If Your Marketing Plan Doesn’t Have These 5 Components, It’s Doomed

With more channels, more content, more touchpoints, and more tools, coordination is key.

When you want a new car, building one from scratch doesn’t figure high on the list of options. You’d need to be a serious expert mechanic to source all the different parts and put them together correctly, and even then, it would take a massive investment of time and energy.

Yet that’s effectively the scenario that marketing departments around the world have found themselves in. Modern marketers are living in an ever more complex environment, with more channels, more content, more touchpoints, and more tools than ever before. At the same time, marketing leaders are under more pressure than ever to drive real results and demonstrate their impact on the business.

The response of most marketing departments over time has been to reach for a grab bag of different solutions to address individual pain points. They might buy some analytical tools to get better reports, or workflow tools to tackle inefficient processes or institute quarterly off-site meetings to plot campaign strategy. And they can choose between around 8,000 different marketing technology tools on the market.

The problem is that these solutions only address parts of the marketing challenge, not the whole. Analytical tools are no use without data to build the reports, and those workflow tools and offsite meetings will be ineffective without a system that monitors the progress of campaigns and creates accountability around them.   

The two biggest pain points that top marketing executives consistently cite are a lack of visibility into campaign effectiveness, and the lengthy time it takes to get campaigns up and running.

Visibility is obscured by the multiple functions — more than 20 in big marketing departments — that specialize in different parts of the marketing puzzle. Speed to market is slowed by inefficient workflows and processes, leading to an average time of 12 weeks from campaign ideation to activation, according to a recent Sirkin Research report that we commissioned. Too many marketers still spend the bulk of their time writing emails, composing PowerPoints, and having meetings about meetings rather than doing the actual work of marketing.

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