Have you seen The Marketing Operations Playbook?

Learn the insider's tricks and techniques to super-charge your company's marketing operations, build up your market share, make more sales through repeat business and customer loyalty, and prove your marketing's true worth through analysis and reporting.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)

How to build a lean, mean marketing machine

This pressure to keep pace with cutting-edge trends can feel like trying to hit a moving target. It places an incredible amount of pressure on the already stretched resources of the marketing department. Therein lies the problem for marketing professionals. How do they keep a finger on the pulse and drive creativity while simultaneously performing all necessary administrative and operational tasks effectively?

On top of this conundrum, the advent of integrated, omnichannel campaigns have brought another headache for marketers – every system, supplier and touchpoint must be synchronised efficiently to achieve success. Modern marketing is expected to bridge gaps seamlessly and reach customers across a spectrum of platforms, whether they are shopping online, using a desktop or mobile device, or in a physical store. So how can marketing professionals ensure that they continue to deliver on trend and on time?

Strip away the admin
To keep up with constantly evolving trends, a cultural change is required at the heart of the marketing industry. Simplification is the answer. Marketers need to return to being marketers – not administrators, procurement or IT people. Adopting a lean, strategic approach to marketing involves outsourcing dull, administrative procedures.

Outsourcing operations should yield immediate results in shifting the focus of marketers back to creative projects and campaign ideas. It can also help ease the pressure of looming deadlines, which are not conducive to innovation and creativity, and can cause work to be rushed. Delegating local customisations to an agency that operates 24/7 means you can provide a seamless, continuous service across your global markets.

Keep your finger on the marketing pulse
Once a cultural change has been effected, the next stage is to identify the technology that is the best fit for your business. Research from expert marketing technology consultant and analyst David Raab shows that almost 70% of marketers are either unhappy or only marginally happy with their current marketing automation provider. It is therefore essential to make an informed choice when selecting a platform.

A simplified marketing strategy should echo advances in modern society, where technology enables people to perform tasks more easily, with greater efficiency, and with fewer clicks of a button, from almost anywhere in the world.

Admin often relies on incredibly complex internal structures, which make simplicity more difficult to achieve. It is essential to ensure everyone – from suppliers to in-house teams – can work together via a platform that enables approvals, compliance and supplier touchpoints to be managed from a single unified interface. All members of the team should be continuously kept up-to-date with overarching creative marketing campaigns and projects through an easy-to-use platform.

Technology-led marketing services can deliver significant cost savings and meet changing and evolving customer demands. Once complex administration procedures and bureaucracy have been minimised, marketers are free to reinvest the time they save on brand development and management.

"The digital market is constantly changing. As we become an increasingly connected society, trends are shifting more quickly than ever, but this does not mean that marketers should lose track," concluded Ward. "The good news is that once a marketing department has identified the areas of its operations that can be outsourced or streamlined, it is simply a case of reclaiming this additional time and putting it to optimal use."

Have you seen The Marketing Operations Playbook?

Learn the insider's tricks and techniques to super-charge your company's marketing operations, build up your market share, make more sales through repeat business and customer loyalty, and prove your marketing's true worth through analysis and reporting.

The Marketing Operations Playbook walks you step-by-step through the techniques, metrics, reporting, analysis, marketing models, technologies, tools and innovations for successful marketing strategies - both traditional and emerging - with expert guidance from thought leaders in every major market.

Find out the best ways to gather, analyse, and act on customer data to increase profitability, build your brand, empower your customers, beat the competition, reduce churn, and increase customer profitability. This is the marketing book you can't afford to be without.

Find out what works - and what doesn't - and who's succeeded, and how they did it. See how the world's top brands keep their competitive edge against all odds.

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in marketing operations hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

This book aims to hand you all the facts, figures and research data you need for the best decisions for a more profitable, more engaging marketing strategy. It also highlights all the facts, forecasts and trends identified by our experts from the global Marketing Factbook's vast database of market data, news, studies, research and articles, and presents you with an invaluable library of ideas and practical support you can call upon at will.

With The Marketing Operations Playbook at your side, you'll gain to a true goldmine of easily adaptable and up-to-date strategies, walk-throughs, trends, research and market data, plus all the supporting arguments you need to build a solid, profitable marketing strategy: All the know-how, strategies and ideas you need to get your own Marketing Playbook right, first time.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)