Newest jobs in Martech:

Sr. Marketing Operations Manager @ TigerConnect (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $89,500 – $189,500 (est.)
• Manage, maintain and continually evolve our lead scoring, lifecycle models and operational fundamentals.
• Maintaining data integrity and data governance through operational programs and automated processes.

Manager of Demand Generation Marketing @ WorldSync (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $88,000 – $112,000 (est.)
• Build and lead a marketing function that includes collaboration with Product Management, Sales Leadership, Customer Success Management, and Executive Staff. 
• Build multichannel campaigns (inbound and outbound) that align messaging to the target audience and buyer journey.

Growth Marketing Strategist @ NewNorth (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $80,000 – $120,000 (est.)
• Develop marketing strategies for clients that drive real, measurable results.
• Engage with clients and delivering your expertise with confidence, expertly managing expectations.

Marketing Manager – B2B SaaS @ Localize (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $70,000 – $80,000 (est.)
• Contribute to the development and management of 1WorldSync’s global demand generation campaigns across channels (e.g., email, SEM, digital advertising, web, events.) including strategy, content planning, campaign setup, A/B testing, reporting, and optimization.
• Partner with Product Marketing Manager as well as Go-To-Market (GTM) and Sales teams to develop and optimize campaigns according to the product roadmap and 1WorldSync’s pipeline and revenue goals.

Director roles:

Principle Marketing Analytics Analyst @ Shutterfly Inc. (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $90,000 – $114,000 (est.)
• Answer measurement and data integration questions: define analytics approach, retrieve, and manipulate data needed to perform analysis, and deliver actionable insights to Marketing Management team. 
• Create and share out weekly reports to clearly communicate Email channel and campaign performance. Identify trends and draw insights and test results to help guide future planning. Dig into the category performance and drivers. 

Senior roles:

Sr. Growth Marketing Manager @ Backblaze (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $130,000 – $190,000 (est.)
• Lead growth marketing initiatives to ensure the best lead experience by creating awareness, promoting free trials or sales leads and ultimately converting leads to paying customers.
• Report out key performance metrics on a weekly/monthly basis and develop monetization trends and sales strategies to optimize our investment for ROI.

Global Lead Product Marketing Manager @ LiveRamp (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $130,000 – $160,000 (est.)
• Collaborate with product management to ensure market needs are translated into new product capabilities, and new product capabilities are effectively rolled out to the commercial teams.
• Draw from deep expertise of the product to clearly articulate how a given feature uniquely addresses customer use cases.

Partner Marketing Manager @ Lambda (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $103,000 – $165,000 (est.)
• Field incoming co-marketing requests, identify new areas of opportunity, and prioritize activities according to impact and reach.
• Work closely with the Sales team to strengthen GTM execution around new and enhanced partnerships.

Sr. Marketing Data Analyst @ GameChanger (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $100,000 – $130,000 (est.)
• Support the Marketing and Partnerships teams in tracking, reporting, and analyzing the effectiveness of marketing and go-to-market activities through the entire marketing funnel from awareness to retention.
• Build reports, data visualizations, and dashboards that clearly communicate findings to stakeholders.

Sr. Marketing Operations Manager @ Cotiviti (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $94,000 – $115,000 (est.)
• Build and execute strategic, best-in-class, multi-channel marketing campaigns for enterprise and line of business audience segments.
• Perform workflow set up in HubSpot including audience selection, dynamic content, etc. to ensure accuracy of campaigns.

Sr. Consulant, Go-to-Market Strategy @ Shift Paradigm (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $90,000 – $130,000 (est.)
• Execute on diverse client consulting projects, with a focus on strategic initiatives and their execution.
• Develop solutions for complex marketing, sales, and organizational challenges in collaboration with the support of specialists across delivery areas.

Marketing Operations Manager @ Britive (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $80,000 – $100,000 (est.)
• Proactively identify areas of improvement in campaign operations to continually evolve a best-in-class marketing automation system. 
• Own and improve supportive structure directly impacting a steady volume of campaign requests by creating and maintaining Hubspot program templates and documentation for Demand Generation and Field Marketing teams.

Associate roles:

Jr. Marketing Operations Associate @ Fictiv (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $70,000 – $80,000 (est.)
• Manage, or assist with data cleanliness, database health reporting, normalization, data cleanup, etc. 
• Responsible for maintenance, troubleshooting and ad hoc improvements across Martech systems like Sales-outreach (Outreach.io, or Salesloft for example), Marketo, scoring, enrichment and deduplication tooling.

Revenue Operations Analyst @ Goldcast (U.S. remote)

• Salary:$57,500 – $72,000  (est.)
• As the first person in the revenue ops function, you will report into the Head of Sales and act as a connective tissue between Marketing and Sales.
• You will connect data and systems, build workflows, and generate insights and analytics to empower marketing and sales to drive more revenue.

The post The latest jobs in martech appeared first on MarTech.

In this article, we will explore the significance of marketing and sales alignment for business success, discuss the benefits of alignment, such as increased revenue, enhanced customer experience, and efficient operations, and provide actionable strategies to ensure your organization operates cohesively.

