lead change + build a marketing powerhouse

Marketing leaders are being asked to do more with less. But smaller budgets don’t have to mean less business impact. You can continue to do more sophisticated marketing despite resource constraints if you have an intentional plan informed by your organization’s unique circumstances and learnings from market leaders.

This is the perspective Barbara Moreno, VP of Marketing at Allied Universal^®, and Brittany Trafis, our EVP of Digital Marketing, shared recently at Forrester’s B2B Summit in Austin, Texas. The session was among the best-attended case study presentations at the conference, so we’re sharing the highlights and slides in case you might find them helpful. If you have any questions about applying these methods to your own situation, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

As a marketing leader, you always want to be in a position to drive value for your organization.  Following these steps will help you prove ROI.

The process we took consisted of four simple steps.

1. set an ambitious vision:

Create a marketing vision that stretches internal staff and agency partners to be best in class despite limitations (roles, KPIs, core values). We went through constant evaluation to create our unified vision.

2. find partners for the future: 

We then evaluated whether our current partners aligned with our vision and core values, removing partners who did not.

3. establish clear goals: 

When setting benchmarks, we were intentional in being aware of market trends and gaining a clear understanding of success metrics, constant evaluations, and optimizations. Start small, focusing on the first year, then expand into the second year and beyond.

4. create a definitive road map: 

To go from the current state to best-in-class, we went through the marketing maturity curve. This can be overwhelming at first. Together, we created an intentional approach to achieving our goals despite small budgets and big expectations.

We embarked on a collaborative journey to map where we were, with an eye on trends and best-in-class practices. This allowed us to set an annual focus and make progress along our road map.