Many CMO 's and Marketing Managers are in the long line of organizations vying for talent in marketing, data and analytics positions. The number of job postings with "marketing" or "data" in the job title on LinkedIn is around 80,000. Everyone seems to be looking.
Meanwhile, invitations to peers on the platform's timeline are flying around your ears. Come work at our super-fat company," "help us rise to the absolute top," and "blow off steam every Friday afternoon with your new colleagues during the table football competition on our unique roof terrace. Oh well, at some point the superlatives also run out. Then we just join the queue again. Waiting for talent. Or you hire an expensive recruitment agency. Then they line up for you.
What can you do besides waiting for talent?
Besides waiting for available talent while your marketing department is busy and understaffed, there are things you can work on in the short term. Roles, Resources, Efficiency and Expectations are four important and self-influencing factors. Investing in your marketing team is more than replacing Thomas or Sanne with a smarter Thomas or 'digital native' Sanne.
1. Roles
Have you already re-examined the structure of your own role and that of the marketing department? And not to fill in the gaps that have fallen as cleverly as possible, reallocate, and move on again.
Incredible when you consider how much work goes into improper, cumbersome or hardly motivating work. While we sense that things should be different, we perform many tasks every day that we are not really suited for. Managers in particular are masters at maintaining the usual ways of working. Nice and predictable. Moreover, for some in the organization, marketing is an amalgam of everything that pretty much has to do with analysis, content, communication and a logo. Or if you just don't know where the topic belongs. The payoff from all those jobs is vague.
Mostly managers are masters at enforcing common practices. Nice and predictable.
Are you taking yourself seriously? As a manager or specialist, first look yourself in the mirror. Write down the 5 things where you are delivering the most to your organization this year. From there, work on redefining your time and activities. Then notice how quickly you become motivated and get others in the organization behind you.
2. Resources
Many marketers seem either overworked or overextended. Specialties have grown extremely in maturity over the past 10 years. The problem is that you have to level with those developments because you can't do without one or the other. You can't have a strong, creative brand without activation. You can't have inbound without outbound. Content not without data, data not without analytics and personalization not without automation. So on and so forth.
The marketing department is too small, expectations high. It feels like a chicken-and-egg problem. The tools marketing works with are often considered fixed. "We work with that software and it still works fine" and "that's just the way our data warehouse is. Good tools are half the job. Now what if there are better tools that solve half your capability problems?"
Has time been taken to scrutinize all the software tools, vendors and process tools? I suggest spending two days on it. From your own marketing perspective, not from IT, Finance or any other department. How would you set it up if you were starting over today?