Building a collaborative environment

Establishing a collaborative environment is fundamental for marketing and sales alignment. A shared sense of purpose and mutual respect can bridge the gaps between these departments. A workplace where both teams feel valued and supported fosters trust and boosts overall performance.

Developing a service level agreement (SLA) is one way to stimulate collaboration. An SLA clarifies expectations, outlines roles and responsibilities, and sets key performance indicators (KPIs) that both teams can strive towards. This promotes accountability and simplifies expectation management.

Frequent check-ins enable both teams to communicate openly, exchange insights and data, address challenges, and realign goals and strategies. This continuous dialogue facilitates improvement and fortifies the relationship between marketing and sales.

Aligning on the buyer’s and workforce’s Journey

Synchronizing marketing and sales efforts around the buyer’s and workforce’s journeys is crucial for delivering outstanding customer experiences. This shared understanding allows for identifying key touchpoints where marketing and sales teams can collaborate, providing a consistent experience for prospects and customers while addressing the needs and concerns of the employees serving them. Considering both aspects, you can craft a seamless experience for prospects, customers, and your internal team, resulting in higher conversion rates and a more unified organization.

Developing detailed buyer and workforce personas is an effective way to understand and target the right audience and shape your internal culture. Marketing and sales teams can pinpoint their ideal customers’ common characteristics, pain points, and motivations, crafting personalized and relevant messaging that resonates with prospects. Simultaneously, comprehending your workforce’s personas enables you to cultivate an environment that promotes employee growth, engagement, and satisfaction.

Streamlining processes and leveraging technology

Optimizing processes and employing technology can significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing and sales teams. Adopting the appropriate tools and implementing well-defined processes empower both teams to collaborate more seamlessly, ultimately driving exceptional customer experiences.

Defining the lead qualification and scoring process is a critical area to address. Establishing the criteria for qualifying leads enables marketing teams to pass high-quality prospects to sales, saving time and increasing the chances of closing deals. Sales teams can then prioritize leads based on their likelihood to convert, ensuring their efforts are focused on the most promising prospects.

Implementing CRM and marketing automation tools is essential for keeping both teams organized, sharing information effectively, and maintaining alignment on their goals and strategies. Integrating these tools into workflows streamlines processes enhances communication, and fosters collaboration.

Measuring and analyzing shared key performance indicators (KPIs) is crucial for understanding the effectiveness of the strategies in place. Regularly tracking these metrics allows both teams to identify areas for improvement, adjust their tactics accordingly, and ensure their efforts are aligned and focused on delivering the best possible customer experiences.

Crafting consistent messaging and content

A consistent and coherent brand story is vital for building trust and resonating with your target audience. Sales and marketing teams play a crucial role in shaping this narrative by aligning their messaging and collaborating on content creation.

Both teams should collaborate to ensure their messaging is consistent across all channels, including emails, social media, website content, and other touchpoints where prospects and customers interact with the brand. Maintaining a cohesive and compelling brand story can create a solid and memorable impression that sets you apart from the competition.

Sales and marketing teams should also join forces in content creation. Collaborating on developing relevant and engaging content enables both groups to leverage their unique insights and expertise better to address their target audience’s needs and pain points. This not only helps to nurture leads but also aids in closing sales and fostering long-term relationships with customers.

Lastly, it’s essential to encourage a culture of feedback and continuous improvement. By maintaining an open line of communication, marketing and sales teams can learn from each other’s experiences, adapt to new challenges, and continually refine their approach to deliver the most remarkable customer experiences possible. Regularly reviewing and updating strategies ensures that both departments remain aligned and focused on achieving their shared goals.

The key to marketing and sales alignment

Marketing and sales alignment drive business success and create remarkable customer experiences. By fostering a collaborative environment, aligning efforts around the buyer’s journey, streamlining processes through technology, and maintaining consistent messaging and content, mid-market and enterprise sales and marketing leaders in B2B companies can achieve better results and drive growth. Implementing the strategies outlined in this article will equip your teams to face the challenges of today’s competitive landscape and deliver an exceptional customer experience.

The post How to align B2B sales and marketing teams appeared first on MarTech.

Those members of the marketing operations team more focused on tech and operations (“maestros”) than the design and execution of campaigns earned, on average, $25,000 more than their campaign-focused peers.

More maestros promoted. A marginally higher proportion of maestros were more likely to have been promoted over the last year than marketers (49% vs. 46%); and 61% of maestros said “demonstrating/proving a positive impact on the business from martech” was the most rewarding aspect of their job (against 58% of general marketers).

Responding to these findings, Scott Brinker said:

Marketers design and run campaigns. Maestroes manage and integrate the stack, design
the processes and workflows, and — importantly — train and support marketing staff on using martech.
Maestros are the giants whose shoulders marketers stand upon.

Scott Brinker, VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot and Editor at chiefmartec.com

Dig deeper: What is marketing operations and who are MOps professionals?

Graduate degrees no impact. It was no surprise that, the larger the employer the higher the compensation. Perhaps less predictably, having a graduate degree had no impact on salary. Directors earned, on average, much more than managers and other staff.

Why we care. It’s important to us to take the industry’s pulse each year and track the opportunities opening up for marketers and maestros and their levels of satisfaction with their work, their compensation and their promotion prospects.

