Marketing Meanders with Sally and Sam

We've had a nice long chat through some of the challenges of being the only marketer in an organisation, and more importantly some remedies. 

Are you, or have you ever been the only marketer in an organisation? If you are, you'll know of the particular challenges this can present, the expectations placed upon you, the evangelising you need to carry out, feeling a little lonely, and having to cave out marketing's niche. We discuss both the challenges and a number of solutions in our two part episode. 

What are the warning signs of a looming political battle and how can you head it off? How can the budget help to unite teams and unpick competing political viewpoints in the organisation? Why should you establish networks within your organisation an work hard at transparent communication of your plans to as many people as possible?

We talk about the sometimes exhausting world of the politics involved in marketing and organisations generally. the politics which influence the strategy you're able to set out, the operational resources you can utilise and the tactical campaigns you are able to deploy.  What are some of the typical political battles marketers encounter? How can we try to get decisions made without the political arguments? How do you face political obstacles and gain agreement? Where and when should you make your boundaries clear, and how can we elevate internal discussions to what matters to the customer?

In part two of our budgets episode we take a look at these questions: When will you look forward to setting up a budget and managing it? Have you considered the human resources you are using? How can you get inventive when budgets are cut and how do budget cuts focus your marketing?

Well, as we all settle in to the latest COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, Sally and I are talking about outsourcing in marketing, and in small businesses. When should you consider outsourcing, what should you perhaps outsource, who should you outsource to, and how do you decide between providers? Most importantly, how do you brief suppliers for outsourcing, and how can this represent half the battle won in outsourcing?

And today we pick up where we left off last year with Toby Roe of Roe Communications with our meander on the subject of PR in part two of our episode we touched on these questions: Where is the boundary between PR and content marketing? Can you prove the ROI for PR and what does media training entail?

Welcome to our bumper Christmas and New Year holidays compilation, featuring all of our special guest interviewees from the last few months. Gain some top tips and insights from our array of specialists in one episode. Why not enjoy by the fireside whilst sipping a favourite drink, or on a long winter's walk.

Hear from Toby Roe on PR, James Holden on websites, Hugo Pickering on Marketing Analytics, Emma Wyatt on LinkedIn, Amanda Claesens on Market Research, Barry Clark on Sales Conferences and Stefan Thomas on Networking. 

Access the part one of their two part episodes here:

Why do you need a website in the first place? What is your website there to do, and how do you know if it's doing it? When are chat bots a good idea, and why should you be different to get noticed in your marketing? 

Here Sam discusses an example of a the selling process, what he liked and what he thought could be improved about a recent sales call he heard. See if you agree, and let us know of any interesting sales stories you've experienced. 

We recently hosted a small poll on the most pressing challenge for marketers in Q1 2021, we gave four options, and the winner by a country mile was audience online overload. So we decided to talk about this as the major issue for Q1 2021 in this episode, amongst other pressures we can see, like budget constraints. We ended up having quite a deep and meaningful chat about how online overload is effecting most of us, both in our personal and professional lives, so we thought of some ideas to try and address this. 

As we know, analytics are an essential part of marketing, but so often analytics systems and reports can be slightly hard to interpret, and to draw useful insights from, if you're not sure what to measure, and why. It can be all too easy these days with obliging platforms to produce lots of lovely colourful charts, but what are the sort of fundamental considerations you need to have in place to create meaningful data insights?

Sally takes a highly practical meander through Project Management, answering a host of questions in under 10 minutes!  What should effective project management achieve? How can it work? How should project management systems be set up, and what are the crucial work processes they can help you with?

Welcome to part two of our LinkedIn special with LinkedIn strategy consultant Emma Wyatt.

In this episode we dig deeper into the professional network and explore some more questions, and provide, what we hope are helpful answers. Questions like, how often should we post on LinkedIn? Why should you interact with other post on LinkedIn and comment on them, and what sort of paid campaigns should you launch on the platform?

"A strategy makes it easier to make decisions, and it means you'll make better decisions more quickly"  Sally Green, 2020

In part two of our strategy episode we talk about aligning strategy to roles within teams and marketing job descriptions, great people's thinking about strategy, organisational mission statements, and how organisations truly live their strategy, both in terms of what they do, and how this compares to their brand proposition.

This is a real cracker! It features deliciously practical observations and helpful tips from Sally, and sneakily smuggled in military history references from Sam.

What do the different levels of marketing really mean, and how does this matter to you and your team? How does it affect your planning and decision making? How do you make meaningful links between the levels, and how does this impact your organisation and resourcing? Why do so many people overuse of the words strategic and strategy?!

How long is your current marketing plan? How long does it need to be? Does a one page marketing plan sound crazy? Have a listen and see what you think...

In this episode Sally and Barry discuss feeling safe to share your concerns, sales and marketing teams utilising CRM systems effectively,  finding and sharing meaningful reporting data, and reimagining reporting relationships and performance assessment.

Where do customer journeys actually start, how do we know if they're optimised, what's our customer lifetime value and how can you get the most out of CRMs?

A number of us will have been to sales conferences in the past, and no doubt have memorable stories of them to share. However, when you take a deeper look, what are sales conferences actually for? Who needs to be at sales conferences, and how do you facilitate meaningful conversations at them?

What do data visualisations, practical steps for consuming market research data and learning from 'negative feedback' have in common? The second part of our Marketing Meander with Amanda Claesens of course! 

Do you know how much time you spend fulfilling the key functions of your job? Do you know how much time you need to spend on these key functions? How much time is spent on less productive, or unrelated areas? How much time do you spend working on tasks which you aren't best placed to complete in an optimal way, tasks that someone else might be best to complete?

If you haven't done this already, you'd probably be surprised how you actually spend your time every day, or every week of every year!

What is market research? How much does it cost? When should you use it? How do you act on its results? 

Want to hear more about market research? What is it, how does it work, what are the pitfalls, how do you make the most of research projects and act on the results? 

As the economic impact of the COVID 19 pandemic bites our marketing budgets are starting to suffer. These are horrible times for so many, and we'd like to try and help facilitate the sharing of advice and support amongst marketers and small business owners. A way of doing this sharing experiences, tips, advise and moral support; you're not alone in having to be creative when 60% plus of your budget is cut!

So this is a call out to anyone who wants to share their tips, advice and experiences of working through times of meagre budgets. How did you adapt expectations, build a case to defend your budget, make the most of organic campaigns, build strengths for the future recovery, support your colleagues experiencing this situation for the first time, and help keep them motivated?

Should you attempt to do ALL marketing activities yourself? What are the pitfalls of trying to be a jack of all trades when it comes to marketing, and how can you harness the skills of others?

Once we have our personas researched, tested and agreed, how do we work at relationships with our audiences so that 'they end with a smile not a slap'? 

Take a listen to Part 2 of our audiences podcast to see if you agree with our thinking.

Please let us know how you process the constant deluge of new concepts and technologies of marketing. Are you one of those who needs exposing to a new ideas multiple times before investigating it, or do you jump in quickly? Do you refine down your notes from education courses into three relevant concepts that you will actually deploy in your marketing? Do you 'manage' your consumption of new marketing ideas from particular gurus that you admire? How often have you actually persuaded others in your team to take on a new approach? 

We'll be covering ways to survive and thrive the incessant stream of marketing innovations in a future podcast, and we'd love to have some of your examples and questions on the subject.