As we head into the next business cycle, uncertainty about what’s over the horizon is pushing businesses to tighten their belts. While marketing is vital to any company or client’s success, it is often viewed as one of the most flexible. When budgets need to be trimmed, companies often start with marketing.
While this may not necessarily happen in your organization in the coming months, CMOs and marketing leaders around the world are wise to take proactive steps to ensure their operations are running as tightly as possible. They’re building up business resilience frameworks that will help them weather market turbulence as it arises.
Building business resilience involves eliminating wasted time and resources costing businesses in the knowledge industry over $60M each year due to productivity challenges, canceled projects, and employee churn. As marketing teams are juggling employees spread across time zones with a host of competing tools, they’re particularly vulnerable in turbulent economies.
To build business resilience for a marketing team, marketers should be doing a few critical things. They should eliminate existing inefficiencies, allocate resources effectively, and maximize their team’s productivity. When CMOs can strengthen those areas, they will be able to better prove their team’s contribution to the organization’s key goals.
We recently published a groundbreaking study on the Dark Matter of Work, which is the work that takes place in synchronous apps and the gaps between systems and solutions that aren't integrated. The study outlined how workplace complexity is eating into companies' profits and harming employee engagement. In marketing departments, that might look like teams struggling with bottlenecks for reviews and approvals, total communication overload, and siloed marketing tools that make collaborating across teams and time zones impossible.
Our research shows that those everyday frustrations waste time, money, and your team’s energy — a single worker’s wasted time might cost a company as much as $16K every year.
Eliminating even a fraction of the Dark Matter of Work your team faces will help you recoup that wasted profit by driving marketing ROI, optimizing resources, and improving productivity.
As experts in working effectively, we know that robust work management software helps marketing teams recapture the energy and resources currently being lost. Work management software pulls entire organizations into a single platform, strips out wasted time spent switching apps, and provides visibility into projects so that tasks don’t slip between the cracks.
To help you build better business resilience, we’ve rounded up 11 Wrike features, templates, and integrations that will help you power through uncertainty.
Key features for building business resilience in marketing
Automated approvals:Approvals can steal precious time from marketers. Wrike’s streamlined and automated workflows mean reviews and approvals occur seamlessly and result in clear, actionable decisions — so your team can improve productivity and focus on more impactful work.
Critical insights: To fully understand your team’s productivity, you’ll need data. Wrike Insights is a first-of-its-kind performance aggregator that delivers insights on 50 tools, delivering real-time data across advertising, marketing, and social media via one simple interface.
Workflow versatility: Wrike’s industry-leading Custom Item Types enable users to mirror their team’s business practices and daily task scenarios in their Wrike workspace. That means you can use your team’s preferred terminologies and behaviors, reducing wasted time further.
Built-in integrations for creative teams
Creative connections: Wrike integrates seamlessly with Adobe Creative Cloud. Teams can manage their assets from programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Adobe Premiere Pro.
Digital asset management:Wrike’s MediaValet integration enables users to share and manage digital assets across both platforms. Teams can attach MediaValet files to tasks, search for assets, and upload assets from Wrike back into MediaValet.
Resource management features for marketing agencies and departments
Optimize workloads:Assigning and managing workloads has never been easier. Get an understanding of team members’ availability, capacity, and strengths at a glance, and drag and drop tasks to balance workloads more efficiently.
Clear budgeting: Weathering upcoming uncertainty is going to put pressure on budgets, so Wrike’s budgeting tools will be critical in helping you accurately determine project budgets and margins. As team members track time spent on projects, you can monitor budget spend in real time to keep projects profitable.
Pre-built templates
At Wrike, we know that one of the biggest barriers to launching projects is getting processes in place. That’s why we’ve set up a wide range of templates to help jump-start your processes, streamline your workflows, and get your team working faster. You can try any of these templates with a free Wrike trial.
Agile marketing template: If your team struggles with managing a constant stream of requests, using the Agile methodology for your marketing operation will create an effective structure to tackle that overload. Our Agile marketing template will help you get started, providing an effective way to maximize sprints and get more accomplished.
Marketing operations management template: Having a handle on your entire marketing operation can be difficult. Wrike’s marketing operations management template sets you up for success, helping you manage every detail of your marketing operations with custom request forms, dashboards, and reports.