What we clearly see is an industry in which two predominant self-identified types are emerging — those individuals primarily concerned with operations and techology and those primarily concerned with devising and executing campaigns. The place where those professional capabilities intersect is what we call — martech.

Download the survey here (no registration required).

The survey. The survey, conducted jointly by MarTech and chiefmartec.com, was taken by 419 marketers in December 2022 and January 2023; 401 of those provided salary information. Nearly 70% (286) respondents live in North America; 15% (63) live in Western Europe. The report’s conclusions are limited to responses from those individuals only. Others were excluded due to the limited number.

Respondents answered more than 20 questions related to career roles, salary, technology and job satisfaction and challenges/frustrations. They were from all job levels — C-suite to managers and staff.

The post Marketing technologists are well-rewarded appeared first on MarTech.

Thinking about what my perfect roster would look like got me thinking about what it takes to build a winning baseball team. How would that apply to building a great marketing operations team?

The five essential MOps roles

The mandate for marketing operations is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the marketing department through people, process, technology and data. When building a marketing operations team, an ideal situation is to have dedicated roles focused on each of those pillars. For most marketing operations teams, that results in five essential roles:

1. Marketing Operations Manager. Oversees the entire marketing operations team and ensures that the team is working towards the overall goals of the company. They are the primary point of contact for the CMO and other senior leaders in the organization and are responsible for developing the team’s strategy, managing budgets, and ensuring that the performance of the marketing department is effective and meeting targets.
2. Marketing Technologist. Manages the marketing tech stack and ensures that all systems are integrated, as well as trains team members on how to best utilize new and existing technologies. This role must have deep expertise in platforms such as CRM, marketing automation, and analytics tools.
3. Marketing Automation Specialist. Manages the marketing automation platform and ensures that it is integrated with other systems in the marketing tech stack. This role creates and executes email campaigns, lead nurturing and scoring programs, and ensures that all campaign data is accurate and up-to-date.
4. Data Analyst: Analyzes marketing data and provides insights to the marketing team. This role creates dashboards and reports that provide actionable insights to the marketing department and other stakeholders in the organization.
5. Project Manager / Process Specialist: Manages the project lifecycle from start to finish and optimizes workflows. Ensures that all projects are delivered on time, within budget, and meet the quality standards set by the organization. Focuses on helping the organization meet their productivity goals. 

The size of your marketing team will likely determine how specialized these roles can be.

In a smaller organization with less headcount, you will need to have more generalists who can do a little bit of everything. For example, you may not be able to hire a dedicated data or process specialist, so everyone on the team may have to figure out optimizing their own reporting and processes. But if you are fortunate enough to be in an organization with more resources, hiring for these dedicated roles will enable those resources to dive much deeper into their areas of expertise. 

Dig deeper: What is marketing operations and who are MOps professionals?

Experience plus skill-sets

When a general manager is putting together a baseball team, they’re looking for the right mix of experience and complementary skill-sets. If there’s a shortstop that excels defensively but is a below-average offensive player, then there needs to be another above average batter in the lineup to balance out that weak spot. But no matter the players’ individual strengths, they all have to be bought into the team’s philosophy and underlying style of play.

Those same team-building philosophies apply to putting together your marketing operations team. First, you need the right blend of technical expertise and hard skills. Striking the right balance in this area is even more critical if you’re on a smaller team with more generalist roles.

For example, imagine you’re on a three-person marketing operations team that consists of a marketing operations manager, a marketing automation specialist, and a marketing technology specialist. All three of those resources have robust experience around demand generation and are skilled in campaign planning and lead generation, but everyone on the team only has basic Excel skills and lacks expertise in data analysis.

In that situation, it may prove difficult for the team to effectively communicate the impact of their demand generation programs, because they would struggle to build the type of robust reporting and dashboards that would demonstrate the positive impact they are making on the organization.

On a small team like this, hiring T-shaped employees is important, but even more critical is making sure that everyone on the team doesn’t share the exact same “T”. When building your team, you must ensure that your resources don’t overlap with their depth of knowledge concentrated on the same skill(s), thereby leaving holes in other skill-sets where you need coverage. 

Dig deeper: MarTech’s marketing operations experts to follow

Inter-personal skills are important

However, there is another aspect of team building where you do want to make sure there is heavy overlap amongst all team members, and that is in the soft skills and personal characteristics.

Going back to our baseball analogy, in Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball,” the Oakland A’s transformed their team by ensuring that everyone on the team was focused solely on getting on base. It became their core team-building philosophy, and every player they added to the team had to embrace that style of play.

When building a marketing operations team, there are a few characteristics that everyone on the team, no matter their role, absolutely has to have.

• Business acumen and strategic thinking: Everyone on the marketing operations team has to have a solid understanding of the business objectives and be able to think big-picture about how to achieve those goals. Evaluating every decision based on its potential to impact those goals is the key to the team’s success.
• Adaptability: In a fast-paced and constantly evolving marketing environment, marketing operations team members need to be adaptable and flexible. Priorities change quickly and conflicting demands from various stakeholders requires marketing operations professionals to be able to pivot quickly.
• Problem-solving: Marketing operations teams face a lot of challenges: data cleanliness across multiple platforms; decreasing or flat budget and resources despite increasing demand for the team’s services; optimizing processes in an environment where people may be resistant to change… the list of challenges is long and constantly growing. This requires marketing operations team members to be skilled at finding creative solutions to solve complex problems.
• Customer-centricity: In order to design campaigns and experiences that will resonate with the target audience, marketing operations team members need to be focused on the customer experience and have a deep understanding of customer needs and preferences.

