How Marketing & Creative Teams Can Win Big
The pace of today’s industry means marketing and creative teams have to react quickly to changes and disruptions. But in a world that requires agility, there are three things teams must consistently prioritize to keep winning this year. Mastering Collaboration
Mastering Collaboration
What’s one thing the most successful marketing and creative teams have in common? They know how to collaborate well—whether it’s with their team members, marketing or creative partners, or other stakeholders in their organization.
Dena Blevins, Starbucks’s Creative Director of Global Promotions & Brand, is responsible for all new creative for in-store promos at 23,000 locations worldwide every 2 months. Here’s what she said about collaboration in a recent HOW Design article:
“Collaboration is so key. We collaborate across functions and across teams. We have our “clients” down the hall, our marketing partners, and we’re all equally passionate about doing what’s right for our brand. We think long term, not short term, and consider how the decisions we make affect every aspect of our business. Will it resonate with our customers? Does it elevate our brand? Does it make our partners (baristas) proud?”
Meanwhile, according to Oracle, 75% of marketers say collaboration increases their effectiveness, helping them deliver stronger messaging, speed time to market, reduce project costs, and increase adoption of products or services.
Bottom line? If you’re not prioritizing improving your team’s ability to collaborate in 2017, you could be seriously limiting your effectiveness. [Find out how to take your team’s collaboration to the next level.]
Personalized Creative Content
Today’s consumers are bombarded by a near constant stream of communication in every channel, on every platform—which is why cutting through the noise requires highly-personalized, highly-creative content.
In a study of hundreds of multi-channel marketing campaigns conducted by MindFire, personalized campaigns were shown to significantly and consistently out-perform static campaigns in generating responses rates. And according to Adobe, 71% of consumers will choose a product or service over it’s competitors because of good design.
So it’s no wonder that Forbes’s CMO analysis found that more than 75% agree that well-organized, well-designed, high-quality content is essential to: leveraging digital, mobile, and social channels; executing targeted marketing and selling strategies; improving sales effectiveness; and developing the brand.
The top marketing and creative teams will focus on delivering targeted, best-in-class creative content to market in 2017. Is yours one of them?
Driving Efficiency
“Content needs are exploding as we move to a world of precision marketing and 24/7 engagement,” said Alison Lewis, CMO of Johnson & Johnson in a February Forbes article.
To meet the demand, marketing and creative teams will have to operate at peak efficiency in 2017—or risk falling behind.
Production process inefficiencies cost B2B companies an estimated $958 million a year, according to Gleanster Research, so savvy marketers and creatives will win big by adopting a workflow that reduces wasted time and resources and solves key challenges like ineffective project kick-offs, chaotic project management, and long content review cycles.
The other secret weapon successful marketing and creative teams will rely on are technology solutions that make managing their workflow simple. And since 82% of executives surveyed by Conductor implemented new marketing technology last year, and 70% say they’ll spend more on new tech this year, teams that are able to get buy-in for a solution ideally suited to their process will likely see impressive results.
“We’ve shortened our approval cycle by 50% and decreased our time-to-market from 10 days to 5 days, while reducing costly mistakes,” said a production manager at Choice Hotels, reporting on the major gains in efficiency a workflow management solution delivered for his team.
85% of teams are under pressure to create assets and deliver more campaigns faster, according to Adobe and IDC. So it’s essential that marketing and creative teams reduce inefficiencies with a streamlined workflow that helps them meet the demand.
Learn how adopting better collaboration practices is easier than you think.
Ellie Baldini is the Content Marketing Manager at inMotionNow. Having been a member of several creative teams herself, Ellie knows the challenges of inefficient workflows. She draws on her experience to connect creatives and marketers with the benefits of inMotion, so more teams can get back to doing the work they love.