Business is a team effort, and no department reaches its full potential without effective cross-functional collaboration. Marketing has a critical role in building and nurturing new relationships with customers and prospects, while also holding responsibility for activities some stakeholders may perceive as a cost center. In today’s economic environment, where doing more with less has never before been more urgent, it’s critical for marketing leaders to collaborate, share strategies, measure results and continually adapt their approach over time. Below are four strategies for elevating confidence in the marketing department.
1. Collaborate with other departments, especially Sales. Marketing should collaborate with Sales to understand how Marketing can support and complement the Sales process. Marketing should be as responsive to Sales support needs as possible, while balancing its tactical support and strategic planning roles. Although it may take some effort to find balance initially, the benefits of collaborating with and supporting Sales are significant. Sales can help Marketing to build a better awareness of competitive activity and customer needs in the field, while Marketing can share insights to help shorten the sales cycle. Finally, collaboration with Sales links Marketing’s contributions directly to Sales activity and revenue generation, which helps to quantify Marketing’s organizational impact and value.

Part one of this series addressed trends in marketing localization as measured by CMO’s and reported in a recent CMO Council study. In this blog, we discuss how to adapt your content to local buyers and markets. Below are some tactical suggestions for localizing your marketing efforts.

Whether your rebranding decision is driven by a merger or acquisition or competitive reasons that necessitate refreshing your brand image in the marketplace, irrespective of the catalyst for change, rebranding strategies require time and research to be done right: Setting your rebrand strategy is just the beginning. Below is our guide to executing a seamless rebrand, including a review of the channels and materials affected and recommended best practices for managing the transition.

Joint, co-branded events are an effective tool in your marketing promotions mix to help distributed sales channels reach new prospects and close the sale. Events and seminars are excellent opportunities for new prospects to learn more about your product or service, and in-person meetings with current customers can also generate new up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. Co-op marketing events and seminars also provide a means for insurance, financial services and manufacturers, such as building products companies, to get closer to their end-customers while overseeing delivery of the brand message. Here’s your checklist for executing a seamless co-op marketing event or seminar from start to finish.

As new marketing technologies proliferate, businesses face a dramatic shift in the traditional model of technology management, creating an emergent need to bridge the IT-Marketing gap with marketing technology champions. With this shift has come the advent of the Marketing Technology Office, which, according to a new report from Forrester Research, works to organize all customer data in a central framework for the adaptive enterprise.

DocuStar’s MarketHUB+ marketing resource management system is a finalist for the Cincinnati USA Innovation Awards to be announced tonight! In the spirit of that designation, below we share some of our ideas to encourage marketing innovation.

Marketing innovation cannot and should not be an isolated process. One of the pitfalls of functional silos is that information can tend to stay within the department, but with so many departments directly interacting with customers in the customer value chain, it’s critical to engage all functional groups in the innovation process to help inspire new ideas. Here are four suggestions:

Beyond creating brand awareness, manufacturers such as building products companies often want to help and guide distributors in generating new leads. It can be challenging to develop target lists and execute marketing campaigns in coordination with distributors because they often have multiple manufacturer relationships. But the easier you are to work with as a manufacturer – including your internal processes, systems, and technology – the better your distributor collaboration will be. Marketing Resource Management (MRM) systems can help you automate turnkey lead generation campaigns for your distributors. Below, we take you step-by-step through the campaign process.

Marketing professionals are called to deliver tactical marketing support while maintaining a big-picture, strategic view, and it can be hard to find balance between the two competing priorities. Tactical and strategic marketing functions can be especially hard to balance because they divide our focus between important, urgent and important, not urgent activities (think Stephen Covey’s Quadrant I & II activities). Tactical execution against strategic goals is critical for driving marketing results, but it’s important not to skew so far towards the tactical that focus on strategic activities wanes: Strategic marketing activities help to bolster marketing innovation. Here are some of our suggestions for helping to find and maintain balance.

With emerging new entrants to social bookmarking such as Tumblr and Pinterest, the social media landscape is rapidly evolving, while consumers are flocking to social networking sites en masse around the globe. Your employees, whether you are a B2B or B2C business, are powerful brand advocates for your company, which is why it’s so important for marketing to be at the hub of brand advocacy in the Digital Age, engaging with and mobilizing your employees to champion the core values of your brand. Below are some thoughts about brand advocacy in the Digital Age:

Whether you’re an insurance company with independent agents or a manufacturer going to market through a distributor or dealer channel, selling via third party sales channels presents a unique set of challenges. Because distributors and dealers traditionally coordinate sales activities for multiple product lines, how do you rely on a third party channel to market your products effectively, and how can you help to ensure that you are the brand of choice? Here’s your go-to checklist for improving distribution channel engagement.