Marketing calendar template: Keeping campaign tasks from falling through the cracks is critical to maximizing your marketing resources. Wrike’s marketing calendar template will ensure your entire team is on the same page so that deadlines are met and clients are satisfied.
Helpful tools on Wrike’s ROI
As you work to bolster resources and do more with less, learn more about the real ROI of Wrike.
With this cache of resources, you’ll be ready to jump-start your business resilience framework and protect your organization from market uncertainty.
Start your Wrike free trial or request a free demo to see how Wrike can help you streamline, strengthen, and thrive.
Emily Westbrooks
Emily Westbrooks is a Content Marketing Manager at Wrike. She brings over a decade of experience as a freelance journalist, editor, blogger, and author to the Wrike blog, where she writes about the latest trends in work management, what’s on the horizon for the future of work, and how work and life intersect in meaningful ways.
Emily joined Wrike in 2020 at our Dublin office, and relocated to Houston, Texas, in 2022 with her husband and kids, Maya, Noah, Angelina, and Laylabelle. After spending over a decade in rainy Ireland, she enjoys being outside in the sunshine with her family as much as possible — hiking, running, walking, and swimming.
15 Suggestions to Improve Your Marketing Operations from Leaders
Learning about, and focusing on, improving marketing operations is becoming more critical for digital marketing teams trying to get ahead. Understanding your customers, implementing customer data properly, and measuring campaign performance are all key steps in building out your marketing ops.
.In addition, marketing ops focuses on (1) managing the technologies that the marketing team purchases, and (2) measuring marketing effectiveness across the board. It’s not just your marketing techniques, but rather, it’s what goes on behind the scenes to make sure your campaigns reach their goals.
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No one knows successful marketing operations better than the experienced marketers and business owners of today. Here are their secrets for improving your marketing ops:
1. Establish a cross-department workflow
“The most important piece of improving your marketing operations is establishing a project workflow between marketing and the rest of the organization. The internal workings of individual teams can be heavily influenced by how other departments request projects and/or expect projects to be done. Once your workflow is established, using a tool to help task assignments, set deadlines, and follow up is critical.”
—Daniel Bliley, Marketing Director, Passport
2. Work with your audience in mind
“One issue with marketing, especially in digital, is the noise. There are so many companies saying the exact same thing, and companies don’t really do the proper research to figure out who they are, what their message is, who needs to hear that message, and how to get that message out.
Start from the top down. Take the time to explore your analytics and the data, interview your customers, pay attention to social media conversations & get involved, then create content that aligns your goals with your audience’s goals, speak to your audience in a unique way, and constantly review & tweak.”
—Patrick Delehanty, Digital Marketing Strategist, Marcel Digital
3. Know your customers
“The vast majority of the time, people make bad marketing decisions because they don’t have the right information about their target audience. To remedy that, I’ve worked hard to tie our CRM to our email marketing to our signups to our web traffic, so when we’re reaching out to someone, we have a complete understanding of them.”
—D. Keith Casey, Jr., Director of Product, Clarify.io
4. Align all consumer insights
"I think in an ideal state there is a dedicated consumer insights team, but a team that doesn’t work in its own little silo. A team that is interactive not only with the marketing team but also the product team, as well as with others who touch the customer technology. They have to understand the full circle of customers’ curiosities so they can put together a real, robust view for those who need it."
— Patrick Adams, CMO, PayPal
5. Establish your key marketing metrics
“Establish 2 to 4 key metrics that will guide all your marketing efforts. Without establishing these benchmarks, your marketing team won’t have anything to shoot for individually or collectively. Unfortunately, many marketing departments don’t get creative with the metrics that serve as benchmarks for performance; their main metrics usually revolve around leads generated, sales, etc. However, there are usually more telling metrics for measuring your marketing effectiveness. For example, percentage of leads (free trials) vs. unique Website visitors; percentage of leads vs. conversions (paid customers); monthly recurring revenue.”
—Jeff Kear, Owner, Planning Pod
6. Prioritize content development
"We have a dedicated team that’s focused on content strategy and on creating what I call the content supply chain, mapping out where all the sources of content come from. Do we have the content already? How do we create new content? Who creates the content? It may be internal, it may be external. What format does that content take? Then, how do we work with the appropriate teams to get that content in the market?
— Rishi Dave, CMO, Dun & Bradstreet
7. Stay on brand
"Ultimately [integrated planning] is a function that’s run through the marketing team. We establish the brand voice and try to create and implement consistency across all of our efforts, all of our communications channels, and all of our internal divisions/business units."