A team that shares these core characteristics has the right foundation in place to become a powerful marketing operations organization. If your team is still facing challenges, such as talent gaps in certain skill-sets that or being understaffed, it may be a multi-year journey to get to exactly where you want to go.

Still, you can be confident that your team is headed in the right direction.  Just like a baseball team, your team may steadily progress from being a playoff contender, to a playoff team that has an early exit, to eventually winning it all. And with the right culture in place, it might not take as long as you think. This could be the year that it all comes together for your team. After all, spring is the time for optimism.  

The post Moneyball your marketing ops team appeared first on MarTech.

While there’s little difference in managing an email nurture campaign, for example, to sell blenders or airplanes, that doesn’t mean understanding the specific product is not essential for the folks administering the marketing automation platform.

Knowing the company’s products helps us understand stakeholder motivations, needs and requirements and better tie their work to the organization’s goals and performance metrics. Here are some examples from my career where making an effort to understand the product led to greater marketing results.

B2B Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

A high-level understanding of the product is always handy in B2B SaaS. While working for Zuora, I learned what the company’s products are trying to solve for revenue professionals. This doesn’t require taking a finance or accounting class or earning an MBA.

Keywords, for instance, play a key role in digital marketing — from paid ads to running an account-based marketing platform. When the product marketing and creative folks provide a list of relevant keywords, knowing about them helps with system administration. 

If a system allows for keyword ranking, it helps to know which ones are most relevant to the target audience. This can also help when designing messaging (webpages, emails, text messages, etc.) by ensuring they are visible or providing guidance for A/B testing of email subject lines and landing page UX. 

Learning about such topics made it easier for me to grasp direction from my colleagues and translate that into system configurations or coordination with vendors. That makes things easier for everyone. Understanding — and speaking to — prospective customers’ pain points isn’t just for the business development, account executive and customer success folks.

Dig deeper: Product-led growth: 3 important lessons from the front line

Hospitality

As part of my current gig with Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, I learned that hospitality has significant similarities with fast food. The vast majority of properties are franchised. Wyndham manages the overall portfolio of brands, provides guidance and support to franchisors, builds overall brand awareness and offers other services. Thus, I’m helping sell far more than hotel rooms and amenities — including opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Along those lines, although the B2C side of the travel sector is very apparent, there’s more to the picture. Understanding how our martech systems are useful to our franchise partners who deal directly with guests in person when they’re at a property is beneficial.

Further, like many other companies, loyalty programs are a big part of the business. They’re a huge deal. “The disclosed pro-forma valuations of AAdvantage and MileagePlus exceeded the airlines’ [American and United, respectively] own market capitalizations,” according to the Harvard Business Review.

These programs provided associated airlines with financial cover as travel plummeted during the pandemic. They also allowed companies to continue engaging customers and generating revenue through partners like associated credit cards and retail affiliations. 

Dig deeper: Why we care about loyalty marketing

Product understanding informs your efforts

When martech and MOps practitioners better understand their company’s products, they can skillfully partner with colleagues to coordinate marketing campaigns and better tie efforts to corporate goals.

This helps decrease the time butting heads with others to decipher the target audience and broader organizational needs, providing informed insight that can garner success for all

We’re the practitioners with technical acumen. A significant part of our duties is to help translate our colleagues’ persuasive brilliance into the digital realm.

The post Why understanding the product is a must in martech, MOps appeared first on MarTech.

Instead of creating a request in a project management tool then waiting for new versions of an existing image to be uploaded to the MAM, a marketer could create several versions in the DAM within a few moments. This simple change could save many hours. 

Given that the largest percentage of marketers are millennials or Gen Z who’ve worked five years or less, business process concepts may be misunderstood. When asked to describe their day-to-day workflows, some may be unable to explain the term. 

Dig deeper: We’re implementing DAM! Where do I start?

What is a workflow?

A workflow is the path one takes from the beginning of a project to the end. For DAM administrators, it represents all the steps between a request for a new asset and the delivery of its final version. 

Most of us don’t think about the steps we take to perform common tasks, especially the ones we do most often. Could you write down the steps you take between deciding to go to the grocery store and putting purchased goods away in your pantry?

Marketing work boils down to a collection of projects containing tasks that are performed repetitively. While the creative process — inspiration, perspiration and activation — is often difficult for writers, designers and developers to articulate, the work products they deliver are not. 

How to sketch out a workflow

Here’s an example of the workflow for a typical marketing project:

• A project request ideally comes in the form of a brief with detailed instructions about the messaging, look and feel and specific assets required for the project.
• An initial draft for the client, which may be  a single piece or multiple pieces depending upon the complexity of the request. A client might request separate copy and design drafts or a full mockup of the asset(s) with copy and design in place.
• A feedback and revision round in which the client returns comments and edits to the creative team.
• A second draft delivery with subsequent feedback and revision rounds, if necessary, until a final proof can be obtained,
• A final proof process where one or more stakeholders review the final asset(s) and sign off on all changes.
• Delivery of the final asset(s) to the client.
• Completion of the project and migration of final asset(s) to a corporate archive. 

