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New (and less new) solutions to time-old problems
It’s fair to say that the Chief Marketing Officer is worried about the same things that their boss, the CEOs, are worried about.
Juggling limited resources, managing competing priorities and finding time to be more pro-active rank high on the list.
But what can they do about it?
Recent talks with both CMOs and CEOs of financial services and wealth management companies offer solutions.
The solutions our clients are using vary markedly, despite the problems often being the same.
While we can’t offer a magic formula for solving time-old problems, there are a couple of ideas that can help tackle the big three bug-bears.
Juggling limited resources
Headcount limits are the bane of many a CMOs life. Jobs and projects need to be delivered, but with headcount a priority, employing permanent staff is not an option.
One solution is to use contractors. The right contractors can help deliver key projects, without taking up headcount or resulting in fixed salary budgets. For some businesses, on-call contractors have replaced full marketing teams. Interestingly while this isn’t a new solution, it seems to work better now – perhaps thanks to a more qualified, agile and senior contractor workforce.
However, even with limited resources, many CMOs are saying one key role is that of the writer – a good one goes a long way. Quality content, on message, and distributed across disparate channels is eminently achievable with limited resources. It just takes the right person.
Competing priorities
Competing priorities is very much the ugly sister of limited resources. Scarce resources mean difficult choices need to be made, often on a daily basis.
It sounds obvious, but the best solution to the problem of competing priorities is putting the things that clients really want to the top of the list. For example, time spent developing a website and filling it with content may not achieve as much as you would like it to. A recent study shared at the PAICR Conference in New York this year showed that almost none of the content a particular firm had on their website met clients’ requirements. Resources could clearly have been better spent elsewhere.
And that’s where attribution analytics are so important. Knowing which part of a limited budget is performing is the first step towards making the hard calls. Our experience is that clients are increasingly rating the impact of traditional methods in driving leads and achieving marketing outcomes.
For example our clients tell us there is a strong correlation between media coverage generated through traditional PR and web hits. The same is true of in-person events and new business opportunities.
So one thought is this: don’t discount the tried and true. It can be tempting to place all our efforts in the shiny new toy of content marketing and social media, but more often these initiatives support existing marketing and communication efforts, not replace them.
Finding time to be pro-active
Starting with client need means actually finding out what they want. And that starts with having time to be pro-active.
The trick of course is finding the time to be pro-active, particularly in a smaller firm where resources are limited and time scarce. One solution here is to develop a marketing routine that ensures planning time is set aside and results of different campaigns and initiatives reviewed regularly. That way the things that work are repeated, and those that don’t aren’t.
The KISS (keep it simple stupid) principle still applies. Sometimes just talking to clients can give insights that no amount of market research, data or analytics will match.
Most of us in the industry would agree that marketing is now at an online tipping point. This means that being “always on” in a social media driven world and finding ways of bringing previously static materials to life digitally is a new challenge we all face.
So what does this all mean for CMO? Well, sometimes, in the new social media driven world, the answer is the same as it was in the old world. Experience counts, or as one asset management CMO said at the 2013 PAICR conference earlier this year.
Fail fast, learn from it, and move on.
Sounds like good advice.
Parts of this blog were previously published on www.cardencalder.com, under the title “What keeps the asset management CMO up at night?”
