The 14 Pillars of an Almighty Marketing Management System
Do you want to manage your marketing department with all its moving parts? Build it on these 14 must-have pillars.
Do you want to manage your marketing department with all its moving parts? Build it on these 14 must-have pillars.
One of the most pressing stress points we have as Heads of Marketing is how to organize, monitor and make work all the moving parts in our marketing departments especially when managing several brands.
Over the past 20+ years I have tested, adopted, created, implemented, abandoned, and revived tens of approaches and methods. In some cases, I had to accept and modify an existing method. In other situations, I was creating it from scratch.
Step-by-step, slowly and with a lot of pushing and pulling, the concept of Almighty Marketing Operating System started to form. I have identified 14 domains where a marketer (marketing manager, head of marketing, CMO) needs to maintain control and forward motion in order to build a working marketing department and still keep his/her mental health and survive physically.
Surprisingly, all those areas of control came with words starting with the letter “P”. Here they are:
Philosophy
Your marketing team needs a philosophy, a manifesto, a codex. You need to have a common goal and approach, a direction and set of values and beliefs. Without a philosophy, your team is just a bunch of people roaming around while waiting to get their salaries at the end of the month.
Positioning
You need to maintain your brand(s). The story, the values, the value proposition and the presentation. Also, when set, you need to maintain brand communication consistent and coherent throughout all channels and touchpoints.
Product
It can be a service, a digital product, a tangible product, this is the thing, the value you are exchanging for money with your clients. First, you need to ensure that you are serving the right product(s) to the right audience. Then you must collect feedback and iteratively improve and expand your product (service) line keeping in mind the product’s lifecycle and the capacity and needs of the market.
Price
Your pricing strategy and offering is crucial for maintaining a short-term cashflow and long-term wealth. hundreds of books have been written on the topic, for a good reason. Do not forget also to test price elasticity with your clients and segments.
Platform
Your communication and selling platform is crucial. In the world of digital business this platform includes your website, email marketing platform, social media profiles, advertising platforms, customer support and community management tools, monitoring and analytics tools and much more. All this should work as a well-oiled mechanism, measurable and optimizable.
Presence
This is the content which you deliver to your audiences through your communication channels (part of the platform) at all the touchpoints with your prospects and clients. The content includes everything from pitch decks to social media, YouTube, blog, email, message, ads and all other forms of content which present your brand, products and offers.
Placement
The channels where you are serving and selling/delivering your service/product form your placement ecosystem. Of course, this depends of the nature of your business. In general, the more you automate and streamline the process through different placement channels, the better for the business.
Promotion
All your campaigns, launches, activities come under this umbrella. You need to organize your efforts of communicating your brand and offers to your target audiences.
People
This is your team, partners, collaborators. You need to find the right people and reach a win-win dynamic together heading to the same direction.
Process
You can definitely identify the main processes in your marketing department. Those processes can be broken down into workflows and procedures/routines. Those routines can be assigned to certain roles in the team and to happen according to a relevant schedule/timeline. When you have all this set up, tested and the team trained, you have an unstoppable marketing machine.
Plan
You know, “failing to plan is planning your failure”. Of course, you should not over-plan or create “The Perfect Plan”. As Mike Tyson reasonably says “Everyone has a plan: until they get punched in the face”. However, you will need at least an overall marketing strategy, brand plan, campaigns plan and content plan. Also, a projects plan will be a good-to-have.
Performance
Nowadays, marketing is about measurability, results and optimization, a.k.a. “performance”. If your marketing efforts do not provide the expected results, you need to optimize and improve. To do that, you need to test, measure and analyze. Simple. Hard.
Progress
You need to see the big picture, the forest, not only the trees. This is possible only if you are able to combine all the performance data you have and analyze the progress over time regarding specific key performance metrics. Based on this you can have reports with different focus and scope and understand the dynamic of the marketing and where is it heading.
Problems
As a head of marketing, you will face problems. Lots of them. Actually, they will be so many and will come from so many different directions, that you need to literally start keeping track of them. This pipeline of problems which you need to handle, I call “Problematorium”.
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If you succeed to cover all these areas in a practical way, voila, you have an almighty marketing operating system.
It should be complex enough to give you a “place for everything and everything in its place”. At the same time, it should be simple and flexible enough so you can train your team to use it and it doesn’t block their usual workflow. In other works, the OS should work without damaging the productivity of the team, aiming to increase it.
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