Buyers have more influence over the purchase process than ever before, which means marketing organizations need better tools and workflow processes just to keep skin in the game.
To effectively foster a buyer journey that resonates with current customer behaviors, organizations must embrace internal change.
Marketing companies need to optimize workflows to align with new technologies and remain competitive in a customer-centric playing field, no exceptions.
Easy access to data is what empowers professionals to quickly and effectively execute marketing content relevant to the customer.
A Clear Glimpse into the Future of Marketing Organizations
To get a head start, marketing organizations need to purchase tools and train everyone on the same workflow process to improve ease of execution and consistency in marketing on all platforms.
“Creating cross-departmental standards, effective motivators, and training to use the technology and understand the tactics, strategies, and techniques is increasingly important,” according to Rebecca Lieb.
Marketing technology facilitates the creation, collaboration, approval, distribution, and analysis around content, maintaining consistency and communication across the organization.
As the pace and diversity of technology speeds along, marketing organizations need to focus on specific ways to maximize their investment in processes and workflows to ensure they are a helpful tool rather than a drain.
So the million dollar question is...are you ready to invest in technology that will improve your internal workflow, streamline communication between employees, and help you market more effectively?
Here are 3 reasons why marketing organizations need technology.
1. Visibility
To harness that very small window of a customer’s attention span, it’s critical for teams and employees company-wide to have access to the same technology.
Organization-wide visibility means each team member can collaborate through a clear, shared workflow process. Visibility through technology allows marketing organizations to eliminate redundancies and create a truly cohesive buyer journey, standing out from the competition.
2. Real-Time Collaboration and Agility
Static documents suck the life out of productive workflows. When static documents are stuck in email or are spread out in a series of Google documents, the result is that everyone’s hard work eventually transforms into multiple versions of conflicting view points that are not shared across all documents. This not only trashes team efficiency, but seriously impacts the launch and effectiveness of campaigns or your ability to create a cohesive buyer’s journey that leads to sales.
Future marketing organizations will need to adopt more agile processes that hinge on real-time editing and collaboration in the cloud. No more save and store—documents and knowledge from key team members need to be front, center, and active throughout the collaboration process. Workflows will need to shift based on how customers are responding to a certain campaign, product, or service being featured in real-time, which makes an agile system the key to success.
“The biggest challenge is organizational structure…How does an organization of any real size structure themselves to be able to execute at scale?” -Scott Brinker
3. Holistic Ideation
To keep ideas fresh and relevant to customers, there needs to be a simple way for employees to contribute in a shared space. Future marketers (more on the future marketer here) will depend on a single platform to connect information requests and customer needs to pull together insights from IT, sales, product development, customer support, and more, and align those messages and content around key customer needs and feedback.
With marketing technology so central to how people work within a marketing organization, it’s no longer a nice-to-have. Investing in tools that allow people to do their best work efficiently is well-worth the cost, and paves the way for the emerging role of a Chief Marketing Technologist who can help you select and manage the right technology to truly pull together a balanced, customer-centric marketing experience.