I often get introduced by my colleagues at Freedom Marketing as a former CMO. I happen to think marketers are like Marines. Once a marketer, always a marketer.
Which is why this past March, I had a momentary panic attack when a close client told me she was onboarding 20 new contract designers in the middle of a pandemic and shelter-at-home-order.
For an instant, I flashed back to the stressors of leading and supporting a marketing team. It felt like performing a high wire act:
Feed the insatiable content engine
Enable sales and keep the lead funnel full and healthy
Communicate the value of investments in people and marketing technology to the CFO
If a tsunami like COVID-19 had come along, would it have blown me off my feet?
I realized that the immediate problem my client faced – onboarding 20 new designers in the middle of a pandemic – was a single dimension of a much larger undertaking. Those designers were joining the organization’s content orchestration engine and they needed to get ramped, pandemic or not!
Once my panic for her subsided, I started thinking about what it would take to organize a distributed marketing team in the current environment? What guidance would I offer to marketers who find themselves walking that high wire today?
How could I help marketers think about what it takes to create a content orchestration engine that can be scaled up, scaled down, and redirected under rapidly evolving business conditions to capture new opportunities?
I described a narrow example of this thinking in my recent piece on Integrating DAM and PIM Systems – 3 Questions to Consider. The larger question I think needs to be answered is:
Is the way that I have architected my content and creative processes serving the needs of my business today?
If your answer to this question is yes, you can stop reading. There is not much here for you in terms of guidance. You are a genius, rock-star marketer and I hope your leadership recognizes the hard work it took to get here.
If your answer is no, it probably feels like that tsunami is still raging. Here are steps you can start taking right now to get to yes.
Get a Big Picture View of Your Content and Creative Processes
In Adobe’s 2020 Digital Trends report, “outdated workflows that slow down our processes” were identified as the number one barrier to successfully creating digital experiences. Source: 2020 Digital Trends Report Based on a global survey of almost 13,000 marketing, advertising, ecommerce, creative and IT professionals working for both brands and agencies. See a glimpse of the results below.
That report was released in 4Q2019! Were the respondents asked today, the 2nd most significant barrier, inadequate budget, would likely rise to the top. But rooting out inefficiencies in your processes can help with that too.
Only by understanding your processes from ideation to execution and measurement, can you find the pain points and remove the bottlenecks that suck time, impede creativity, and damage performance. Process mapping is a necessary step. Invest the time and you can dramatically improve performance.
Avoid the Instinct to Think About Content and Creative Processes in a Linear Way
Most workflow diagramming tools guide you in a linear way, but you should not let that force you into an overly simplified view of how work gets done. If you walk in the shoes of marketers and creatives, you will learn that very few of their tasks happen serially. There is much back-and-forth and human interaction involved in creating great content that converts to revenue. Your content orchestration engine needs to make these interactions fast and frictionless.
Modern work management platforms facilitate these types of frictionless interactions. But that is just one element. Workfront, in their 2020 State of Work report, describes the attributes of high-performance organizations:
Rather than simply make existing work easier or more fluid, they actually take on a more dynamic approach, working across departmental seams, changing more often, empowering new leaders, and redeploying themselves at the individual, team, or even organizational level to drive new market opportunities. Source: State of Work 2020 Report
What does that look like for you? Start by asking yourself: does everyone in the content lifecycle have the information that they need to make the optimal decisions in the moment? Are marketers using the latest or most effective content? Do creatives know how their deliverables perform? How quickly can the team be redirected to pursue a new opportunity? Can everyone cascade critical information across the team in a streamlined way? Can they map their activities to results that matter to the business?
Examine Your Fundamentals – People, Process and Taxonomy
Yes, not a typo: Taxonomy. Now that the only viable sales, marketing and distribution channel for many businesses is through an e-commerce store front, technology is the cost of entry. The inconvenient truth about content orchestration at scale is that most companies have not architected the requisite underlying taxonomy and metadata strategies.
This results in a large amount of rework and is one of the primary impediments to an optimized content orchestration engine. Think about taxonomy and metadata as the accelerants. Get it right, and each individual and system in the content life cycle has the information needed in the moment.
When we start working with a client, the common response to the question whether a taxonomy or metadata strategy exists in the company is yes, we have several! And that’s the crux of the problem. Your taxonomy and metadata are likely being morphed and adapted across every system and process you use. It is wasted time and money hiding in plain sight and is a tremendous lag on performance.
Standardizing in this area can accrue unexpected benefits straight to the bottom line. Standardization isn’t a trivial effort, but it’s one that can start small and improve over time.
Crisis Averted – Design Contractors Onboarded
I started this piece with a quick story about a client who had to onboard 20 contract designers in the middle of a pandemic and shelter-at-home order. So how did she do? Quite well I am happy to report. Because her firm is well on its way to orchestrating that high-performance content engine, they were able to roll their contract designers onto their digital asset management system remotely and get everyone working in short order.