Each of these stages can contain one or more individual tasks, such as:

• Producing graphics.
• Implementing templates.
• Getting brand manager approval of particular items such as logos.
• Editing and proofing of copy.
• Internal Q&A prior to delivering drafts and revisions to clients.
• Legal or other regulatory review of certain aspects of copy or design.
• Other steps within the approval flow to ensure agreement across different operational or organizational departments.

Reviewing a process such as this can help your team map out their own processes. Using these stages as milestones, they can discuss the tasks they perform to move from one stage to the next.

Making a workflow diagram

There are many templates and flowcharts available to assist you with mapping workflow. Some are available in your desktop software, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Keynote. Even a simple list of tasks in Notepad can suffice. For example:

1. Project Request
   1. Assign project lead
   2. Assign copywriter and graphic designer
   3. Assign web developer, if required
   4. Choose & verify templates and brand guides
   5. Write first copy draft
   6. Create three graphic mockups for creative team review

A project management platform such as Adobe Workfront, Confluence, Trello or Asanar, can convert these into forms and templates that automatically populate, assign dates and deadlines and send emails to appropriate project members. 

Setting up workflow tasks in your DAM

Some DAMs have features that will help speed tasks and eliminate speedbumps using automated workflows.

Adobe Experience Manager Assets, for example, has  a proof approval workflow  that sends links to internal or external clients and stakeholders, allowing them to OK proofs without needing access to the DAM.

Once the project management tool is linked to the DAM via API, the DAM will capture and retain all comments, revisions and updates and automatically email a copy or a link  to relevant parties. 

This can eliminate the final step of packaging and migrating final files, because they immediately become a part of the DAM system. This also makes it a simple matter for your team to share updates of works in progress to clients without  countless emails or uploading sensitive documents to clouds outside your firewall. 

DAM workflows boost productivity and efficiency

The steps to get things done mostly reside “in one’s head.” But teams cannot benefit from each other’s creativity and skill without common workflows that save everyone time. 

Once workflows are hammered out, DAM administrators can ask relevant questions about what steps take.

The post Here’s why you need a DAM workflow — and how to map it out appeared first on MarTech.

• Proposition: Aligning and concentrating your marketing firm’s or in-house agency’s efforts with a focused vision, positioning strategy and value proposition. 
• Principles: Unifying people with a shared set of operating principles on how to lead, collaborate, communicate and make decisions in their work.
• People: Aligning organizational structure, staffing and professional development opportunities to deliver on vision, strategy and value proposition. 
• Process: Employing lightweight processes and tools for nimble ways of working.
• Performance: Measuring, analyzing and improving how your firm or in-house agency works. 

In this article, I’ll dive into “Proposition” and explain why aligning your organization’s efforts with a focused vision, positioning strategy and value proposition matters. I’ll also chart a course you can use to get started.

Building your foundation for focus

There is such a low barrier to opening a creative marketing firm today. Droves of talent are leaving agencies and opening their own firms or joining innovative talent communities and matchmaking marketplace. The market is saturated with creative and marketing service providers. 

We also have CMOs bringing increasing amounts of work internally. As a result, many in-house production studios have grown and evolved, expanding their services and becoming better known as in-house agencies.

To thrive in this environment, your organization must become a unique provider of focused expertise that others can’t replicate. It’s the only way to secure a market position safe from the sea of sameness.

Marketing clients seek well-positioned “best-in-class” partners with narrow and deep expertise more than a range of lower-value services. The days of providing all types of services to all kinds of clients are behind us.

Today, offering a wide variety of services doesn’t scale. It’s costly, inefficient and creates chaotic operating environments. 

Focus is what scales. With it, you can:

• Concentrate resources toward a coherent strategy.
• Quickly improve the skills of your people, your services and your internal ways of working because they’re focused on just one or a few specific solutions or services.
• Deploy people’s expertise across a large client base because they replicate the same focused service areas.
• Easily maintain alignment between strategy, operating model and day-to-day decisions.

Focus makes running your organization much easier and more profitable. You can produce better work, which helps with recruitment, employee morale and retention.

Developing a focused, differentiating positioning strategy

Successful creative marketing organizations align their resources around a focused and differentiating positioning strategy. They invest in expanding their unique expertise and what they’re best at, while shedding or outsourcing other costly or distracting capabilities. 

As a result, they gain a variety of benefits.

• For creative marketing firms:
  • A well-defined criteria for targeting ideal clients.
  • A stronger win ratio in new business because you are playing to your strengths.
  • Stronger pricing power.
  • Reduction of costs.
  • Better margins.
  • Clearer direction for how to spend time, money and resources.
  • A broader — not narrower — geographical market from clients seeking your expertise.
  • Fewer competitors saying they can do what you do.
• For in-house agencies:
  • Clarity on which internal clients you are best at serving.
  • Stronger client alignment on when and how to work with your team.
  • Easier to create opportunities to work on higher-value projects.
  • Increased credibility amongst stakeholders and clients.
  • Likely to be seen as a strategic partner.
  • Reduction of agency-wide costs.
  • Greater support and funding for staffing and tools.
  • Less overlap and competition with external firms.

