With recent shifts in what business-to-business marketing tactics work, marketing departments have had to acquire new knowledge and new skill sets. This doesn’t mean that one marketing person has to have them all, but the person leading the team needs to understand and know the importance of each.
A great article in Ad Age, Four Talent Categories You Need to Win in a Connected World, prompted this blog post. In the article, author Chris Kuenne states that strategy, analysis, creative program design and technology are the skills that make marketing successful today.
Most marketing departments have the creative program design and use some technology – perhaps in the form of a website and some social media. If their organization is doing business the right way, they have a strategic marketing plan. But many lack the analysis and high-level understanding of technology to make the best marketing decisions possible. They don’t know what visitors do on their websites, they don’t know their website traffic patterns. They hear about search engine optimization creating results, but they don’t understand how or why.
Without understanding technology or how to analyze technology results, marketers are vulnerable. They are vulnerable to vendors who tell a good story about what works in SEO, social media or their websites, when the tactics they are selling are outdated or – worse – “discouraged” by Google and other search engines. They are also vulnerable to competitors who are one step ahead because they get the strategy-analysis-creative-technology mix and are executing it well.
As Ad Age‘s Chris Kuenne points out, even if a marketing department has talent in strategy, analysis, creative design and technology, the CMO or department lead may have challenges getting this multi-disciplinary team to work together because of a lack of understanding and/or a lack of process for how to get the parts to work as a whole.
Do you have the right skill set in your marketing department? Is everyone working together to achieve strategic goals? At New Incite, we understand how to bring the right skills together to get the right results. Contact us today for information on how we can drive marketing results for your business.
