Posts Tagged ‘casting responsible’

Are marketing best practices an oxymoron?

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

Are marketing best practices an oxymoron?

Can best practices improve your marketing?

Here’s what a best practice is, according to Wikipedia:

With proper processes, checks, and testing, a desired outcome can be delivered with fewer problems and unforeseen complications. Best practices can also be defined as the most efficient (least amount of effort) and effective (best results) way of accomplishing a task, based on repeatable procedures that have proven themselves over time for large numbers of people.

Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Problem is, if you ask 100 marketers how they’d do a brand audit, develop a positioning statement, create an ad or craft a news release, and you’ll get a slightly different answer from every time.

Standards are a necessity if you want to introduce best practices into anything you do. In marketing there’s little standardization in the approach taken with even the most fundamental of marketing tasks.

Why?

For starters, it’s next to impossible to develop best practices within an in-house marketing department. It’s not for lack of talent, but repetition.

Think about it.

If your marketing team one does certain things a few times a year (ads, news releases, etc.) and other things once every few years (branding, naming, websites, etc.) how can they ever become as proficient as folks that do this kind of work every day?

Then agencies must have best practices in place, right?

Well, yes and no. Most agencies are creatively driven (thank goodness), not process-driven. And when someone does nail it on a process, they don’t want to share it with the world—it’s a competitive advantage.

There’s even more to this conundrum than meets the eye.

Who do you use to help you with your marketing? Most agencies, process-driven or not, are biased by their model: Ad agencies recommend advertising, PR firms recommend PR, and so on.

At Outsource Marketing, we’ve worked to rectify these challenges by offering a strategic, seamless and sustainable way to get marketing done, and we try to build standards and best practices into everything we do.

We’re definitely not for everybody, and there are other firms striving to do the same thing.

Here are three things you can do now to start building best practices into your marketing:

  • Start with benchmarking. You have to know what you are trying to beat. Is it the number of leads, printing and promotional costs, number of unique user sessions, subscribers to your RSS feed… brand awareness? Really, everything is on the table.
  • Embrace project management. That means you should have people that understand project scope, timelines, deliverables and budgets involved in every marketing project.
  • After each project, discuss what you learned. Are all the players on the team contributing? Was the creative as good as it could be? Where were the logjams?
  • Apply that learning to the next project, then repeat.

    • So, given the challenges above, what are other things marketers can do to develop best practices into their organization?

    Comment below to share.

    Subscribe to this feed.

    . . .

    No turtles were harmed during the creation of this post.

    Tags: , , ,
    Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

    How marketing is like pushing a car

    Monday, May 5th, 2008

    When I was a penniless college student at Gonzaga University, I pushed many a “beater-with-a-heater.”

    I pushed my ‘69 Beetle. I pushed my ‘73 Maverick. I pushed my ‘81 Chevette. I became an expert at pushing cars in rain, snow, sleet or hail. Laugh all you want, but that Beetle was sweet when it was running.

    Anyway, first thing you do is you remove the emergency brake. That helps a lot.

    Then you place your hands on the trunk lid, lean in and push. At first, the car will barely budge.

    So you lean into it more, dig in with your feet, and put your shoulder against the trunk and push with all you have. Provided you aren’t going up hill—that sucks—the car will begin to creep along slowly.

    As the car begins to roll, momentum will take over and things will get easier.

    Soon, you’ll be walking behind the car, one hand on the trunk.

    That’s what it’s like with marketing.

    When you first get started, it takes everything you have with seemingly no results.

    As you make adjustments, little things begin to happen.

    And if you get the opportunity to make more adjustments to your adjustments, you can turn those little things into bigger things.

    Eventually, marketing gets easier, momentum takes over and the results will come.

    That’s why casting responsibility is so important: Your organization must have the right people on your team internally and externally.

    All too often, organizations fire their CMO, Marketing Director or marketing firm before they’ve had a chance to make the adjustments that make the difference between success and failure.

    So, how much time should a Marketing Director, CMO or marketing firm be given before you start to see results?

    Comment below to weigh in.

    Tags: ,
    Posted in casting responsible, strategically responsible | 7 Comments »

    Whole brain marketing, and why you need it

    Thursday, March 27th, 2008

    Spinning Girl: Are you right brained or left brained?

    Take a look at the spinning figure above. Is it spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise for you?

    If it’s clockwise, you are more of a right-brained, creative person. Counter-clockwise and you lean toward being a left-brained, analytic type.

    Here are some of the attributes of each:

    Left brain functions
    uses logic
    detail oriented
    facts rule
    words and language
    present and past
    math and science
    can comprehend
    knowing
    acknowledges
    order/pattern perception
    knows object name
    reality based
    forms strategies
    practical
    safe

    Right brain functions
    uses feeling
    “big picture” oriented
    imagination rules
    symbols and images
    present and future
    philosophy & religion
    can “get it” (i.e. meaning)
    believes
    appreciates
    spatial perception
    knows object function
    fantasy based
    presents possibilities
    impetuous
    risk taking

    Why this should matter to you

    Marketing requires your whole brain. You need rock solid analytics and breakthrough creative. Obviously, we’re all capable of both and I know a few marketing generalists that are as comfortable with a pivot table as they are with Photoshop or drafting a good headline. But folks that excel in both areas are few and far between.

    To be casting responsible, you might want to know where your team member’s strengths lie. If you have someone who is left-brain dominant writing copy, you may have a problem. Likewise, you may have someone crunching numbers that could bring value to a creative brainstorming session.

    What to do about it

    Have your marketing team take the Right Brain v. Left Brain Creativity Test from the Art Institute of Vancouver. Ask them to be honest and tell them it will only take a few minutes.

    It will help you learn a little more about your team, and who knows, maybe you’ll help someone find some hidden strengths and improve your marketing at the same time.

    So, how did you do?

    # # #

    In case you are wondering, I didn’t believe there was a difference. I could only see the clockwise motion for about two minutes, then snap! it was turning the opposite direction. That figures, since I’m 48% right-brained, 52% left-brained.

    Thanks to Freddy Nager at Cool Rules Pronto for the inspiration for this post.

    Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in casting responsible, creativity, socially responsible | 3 Comments »