Charting your course forward

To develop a focused, differentiating positioning strategy, start by answering these four questions. 

1. Who are our best customers? What markets or audiences do we know best?

Defining an effective positioning strategy means clearly defining and understanding your ideal customer — the types of clients you’re best suited to serve. 

This requires exploring your experience within different business categories, market segments, audiences and even business models, depending on the clients you’ve served.

It may help to identify the following:

• The product or service categories you serve and perform well.
• The distribution and delivery channels you serve best.
• The internal and external stakeholders you know best.
• The types of audiences and market segments you know better than anyone.
• The types of brands you serve best.

Creative marketing firm example

Agency Sacks has defined its who as “affluent consumers.” They can influence the affluent as the audience they know best. 

In-house agency example

ESPN’s CreativeWorks defines their who as sports fans, which makes perfect sense.

2. What are our core competencies? In which areas are we truly best-in-class?

You need to beyond identifying capabilities and find what it is you can deliver better in a dependable, differentiating way. 

Look into:

• Unique skills your team may possess.
• Communication channels you know best.
• Customer points of contact who you know best along the customer journey.
• Unique strategic assets you own.
• Outcomes your clients consistently seek from you.
• Benefits you can deliver repeatedly.

These are different ways of looking at the same question. Often, we can find a pattern by separating services into different skills and abilities. Then, we can reorganize them to tell a compelling story about where you are truly best in class.

Example

Tribe has focused their what to be on internal communications. Their direction also works with their who — the audience they know best are the employees of global and national brands. 

3. How are we different in the way we think? Do we have distinguishing approaches or philosophies?

This is how you identify the standards, values and beliefs by which your agency operates, serves clients and makes day-to-day decisions. It’s also about the proprietary approaches you bring to solving client problems.

Consider:

• The philosophies or beliefs that fuel how you work.
• The methods and approaches you use.
• Your “firsts” and major organizational milestones.
• Your access to specialized resources.
• Your beliefs about organizational design, structure or work environment.

Creative marketing firms and in-house agencies might be tempted to pick the answer to these questions as the basis of their strategy. It requires less focus and sacrifice than basing your strategy on the who or what questions. But going the easy way makes for a weak strategy. 

Only a few organizations truly have a philosophy or approach to their work that is uniquely their own.

Example 

TBWA is a great example of a positioning strategy that hinges on the question how. The firm owns the idea of disruption. No other agency can say they are the “Disruption” company as TBWA does. They have created disruption workshops, tools, a consultancy, disruption days and four books on the subject.

4. Why do we exist in the first place? What is our calling?

Without exception, the most notable marketing organizations have an ambitious reason for existing. They don’t let the market, competition or financials drive their reason for existing. 

What drives your group from the inside? Your purpose must be the center of who you are as an organization.

Why is the most difficult question to answer. To help define your calling, think about the following: 

• Beyond making money, what is our purpose?
• If our people were volunteers instead of employees, what would drive them to volunteer?
• What are the things we will always do?
• What are the things we will never do?
• What do we preach? 
• What are we against?
• What do we fight for?
• What would we want to achieve if we knew we could not fail?

Example

Common Good’s why is to make health and happiness accessible to anyone, so they fight for the brands that share this purpose.

Other examples of in-house agency positioning

In-house agencies will base their positioning on who they know best, which will be their company’s brands and respective customer bases. Some examples include:

• BBC Creative
• Anheuser Busch’s Draftline
• Google’s Creative Lab 5 or their Brand Studio EMEA

Many in-house agencies also design their organizations to be “full-service.” Therefore, they won’t typically limit their service offering to the degree that the what question requires to develop a strategic advantage against other service providers.

However, the question of what is still essential because it can be used to communicate the type of creative work an in-house agency is best suited to deliver. For example, are you best at production work or strategy and creative concepting?

Unfortunately, I’m unaware of any in-house agencies that answer how or why in a differentiating way on a publicly accessible website. If you have any examples to share, please let me know.

Next steps to becoming a high-performing marketing organization

By answering the questions above, you can define a positioning strategy to increase your organizations’ value and relevance. It will point the way toward how to design your operating model and bring your strategy to life.

The post Why focus is the way forward for high-performing marketing organizations appeared first on MarTech.

Digital asset management (DAM) stores and organizes all of an organization’s digital assets — images, PDFs, photographs, audio, video and even virtual reality or other cutting-edge formats.

It is the “single source of truth,” where marketers can find every relevant version of media assets created for the brand. A DAM also adds metadata that can provide information on anything the marketer might want to know before using it. These include things like does the company have perpetual rights to use a photograph, whether the legal team has approved a video, and if an infographic or whitepaper was checked for brand design standard compliance.

How do companies use DAM?

Marketing agencies might leverage DAM technology to maintain consistency across in-house content and creatives developed by partners. B2B businesses might draw on the benefits of a centralized hub for sales collateral and event marketing materials. DAMs are being integrated with other technologies, especially content management systems and digital experience platforms, to unify marketing asset management and distribute digital content directly to the channels where they’re consumed.

Why are so many organizations using DAMs?

First is consumer expectations.

