Key takeaways:
- Marketing environments have become fast-paced and prone to rapid changes, leading to disorganization.
- Customer journey mapping can bring organization by assigning responsibilities clearly and keeping track of marketing activities.
- Team synchronization issues arise when departments lack communication and detailed updates.
- Complex marketing operations make it difficult to understand and integrate new ideas seamlessly.
- Remote employees face challenges in understanding marketing operations fully, hindering their potential contribution.
Initiated by the wide adoption of the internet, the work culture underwent a drastic change over the last 20 years – everything became fast-paced. Changes are frequent and rapid – new trends get adopted as fast as possible to utilize the early adopter advantage because once a technology or a technique is widely used, a significant part of the edge is gone. This is especially true in the marketing world – everybody is on the lookout for the next big thing that will help to improve the KPIs before others catch on.
This environment makes marketing a very attractive and thrilling industry to work in, but there’s a dark side to it, too: it makes it very disorganized. We’re going to explore the causes point-by-point below, but we also want to offer a solution.
The concept of customer journey mapping has a very beneficial side product: it helps to keep things organized. It’s almost funny how precisely can its adaptation cure the most common causes of disorganized marketing ops. Our tool takes CJM to the next level and formalizes these side-product advantages – we’ll tell you how below each point.
1. Unclear responsibilities (and their overall fading over time)
Do you know these meetings where a ton of new ideas are discussed and approved, and then a few team members are pointed to to “figure it out and take care of it”, plus someone not at the meeting (working remotely or an outside consultant) should be included, too? Then something is put together and released – but there’s no one set to follow, refine, and evaluate these new marketing activities. Then another round of new ideas is born and adapted, and the old ones are forgotten. Over time, these forgotten activities nobody is accountable for start to pile up and either collide with the new ideas in some way or include some unpleasant surprises when finally checked.
How Out of Dark helps: Every marketing activity is part of a customer journey map and has specific team members assigned. It stays on the map so it’s hard to overlook, plus team members can record their check-in every time they check the activity. Since everybody knows who’s responsible for what and it’s easy to check the last time they checked in (check, check, check!), it leaves no room for “Whaaaat, me?”.
2. Teams not in sync
If the marketing department consists of multiple teams and the communication isn’t top-notch (which rarely is), it’s natural they are not perfectly familiar with each other’s work. Weekly updates tend to deal with high-level stuff and don’t always go into details – and these details, or lack thereof, create a huge blindspot for respective team members.
How Out of Dark helps: Teams can see each other’s activities that include a basic description and up-to-date KPIs. As mentioned above, they also include people who are responsible for them, so if details about a specific activity are needed, it’s easy to look up who to get in touch with.
3. The marketing is simply too complex
Not everything is someone’s fault – sometimes marketing operations get so big and so complicated, that it’s impossible to keep track of them and understand how they are supposed to work with each other. Context is key, but there’s no way to provide it to everyone. And when you don’t understand what’s already in place, it’s difficult to come up with new ideas and integrate them into ongoing operations: the risk of them interfering with those already running is very high.
How Out of Dark helps: Besides being on a single customer journey map (or more, if the marketing is really complex), marketing activities are divided into logical phases and are expected to be ordered in logical sequences. Looking at such CJM allows you to see all activities in one place and in context, plus their metrics and KPIs provide you with yet another layer of understanding.
4. Remote employees
Managing remote employees is another cause of disorganized teams – their work is sometimes a mystery to the on-site employees, and sometimes it works the other way around, too. Fully remote teams are forced to cooperate and share everything online, but if a part of the team is on-site, the remote employees are clear outsiders who don’t have access to all the information flowing among team members. They can’t simply sit up from their chair, take a few steps, and ask a colleague – or listen to what others talk about. DMing their co-workers about every single detail they’d like to know more about is not a good look, so they keep the questions to themselves and only ask the crucial ones. Their knowledge of marketing operations is often very narrow and limits their full potential.
How Out of Dark helps: Remote team members can browse all marketing activities in the CJM and easily look up any basic metric or KPI in the activity they’re interested in. Moreover, they can check the historical data, too to see how the performance of an activity was developing over time. Grasping the whole marketing strategy won’t be a problem either, because, again, its basic outline with real data is available in the CJM. Knowing what every team member does won’t be a mystery anymore, either – each activity has an owner.
5. Experiments and targeting
You can’t always precisely know what’s going to work, so the easy way to see and compare the performance of multiple designs, versions, or approaches is to set up a couple of experiments. Then, you want to customize the ads, promotions, emails, and content for your multiple target groups – and just like that, everything gets multiplied. Usually, there are dedicated tools to manage the A/B tests and such, but access to them is limited to a select few directly involved in the experiment, leaving the rest of the marketing department completely in the dark about what’s going on. Then the negative scenarios from all points above are very likely to happen – the experiments are forgotten, valuable information collected from them is not available for everyone to see, or their number and lack of overall clarity simply makes everything a mess.
How Out of Dark helps: You can assign customer personas to individual activities and easily manage the experimental ones. All experiments can be added to the customer journey map and be easy to browse, see in context, manage, and evaluate.
