The Three Pillars of a Successful Marketing Team
Marketing is commonly seen by those within and outside of the industry as an amorphous blob that seems to embody everything under the sun and nothing at all at the same time. While this can be true in some cases, the reality is that marketing is a clearly defined role that encompasses very specific criteria.
As the marketing director, your job is to define those roles for your team, otherwise, everyone will be actively doing the same jobs. It’s imperative that the marketing department has a clear grasp on what their goals are and how best to meet them.
Because of this, some experts have branded a “three pillar” approach to understanding marketing as a whole; each pillar discusses a specific role and goal for the team to accomplish. When these three are met, the marketing department runs efficiently.
The First Pillar: Clear Branding
A lot of people talk about branding, but what is it exactly? Simply put, branding is the reputation a company has with the outside world. How they perceive your company, what they think about it, and what personality the company conveys to the world is a key marketing effect and can drive sales in a positive or negative way.
While branding is technically the responsibility of the entire organization, it usually falls to the marketing department (and rightfully so) to craft the message through advertisements, mission statements, and customer awareness. This responsibility should be taken seriously: in today’s business climate, people are not only wanting to buy from a company but to have a relationship with them as well.
Branding infiltrates every aspect of the company’s message, from the way that they conduct business to their customer support to their interaction with customers on social media. Be careful to create the right reputation for your company that most closely mirrors the company’s values, and you’ll customers respond as a result.
Pillar Two: Demand From the Company
Viewing the marketing department as a loose set of emotional advertisements and seat-of-your-pants style of marketing came with a certain amount of freedom. Since no one really knew exactly what worked, the team was free to try a bunch of different things.
Those days are behind us. In this time period, marketing teams are given countless tools to use in collecting, organizing, and interpreting data, and the company demands a better outcome as a result. In some cases, this is fair, but in every case, it’s the responsibility of the marketing department to meet those demands on some level.
Strive to meet these demands by creating a marketing strategy that is consumed by return on investment (ROI). Empower your team to make the most of their tools by analyzing various metrics that are incoming, and be transparent to the executives about the decisions that are being made. By owning the demands and being responsible for the results, you can turn your team into a results-oriented group.
Pillar Three: Company Culture
While branding is what the world sees on the outside, a company culture is what it’s like on the inside. There’s a reason that Google constantly ranks as one of the best places to work: because the employees have embraced the culture that was set forth by the company as a whole.
But culture is more important than just about making everyone feel better about their workplace; as the culture improves, so does the efficiency of everyone within. People perform better at their jobs, help drive retail innovation, and weather the storms that inevitably drive less-committed employees away. While marketing has traditionally been seen as the voice to customers on the outside, current business climate demands that the marketing department set the tone for the rest of the organization by creating a culture where people champion their own company, rather than viewing it as a place to simply come in and punch a time clock.