Nearly three quarters of customers expect companies to understand their unique wants and needs — up from two-thirds in 2020, according to the fifth edition of Salesforce’s The State of the Connected Customer. The benefits of this personalization are clear. Companies using more granular personalization experience significant gains in conversions, revenue per visitor and average order value, according to an Incisiv Adobe study.

Second is the expanding number of channels and devices consumers are using.

DAMs make it easier to create and repurpose marketing content according to the different needs of the medium and format. They also support the entire content lifecycle – from upstream creative to downstream delivery. They support work-in-progress for content, speeding asset workflows, reviews and approvals, as well as connecting with tools like Adobe Creative Cloud, Canva and Microsoft Office.

This guide is for marketers who are looking to enhance their campaigns with digital assessment management technologies. Here’s what’s inside:

• Capabilities of digital asset management platforms
  • Workflow management
  • File formats and handling
  • Asset conversion, editing and customization
  • Distribution and user permissions management
  • Search and metadata
  • Digital rights and corporate governance management
  • Reports and analytics
  • Data storage and security
  • Integrations

• What are the benefits of using a digital asset management (DAM) system?

Capabilities of digital asset management platforms

Digital asset management platforms have everything from legacy features, like file management, to emerging capabilities due to the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Here is a detailed look.

Workflow management

DAM systems differ in the extent of their workflow management capabilities. Some allow collaboration through @ tagging, while others have more full-fledged project management offerings. This can help marketing teams, along with outside creative resources, communicate about changes while an asset is in development or being updated.

Later, they can allow for approvals to be obtained from brand managers, execs and the legal team, while some systems also facilitate asset distribution. These capabilities may be built into the core platform or offered as an add-on or integration. Most DAMs are SaaS and can be accessed from browsers, but some have developed native apps.

File formats and handling

One area of differentiation is the ability to manage a variety of file formats. Most support common popular video, image and audio formats. However, if your workflow requires the use of a specialized format you need to ensure any system you’re considering can handle it.

Asset conversion, editing and customization

Some platforms allow an asset uploaded in one format to be downloaded or distributed in another — with conversions happening on the fly. Also, some have lightweight editing capabilities within the platform. To be clear, connections with common image editing software (Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, etc.) are typically more useful.

Distribution and user permissions management

The content production supply chain can involve many departments, agencies, freelancers and more. The ability to provide flexible permissions, so the right people have access to the right assets –– and only the right assets –– is very valuable.

Within agencies, in particular, these capabilities can give clients/customers convenient self-service capabilities. It also lets large enterprises maintain a consistent brand message across geographies and verticals, while still letting marketers and salespeople can help themselves to the materials they need.

Search and metadata

One of the most important benefits of a DAM is the ability to find assets after they’ve been created and filed away. Most providers now use artificial intelligence, either proprietary or through a partnership, for image and video recognition and tagging. Vendors are also exploring ways to use AI and machine learning to find insights and automate content transformations based on usage patterns.

Digital rights and corporate governance management

Most marketers license content from individual creators or stock libraries. DAMs can keep track of the specific license terms governing each piece of content, ensuring they’re not used in the wrong market, an unapproved context or after license expiration.

Corporate brand guidelines, as well as timelines associated with particular marketing campaigns, can also typically be managed with DAM functionality.

Reports and analytics

Analytics capabilities allow marketers to trace the return on the investment made in the development of digital media. They can also determine which assets are used most often and in what ways, proividing insights for planning future content creation.

Data storage and security

The majority of DAM providers partner with Amazon Web Services or Google to host their software and their clients’ assets. This means following those companies’ policies for geographical distribution, backups and security protocols. However, some players offer clients a variety of options for data hosting. This is useful for enterprises working with strict data governance regulations.

Integrations

Since a DAM is meant to be the central “single source of truth” repository for all of a brand’s assets, it must integrate well with the rest of your martech stack. Vendors differ greatly in terms of the number and types of integrations they offer. Some are beginning to specialize in serving a specific sector with unique integration needs, such as online retailers using product information management systems.

Explore DAM solutions from vendors like Acquia, Widen, Cloudinary, MediaValet and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on digital asset management platforms.

Click here to download!

What are the benefits of using a digital asset management system?

Digital asset management systems can play a vital role in your marketing organization, unifying online and offline marketing channels and leading to more efficient marketing resource allocation.

The specific benefits of using a digital asset management platform include – but are not limited to – the following:

• Improved communication between in-house and freelance/contract workers.
• Improved distribution of assets to clients, partners or other outsiders.
• More efficient utilization of existing resources.
• Increased efficiency in the workflow for internal approvals.
• Speed the conversion of assets into different sizes, aspect ratios and file types.
• More efficient creation and distribution of assets to martech and adtech systems.
• Easier compliance with changing brand standards and licensing terms.
• Ease of presenting a more consistent brand face to the customer.
• Ability to quantify the usage of each individual digital asset, and therefore track ROI on the cost of creation and distribution.

Read next: Does your organization need a digital asset management platform?

The post What is digital asset management and how can it help you? appeared first on MarTech.

Given all of that promise, marketers are certainly evaluating these technologies and one crucial part of that process is the demo.