— Evan Greene, CMO, The Recording Academy (The GRAMMYs)
8. Focus on the ROI of your campaigns
“Focus on ROI and user retention. By measuring the return of each campaign, we’re able to identify which ones are actually working and prioritize those. Our ROI has grown from 35% to 200%. Now, we have more money to invest in other projects to continue growing.”
—Gabriel Stürmer, Chief Marketing Officer, Cupcake Sweet Entertainment
9. Implement Lean methodology to discover which campaigns work
“Implement the Lean methodology (build, measure, learn). In essence, during planning sessions, we develop a list of hypotheses & prioritize based on expected impact. We then devise bare-bones methods to test these hypotheses. In this way, we get data-driven feedback quickly, allowing us to invest more heavily in winners and cut losers.”
—Ryan O’Donnell, Director of Marketing, Avalara TrustFile
10. Use a Scrum board to focus weekly priorities
“Enhance your weekly task delegation through the implementation of a Scrum board. Scrum is an Agile framework for handling tasks, originally developed for software development teams to easily delegate tasks. There is nothing worse than being inefficient when it comes to marketing, so a Scrum board helps us develop a weekly plan of attack, and lets everyone know what they should be working on.”
—Jake Lane, Growth Analyst, LawnStarter, Inc.
11. Keep experimenting with new marketing techniques
“Great marketing is about experimentation, testing, and measuring different approaches to find what works best. An issue many marketing departments face is that everyone has their discrete responsibilities, so it’s left to the marketing director or VP to initiate new programs. However, this should be everyone’s responsibility. Your team should meet regularly to brainstorm and come up with one new idea to apply and measure. It can be big or small, as long as you try something new — otherwise, you may never find that one golden opportunity that makes your revenue curve bend upward.”
—Jeff Kear, Owner, Planning Pod
12. Build a long-term marketing plan
“Set in stone a comprehensive 12-month marketing strategy and goals for the next five years. Developing a strategy with clear action items and setting both short-term and long-term goals pushes you to assign team members and actually implement the tasks.”
—Beth Gard, lotus823
13. Hire a strategic analyst
“The first hire in the marketing operations role should be a strategic analyst. This role is focused on developing ROI measurements for marketing. Once the tracking is in place, then everything else within marketing should be aligned.”
—David T. Scott, CMO, Scott on Marketing
14. Continue to manage customer data
"We’re building a centralized marketing profile that is at the customer level and becomes the common definition used by marketing teams across the organization to drive their campaigns. Getting the data house in order, making it real-time, and managing it at the attribute level is what’s important. As is making sure that the experts who are really close to the products have the ability to control what’s most important to them in that profile. This allows us to federate it out and take a much more efficient view across the organization, rather than be a big centralized behemoth that is too slow and ultimately doesn’t work."
— Steve Ireland, SVP/MD, JPMorgan Chase
15. Remain accountable
"In order to be effective, marketers need to have credibility. Because they have to do a lot of leading by influence, they have to do a lot of aligning and engaging and evangelizing, and that only works when people trust you. They only trust you if you deliver the goods and are accountable; you do what you say and you say what you mean.
— Peter Horst, CMO, The Hershey Company
More marketing resources
Marketing operations is a relatively new field, and there’s always more to learn. Here's a list of some of our resources for marketing leaders and teams (including our eBook, The Digital Marketer’s Guide: How To Drive Success at the Tactical Level) to help bring your next campaign to success.
eBook: 7 Habits of High-Performance Marketing Teams
Infographic: How to Choose Marketing Software
eBook: The CMO’s Formula To 3x Your Digital Marketing Campaign Results
Blog: The “We” in “Teamwork": How Marketers Can Drive Cross-Team Collaboration
eBook: How to Avoid the Eight Pitfalls of Marketing Campaign Planning
eBook: 5 Steps to Transforming Marketing Operations for Maximum Growth
Marketing
5 min read
Marketing Operations: A Primer on the Fastest Growing Role in Business
For businesses looking to stretch their marketing dollars, marketing operations is a hot topic. In order to keep up with the current speed of business, organizations need to leverage technology and gain insight into customer needs and business performance.
