As marketing professionals, we obsess over metrics surrounding overall site traffic, new versus return visitors, bounce rate, impression shares, our marketing funnel through rate, and the list goes on. Yet, we don’t seem to equally obsess over the tech stack that drives this and how well it enables our team for success. Most marketing teams put the basics in place, then immediately move on to driving campaigns and brand building activations.
What we forget is that a highly-productive, rock-star marketing team isn’t possible without the right foundation - one that enables digital dexterity, agility, resilience and growth. This is one of the most profound ways some marketing teams stand out from the rest.
Are You Optimized to Deliver Results?
The recent events we’ve all had to navigate has put a spotlight on what needs to change to improve resiliency as a marketing team. The challenge that most of us faced in early 2020 was that everything around us was changing, personally and professionally, yet we still needed to deliver results for the business. The problem was that we weren’t optimized to do so. Most teams and individuals couldn’t be digitally dexterous because their systems simply wouldn’t allow for it. While the events over the past six months were unprecedented and unpredicted, they have forever altered the way we work, and have pushed us full-force into the digital age.
Digital Agility and Resiliency
Now, think about how your team adjusted to the new normal… and how you anticipate they’ll handle what comes next, and even after that. In today’s highly fluid environment, organizations and teams need to frequently adjust, requiring digital agility and resiliency.
Digital agility and digital resiliency represent two fundamental components that can help a marketing team thrive during organizational shifts in strategy, structure, operations and more. Both attributes represent two sides of the same coin, that equate to a team’s “adaptive capacity.” A team’s adaptive capacity relates to how much energy and strength the team needs to effectively address challenging, changing and adverse situations. The more capacity they have, the better they’ll be able to react to adapting environments.
It’s Time to Get Obsessive
To truly thrive in the current climate and what’s to come, it’s time to get obsessive - to ruthlessly prioritize, connect and consolidate the technologies that allow you to improve operations and build a digitally resilient team. To thrive as a marketing team, you need to prioritize technologies that help you:
- Stay Productive
- Stay Connected
- Stay Agile
Stay Productive
A common question for marketing teams - or any team for that matter - is how to get more done with the same, or in some cases less, resources. The answer in almost all cases comes down to implementing technology that enables three core competencies: autonomy, automation and recycling.
Autonomy: Promote and enable self-service.
To the maximum extent possible, you want to move away from people or teams needing to rely on others to access the materials they need to complete their work. In the case of distributed teams, autonomy allows people to work on their own schedule without having to wait for request responses - a common bottleneck within team workflows.
Automation: Eliminate repetitive & administrative tasks.
Automation is all about using software to streamline some of your team’s marketing activities - specifically, repetitive and administrative tasks. Many internal tasks can likely be replicated using automation in the solutions you already use today.
Recycling: Equip teams to maximize asset re-use.
The purpose of recycling is to increase the use of digital assets across various departments, as well as re-use finished content in successive campaigns or projects. Enabling recycling helps to extend the lifecycle of marketing material and achieve additional ROI from creative work that’s already been done,
Stay Connected
The reality here is that remote work is here to stay. Gartner recently surveyed 299 human resources (HR) leaders and determined that 41% of all employees are expected to continue to work remotely at least part-time, post-pandemic. Solving collaboration challenges that come with remote work is something that needs to be addressed by organizations immediately.
Getting work done is no longer as easy as tapping your desk neighbour's shoulder. It’s now much more complicated and visibility is the factor that’s taking the biggest hit. More often than not, the reduction in visibility leads to drastically uneven workload distribution and massive bottlenecks. Not only is this a source of frustration, it’s also incredibly unsustainable and unscalable.
When the MediaValet marketing team went fully remote, one of the first things we noticed was that our martech stack needed adjusting to complement our new way of collaborating. The team needed a better, connected workplace that increased visibility, and improved autonomy, automation and content recycling. For us, this meant implementing Wrike and connecting it with our MediaValet library. Within 45 days we were operating like a well-oiled machine and doubling our output.
Stay Agile
Marketing teams so often have to spring into action to support shifts in strategic direction, structural changes and internal or external crises. The dexterity to respond to the unknown comes down to having an agile team and mindset, as well as an agile tech stack.
As teams and companies scale, one integration today quickly becomes ten tomorrow - and it’s critical for these tools to communicate with each other and adapt as you add, replace and remove components. It’s important to consider the concept of extensibility - can you stretch or build on what you have today based on future requirements? Are you able to seamlessly plug-and-play various technologies, without overhaul your entire stack? Even if you don’t use it or need it right away, ensuring the individual tools in your tech stack have well-documented and up-to-date APIs help future-proof and truly build a foundation for digital dexterity with the organization.
Support Your Team with an Optimize MarTech Stack
Rock star teams don’t just happen. To build a highly effective team, the right foundation must be laid first. Putting the focus on increasing productivity, improving collaboration and ensuring agility will allow your team not only to adjust to the new normal - but to thrive.
Get Ahead of the Game with MediaValet & Wrike
As more and more marketing teams look to become more digitally dexterous in the new norm, they’re investing in digital asset management systems and work management platforms for help. Wrike and MediaValet partner to help teams save time, increase brand consistency, and maximize the impact of their marketing assets. Read more about the integration here.
MediaValet is one of the world’s leading cloud-based digital asset management (DAM) solutions, helping top global brands manage and distribute their assets. A centralized DAM approach enables marketing and creative teams to move fast, with confidence and control.
