What Marketers Hate Most About Marketing (and how to fix it)

Marketing implementation is by no means glamorous. It’s an intricate dance between being productive and shifting priorities.

Are you repeating work unnecessarily, navigating foreign toolsets, or battling ineffective processes? If this sounds like you, don’t despair because it turns out that you are not alone.

The new ebook by from marketing resource management provider, Simple, identifies the things that marketers hate about marketing and the tricks they can employ to make work easier.

Let’s take a look at the top five:

  1. Planning purgatory: Few professionals dreamed of a career in marketing because of their deep and abiding passion for process documentation. And yet due to the disparate types of systems they use every day, few of which are fit for purpose, there are huge inefficiencies, all of which get in between the marketer and the job they really want to do. Spreadsheets, emails, and Word documents still predominate in marketing planning, and while they may be centralised, they are often not stored in the cloud, making version control and accessibility difficult.
  2. Poorly designed briefs: Poorly briefed work ties up the resources of your in-house design studio. But when there’s an external creative agency involved, as many as 30 per cent of your agency costs can be attributed to the fallout from a bad briefing. Just as annoying for marketers, having to find, and re-enter commonly re-entered information. Hours are wasted re-entering the same data in different briefs with little consideration or even hope that the information will be reused.
  3. Prioritisation ping pong: It is not uncommon for marketing teams to spend between 40 per and 80 per cent of their time on ad-hoc requests — many of which are never logged, poorly briefed and off-strategy. And as these “invisible” requests are rarely if ever tracked it’s impossible to assess, prioritize and manage them alongside important, strategic work. In turn that makes it harder to ensure the team is working on the most important work, and ultimately to demonstrate the value that marketing is delivering to the business.
  4. The unwritten rulebook: Put simply, if you don’t document your marketing process then you don’t have a marketing process. Many marketers naturally assume there is one logical marketing process for any given task. In truth, there is an infinite number of variations depending on the company, structure, culture, category, regulatory hurdles, territory, discipline, channel, and even your internal politics. All of which means there are a lot of ways things can go wrong.
  5. The approval tango: The ebook says nine in 10 marketers cite approval delays as the main reason they miss deadlines. “Approval tango can also become a game of second-guessing: you know, when your manager approves or rejects work on the basis of what she thinks the CMO will like.”

Read the full article by Andrew Birmingham here.

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