools haven’t kept pace with the demands. When it comes to the human interactions and collaboration at the heart of so many marketing activities like planning and executing campaigns, creating collateral, enabling channel partners and nurturing customer relationships – marketers have been stuck using tools from an earlier age: email, phone, face-to-face meetings, on-site events, content management systems and desktop apps. A few newer collaborative tools have entered the picture, but have tended to be piecemeal and limited-purpose.
All this causes that knowledge-workers need a lot of time to do things they aren’t supposed to do. Just think of all the effort and frustration that goes into fruitlessly searching for information, sorting through email, managing disjointed document revision cycles, struggling to keep all team members on the same page etc. etc Jive states. According to McKinsey Global Institute the average knowledge worker spends 19 percent of the day searching for information and expertise and another 28 percent of the day processing email.
All this makes it hard enough to work together in an internal team, let alone to work with external teams like agencies or sales- and productteams. ‘The problem extends to partner and customer engagement too’, according to Jive. ‘What the new marketer needs is a a seamless, collaborative solution.’
Marketing teams need a level of tight coordination, cross-functional connection and speedy, synchronized interaction that traditional tools and methods don’t provide. There are some key asset development challenges tools must address
- Getting the whole picture
- Easier access to answers and experts
- Agencies and contracters need to be involved
- Involve sales
- Streamline doc collaboration
In a time where budgets are tight , marketers have to find ways to magnify their impact and develop campaigns more effectively with limited resources. They can by:
- Bringing all participants together
- Moving from talk to action
- Unifying doc collaboration
- Fine-tuning and optimizing campaigns
- Creating a collective, searchable archive
So, work together, involve multiple disciplines. Make your assets available for everyone involved, get oversight. Modern marketingdepartments need to be a collective instead of an island, so marketers can be more effective, spend less time on things less important and put out more good things so your marketing goes up0 and is more effective. The right tools can help with this.
This whitepaper is published before on jivesoftware.com/jiveformarketing
