Today I would like to focus on the first rule of robust, healthy marketing strategies and campaigns: marketing is a company-wide responsibility and process. Too often, marketing is relegated to one department, and that department gets demands thrown at it left and right. People demand new collateral constantly, and everybody outside the marketing department has an urgent request for the marketing folks. Why does this happen? A few reasons:

• More often than not, the people in the marketing department are not the most knowledgeable people in the company when it comes to the product. Not to say that the marketing department should not be deeply knowledgeable about the product—it should—but there is no way your marketing communications specialist will know as much about a product as the people in R&D who designed it. Those people in R&D who hold the greatest wealth of knowledge often consider marketing, or interfacing with marketing, or doing anything for marketing as not part of their job or simply as a nuisance. So, when the marketing communications specialist does her best job to pull together a product brochure, she often lacks the input of the person who knows the most. This is problematic because it can lead to displeasure amongst the non-marketing staff upon reading marketing material, forcing rewrites and making the job of the people in marketing a great deal harder; in technical industries, the problem extends out to the tech-savvy customer who recognizes fluff or lack of technical clarity in a brochure when she sees it.
• In many cases, the marketing department is not directly in touch with the most current or pressing customer needs or expectations, so sales teams rarely get what they need from marketing on the first try. Making both  the rest of the company and the customer happy means deeply involving your sales team in the company’s marketing strategy; they are the ones that can best tell you what value proposition will hit home with the customer.
• Sometimes, marketing staff work off specs and internal product descriptions to create collateral. If marketing staff don’t get hands-on experience with the product, the collateral may not accurately reflect the reality of the product, or might miss something that really makes the product a stand-out.
• In certain cases, marketing staff lack a big-picture view of what the company goals are, and perhaps of what a company’s long-term strategy entails. This can be particularly true in a company that has many divisions or a company that undergoes regular mergers or acquisitions. Involving business development staff or other staff responsible for planting the seeds of long-term growth is essential to good marketing practices, and keeps you ahead of the curve.

By involving all parts of an organization directly in marketing tasks, the best ROI on marketing collateral is achieved. Getting the best version of a value proposition, the most precise information regarding product features or capabilities, and the message most in line with long-term strategies and recent developments will increase the effectiveness of all collateral. I will discuss in detail how to get buy-in and participation from various parts of your organization for marketing tasks in future posts, starting with sales.

Read More…

• Back to Basics Marketing
• You Are Here Marketing as Company Wide Responsibility
• Mobilization: Reaching Outside the Marketing Department
• Advanced Lead Qualification: Sales and Marketing Work Together
• Sales’ Feedback into Marketing: Profiling Prospects and Their Problems
• “Inside Marketing”: Marketing to Your Own Sales Organization
• Developing Unique, Customer-Focused Value Propositions
• How to Train an Entry-Level Marketing Employee
• When Return on Investment Doesn’t Paint a Full Picture
• Defining and Presenting Value Propositions in a Competitive Market
• Logos and Promotional Product Designs for “Difficult” Subjects
• Defining and Refining Value Propositions for Luxury Items
• Evaluating Return-On-Investment (ROI) for Tradeshow Activities
• Management Mistake in Small Business: No Investment during Trying Times