And while marketing operations has quickly become the fastest-growing role in business, there are still plenty of questions surrounding this relatively new field: What is marketing operations, and why bother with it? How does it fit into the broader marketing discipline? Is there a conflict between operations management vs marketing? And what strategies can businesses use to improve their marketing campaign results?
What is Marketing Operations?
First things first: what is the role of marketing operations? A typical marketing operations director or coordinator has many responsibilities, including measuring and evaluating marketing performance, strategic planning, budgeting, developing and improving the overall marketing process, selecting and implementing marketing technologies, and providing professional development for the marketing team. So the operations and marketing relationship is really that of a partnership. Marketing ops focuses on behind-the-scenes activity to ensure processes are running smoothly and campaigns reach their goals.
Digital marketing operations may be a relatively new field, but its beginnings can be traced back to the 1920s. This infographic shows its evolution, and growing importance to various marketing disciplines:
Popular Marketing Operations Tools
As with any branch of the marketing world, there are a zillion options when it comes to marketing operations software. In fact, in his annual Marketing Technology Landscape super graphic, Scott Brinker of chiefmartec.com identified a whopping 3,874 marketing technology solutions.
If you want to zoom in for a better look at the landscape, you can view a hi-res version here: 2016 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (PDF)
To save you some time looking through thousands of tools, we've rounded up some of the most popular software used by today's marketing operations managers:
Kissmetrics: Build customer funnels and sort website visitors into groups based on common actions and triggers so you can understand how potential customers are engaging with your site.
Unbounce: Use A/B testing to discover which features, website elements, or marketing messages are most successful when it comes to eliciting a desired response from potential customers.
Hubspot: Analyze and improve landing pages and forms to collect the right information from potential customers and automatically plug them into the appropriate nurture tracks.
Clicktale: Heat maps track website visitors’ mouse movements, clicks, and scrolling to determine which parts of your site they’re paying the most attention to — and what’s being overlooked.
SEM Rush: See top organic keywords, keyword rank, and search volume for keywords that are driving organic traffic to your competitors’ websites, and discover opportunities for gaining ground.
Wrike: Give your teams a collaboration and work management tool for organizing incoming requests, delegating tasks, and tracking project progress and results.
Get 10 more must-have marketing operations tools, plus details on the metrics you should track, here: Marketing Ops Tech & Tools for a Customer-Centric Organization
Marketing Operations Strategies
Most bad marketing decisions come down to one simple mistake: not having the right information about your target audience. This is where marketing operations strategies become an essential ingredient to marketing (and business) success.
A common myth about marketing operations is that it’s all about crunching numbers and automating processes. In fact, a good marketing operations analyst has the skills to interpret a mess of numbers and fill in those knowledge gaps. They use their data-driven insights to help the marketing team improve customer experience and boost engagement.
Marketing operations also focuses on improving processes and cross-team collaboration. By coordinating the various arms of the marketing organizational structure and product management roles, marketing operations management can connect the dots between strategy and execution. They can ensure that inbound and outbound campaign messaging is aligned, content managers are on the same page as the Lead Gen team, and all efforts line up with the CMO’s priorities and business objectives.
Ultimately, marketing operations works to combine processes, metrics, and technology to support the entire marketing organization.
For more marketing ops strategies, both the CEO and the Chief Strategy Officer of Marketing Operations Partners give their best tips here: 7 Secrets of the Best Marketing Operations Teams
The Future of Marketing Operations
In an effort to make their marketing efforts more efficient and effective, more and more companies are turning to marketing operations. And in turn, marketing operations teams are focusing on a central goal: value creation — for customers, employees, and business owners alike. This focus will continue to make marketing operations a global discipline used by successful organizations worldwide.
The Road to Successful Marketing Operations By Diederik Martens from MarTech Conference
Ready to Get Started with Marketing Operations?
If you think your company needs a full-fledged marketing operations department in order to have effective marketing operations, think again. You can improve your marketing operations today, with resources you likely already have.
Radius provides advice on identifying someone within your current marketing team that would be a good fit for taking on some marketing operations responsibilities, Emmsphere explains how you can improve your current marketing operations processes without spending a dime, and industry leaders offer 10 suggestions for marketing operations success.
Marketing
10 min read
The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Campaign Management
Campaign management requires diligent planning, timely execution, and a ton of knowledge and insight into the audience you're reaching out to. Let's dive into the world of campaign management and learn what it takes to bring your marketing campaigns to the next level.
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