Things to think about before your DAM demo

It’s important to set up demos as close to each other as possible to help make relevant comparisons. Also, make sure all potential internal users are on the demo call, and pay attention to the following:

• How easy is the platform to use?
• Does the vendor seem to understand our business and our marketing needs?
• Are they showing us our “must-have” features?

Explore DAM solutions from vendors like Acquia, Widen, Cloudinary, MediaValet and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on digital asset management platforms.

Click here to download!

Questions to ask during your DAM vendor demo

The following 20 questions will help gauge if these platforms are right for your organizations.

File types

• What file types do you support, meaning users can view thumbnails and also convert those files into other formats as needed?
• What file types can be uploaded and downloaded, but aren’t officially supported?

Integrations

• Do you offer native, off-the-shelf integrations with third-party systems such as web content management, mobile apps, marketing automation platforms, etc.? If so, which ones?
• Are APIs available? Is access included in the pricing?

Infrastructure and onboarding

• What makes this platform technically unique from all the others?
• How difficult is the platform set up and implementation? How long will it take for us to be up and running on the system?
• How intuitive is the platform user interface? How easy is it for business users to customize the machine learning-based models or settings?
• What is your service reliability guarantee?
• Do you host the content yourself or who do you work with for hosting capabilities?
• How scalable is the platform? How much data can it handle in terms of file size and simultaneous interactions across a wide geographic area?

Pricing and support

• What is pricing based on? What features are included? Are there additional fees (consulting, add-on features, APIs, quotas)?
• What is the minimum contract length? Is there a short-term contract or an “out” clause if things don’t work out?
• Is a free trial or pilot program available?
• Can your platform be white-labeled for agencies or multi-location marketers?
• Who will be the day-to-day contact?
• Who pays if your system/team makes an error?
• What kind of customer support is available? Can I pick up the phone to report problems?

Strategy and product roadmap

• Do you have other clients in my vertical?
• How does the company handle requests for product modifications?
• What new features are you considering? What’s the long-term roadmap and launch dates?

The post 20 questions to ask digital asset management platform vendors during the demo appeared first on MarTech.

Marketing operations is what makes the magic happen. These are the folks who see that your martech stack doesn’t get stuck. They are the maestros, modelers and makers who make sure the trains run, the data is digestible and that you have the programs you need. Where would we be without them? That’s too scary to think about. Here’s our list of MOps experts who have the ear of the profession.

Darrell Alfonso

Darrell is director of marketing strategy & operations at Indeed and the former global marketing ops leader for AWS. He’s the author of “The Martech Handbook: Build a Technology Stack to Acquire and Retain Customers.” In addition to speaking at many conferences, Darrell was named one of the Top Marketers in the US by Propolis 2022 and among the “Top Martech Marketers to Follow” in 2020 by Martech Alliance. He’s a regular and popular contributor both to MarTech and the MarTech conference; you can find all of his articles at this link.

• LinkedIn: DarrelAlfonso (40K followers)
• Blog: DarrelAlfonso.com
• Twitter: @DemandDarrel (13K followers)

Eddie Reynolds

Eddie has been in business a long time, starting his first company when he was 14. “A pretty minimal enterprise,” he told one interviewer. “I had a tax ID number, a legal entity, and a company name. I even had the IRS coming after my dad for sales tax that I failed to report properly.” Today he is CEO and revenue operations strategy consultant of Union Square Consulting. He publishes The RevOps Weekly Newsletter and the podcast RevOps Corner. Eddie’s large LinkedIn following attests to the quality of the insights he shares there on  sales, marketing, service, and admin roles. 

• LinkedIn: EdwardReynolds (24K followers)
• Company: Union Square Consulting

Sara McNamara

Sara is an award-winning marketing and sales operations professional whose work has been recognized by awards from the likes of Salesforce (Pardot), Adobe (Marketo), Drift, and LeanData. She is a Senior Manager, Marketing Operations at Slack and a martech stack (+ strategy) solution architect. That and her passion for leveraging technology and processes to improve the experiences of marketers, sales professionals, and prospects, explains why she’s a regular guest on MOps podcasts.

• LinkedIn: SaraMcNamara (16K followers)
• Twitter: @Ifeellikemacmac (2K followers)

Ali Schwanke

Ali is the CEO and founder of Simple Strat. The firm specializes in helping companies get the most out of HubSpot — from CRM strategy and setup to marketing automation and content creation. She is also host of HubSpot Hacks, “the #1 Unofficial YouTube show for HubSpot Tutorials” and has been a guest speaker at the MarTech conference.

• LinkedIn: AliSchwanke (7K followers)
• YouTube: Hubspot Hacks (16K subscribers)
• Twitter: @alischwanke (4K followers)
• Website/Blog: AliSchwanke.com 
• Business: Simple Strat 

Mike Rizzo

Mike’s career in marketing operations showed him that there is a real and significant MOps community. That’s why he founded MO Pros/MarketingOps.com, the fast-growing online community for people in marketing operations. He is also co-host of Ops Cast, a weekly podcast. 

• LinkedIn: MikeDRizzo (7K followers)
• Organization: MarketingOps
• Podcast: Ops Cast

More MarTech experts to follow:

• Marketing operations
• AI and marketing
• Email marketing
• B2B marketing
• Content marketing

The post MarTech’s marketing operations experts to follow appeared first on MarTech.