introduction
At 8:57 a.m., as the marketing manager gets ready for their third refresh of the campaign dashboard, they will see that one of the ad text changes made since yesterday has resulted in more than doubling the click-through rate. They go ahead and initiate discussions with their team on how to scale it out by 9:15 a.m. This is the pace of modern marketing — rapid-fire, analytics-based, and in constant motion.
Marketing has evolved beyond just having the occasional brainstorm to create unique and innovative marketing ideas or promotions of products. Today, marketing is a day-to-day operation that fuels (empowers) the visibility of brands, builds connections (engagement) with consumers, and maintains ongoing growth of revenue. In addition, marketers function at the intersection of strategy and execution through the analysis of key performance indicators (KPIs) and coordinating advertising and marketing campaigns through various media outlets.
This article will illustrate for you what a day in the life of a marketing manager looks like by discussing the three pillars of responsibility and accountability within marketing today: data-driven decision-making; cross-functional co-ordination; and continuous process improvement. These three things are what define how successful marketers perform their daily work and why their daily performances are essential to the overall success of the business.
Marketing Work Done on a Day-to-Day Basis
Utilize Data to Make Decisions and Formulate a Strategy
All of the data marketers use to make their decisions in modern marketing comes from analyzing data each day, with no assumptions, guesses or guidance from the past. Marketers use data to determine which parts of their marketing efforts are successful and unsuccessful, as well as what opportunities exist.
What Does This Look Like?
A typical morning for many marketers could include reviewing the following:
Website Traffic Stats and Conversion Rates from Digital Advertising
Email Stats Including Open Rates and Engagement
Stats on the Effectiveness of Paid Advertising, Including Click-Through Rate
Social Media Stats, Including Impressions and Quality of Your Audience
As an example, a digital marketer who works in e-commerce might analyze their data and identify that mobile users are abandoning their shopping carts at a higher rate than desktops. The digital marketer then needs to research this problem, and in many instances, the problem for shopping cart abandonment on a mobile device could be attributed to a slow-loading checkout page on mobile devices in comparison to the desktop. Therefore, the digital marketer could fix this issue and save thousands of dollars of lost revenue.
In addition, various studies show that organizations who incorporate data into their marketing efforts have a much higher probability of achieving a higher return on investment than those marketers who primarily rely on their intuition when making marketing decisions. As a result, marketers who use data are more accurate in their targeting, allowing them to invest their money on the areas with the largest potential for future success.
How Does This Differ From Traditional Marketing?
Traditionally, marketers created and executed broad marketing campaigns aimed at large groups. While some marketers utilized their creativity to augment their marketing efforts, they typically received relatively little measurable feedback on those campaigns. The way that today’s marketers conduct their businesses is quite different than the way traditional marketers conduct their businesses.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Marketing Is a Group Effort
In the past, marketing worked in a siloed fashion, but that no longer happens. Marketing departments engage in routine cross-functional collaboration with sales, product development, design and, often, customer support.
Real Examples of Collaboration
Take a look at the process of launching a product:
Marketing and Product Team Work Together to Determine Which Features to Market
Marketing Works with Sales to Match Messaging to Customer Objections Heard In Field
Marketing and Design Work Together To Create Visual Representation Of Brand Identity
Marketing Works With Customer Support to Discover Recurring Customer Pain Points That Can Be Addressed In Marketing Campaigns
Can you imagine launching a software tool without consulting with customer support? You would be promoting complex features when your customers are interested in simple ones. As a result of collaborating on an ongoing basis, marketing and customer support avoid this situation.
There are now daily standup meetings, shared dashboards and communication technologies that allow all parties to coordinate quickly. Consequently, every customer touchpoint has consistent messaging.
What Makes Today’s Marketing Different?
Historically, marketing has always been the last step in a product lifecycle. Today, how products are marketed is embedded throughout the entire lifecycle of the business.
The most significant differences are:
Marketers inform product design through customer insights
Feedback loops shorten the time in which brands evaluate decisions
The voice of the brand is consistent across departments
Instead of being promotors, marketers are now strategic partners.
Ongoing Optimization: The Never-Ending Cycle of Improvement
One of the most misunderstood aspects of marketing is the idea that a campaign is finished once it launches. Actually, launch day really marks the start of a never-ending cycle of:
– Daily work on marketing campaigns including testing, finding and refining.
The Optimization Process
Marketers routinely use controlled experiments to assess things like:
– A/B testing of email campaign subject lines.
– Using different creative for ads.
– Changes in landing page format.
– By narrowing down the audience that an ad will reach.
A simple example would be changing a single headline from “Get Started with Your Free Trial” to “See Results Within 7 Days.” You would potentially see a dramatic increase in conversions based on that one small change. Over time, these incremental improvements will add up to turn average campaigns into top performing campaigns.
Research has consistently shown that when optimization is performed on current campaigns, a minor improvement can generate millions of dollars in additional revenue. The key to successful optimization is consistency. Digital marketers do not simply perform optimization on individual campaigns and stop — they continue optimizing forever.
Stretching Beyond the “Set It and Forget It” Approach
Previous to the digital world we live in today, marketers used to run their campaigns similarly to billboards and would leave them up for the duration of the campaign without any major modifications. However, the world has changed.
Today, marketers:
– Monitor their digital campaigns on a daily basis.
– Respond to market changes almost immediately.
– Adjust their messaging based on how their audience is responding.
Optimization is much more than just a strategy, it is an underlying principle that drives the overall culture of professional marketing today.
Daily marketing success depends largely on human ability in addition to having the right tools and using analytics. Marketers who achieve high levels of success usually possess a combination of both technical and interpersonal skills.
Strategic Thinking—Marketers with strong strategy skills look past specific campaigns to see how they contribute to positioning the brand over the long term.
Time Management—Today’s marketers are typically managing several different campaigns simultaneously, so setting priorities is critical.
Adaptability—Algorithms can change, consumer preferences can change, competitors can find new and different ways to innovate. Therefore, marketers need the ability to be flexible.
Communication—Providing clear messaging within the organization helps to create consistency in messaging across all of the campaigns that the marketer is supporting.
These competencies take everyday work activities and make them into a success.
Challenges Marketers Face Each Day
Marketing is rewarding; however, it is seldom easy.
Some examples of challenges that you might face include:
- Information overload with too many sources of data
- Pressure to produce measurable ROI
- Rapidly evolving technology
- Increasing consumer expectations for personalized products and services
All of these obstacles also provide opportunities. Those organizations that utilize modern marketing processes generally do better than those that resist change.
calculation
The daily marketing landscape is much more fluid than many realize. In fact, the successful execution of any marketing campaign is a function of multiple components such as data-driven decision-making, cross-functional collaboration as well as an ongoing process of optimization all coming together to allow marketers to respond quickly to customer needs while driving sustainable growth.
In the future, a disciplined approach to marketing on a daily basis will become even more important. Automated processes will grow in number and analytics will become more advanced, therefore marketers who have the ability to marry technology and strategic insights will be able to lead their respective industries.
To this end, we recommend the following to our marketers and their organizations:
Invest in powerful analytic tools that deliver actionable insights.
Encourage collaboration amongst departments.
Consider every marketing effort or campaign an opportunity to learn and improve.
Develop processes that support agility rather than rigidity.
Marketing is not a one-time endeavor, but rather a commitment that you make to continually understand your audience and provide value to them on a daily basis.
The call to action
your marketing processes now, they are they reactive vs intentional? Are they fragmented or collaborative? Do they experiment, or are they stagnant? By taking the time to strengthen your daily marketing processes today, you can position your organization for long-term success.