Blog for marketers and marketing teams

Marketing is a fascinating sector that evolves at lightning speed: everything is better, faster and stronger all the time. Unfortunately, the number of marketers suffering from stress seems to be growing at the same rate.

Professional marketing project management is becoming an ever greater challenge within marketing teams and marketing departments. After all, the ad hoc organization of the average marketer today is no longer aligned with the complex marketing environment and ever-increasing pressure from above in the organization. I see 3 major drivers for marketing project management.

Marketing is more than setting up and managing promotions and campaigns. The success of operational marketing projects is determined by the quality of the strategy that serves as the basis for the implementation. Operational marketing success based on a weak marketing strategy is rare, you know. Good marketers therefore not only execute, they also think about the strategy that must lead to success. Professional marketers go one step further: they define the strategy, document and substantiate it and share it with their colleagues, marketing agency, customers and management. In this way the defined strategy becomes even stronger thanks to the shared insights. In this article I give you some tips and techniques for sharing a defined marketing strategy with other people.

Each marketing team wants to work as efficiently as possible within an external environment that is becoming increasingly agile, uncertain and complex. Agile working – in which multidisciplinary teams search for concrete results via result-oriented sprints and short cycles – is presented as a potential solution. Agile experts know for sure: a sequence of targeted, short-term actions works better than long-term campaigns in certain cases. But is that really the case? And if so: how do I get started? Marketers are left with a lot of questions when they want to introduce agile working within their organisation. In this article I list the most common questions (and answers) for you.

Excel is without doubt the most frequently used tool by marketers to plan projects, actions or campaigns. And with the arrival of Office365, Microsoft offers a cloud-based marketing suite in which you can seamlessly combine Excel with Outlook, Sharepoint, OneDrive, Teams, Planner, Word and Powerpoint. You have all the tools you need to write your marketing strategy, plan, manage tasks, manage budgets, write briefings and monitor results. No wonder the IT department puts the heels in the sand when marketers want to get a marketing planning tool in-house. In this article I sketch the differences between Office365 and a specialized planning tool, but I also outline the complementarity between the two systems.

If you’re going to use new collaboration software with your team, it’s best not to do it overnight. It doesn’t always have to be a week-long preliminary phase, but the better you prepare your first steps, the better the chances of success for increased productivity at team level. These 7 inspiring quotes are sure to help you with that.

Meeting discussions, comments on printed documents, replies to emails … marketers don’t just communicate with the market but also with each other. The way in which the internal communication within a marketing team proceeds is therefore a particularly difficult issue that leads to quite a few … discussions. However, communication about marketing planning issues also extends beyond the team. How do you communicate with freelancers, with key stakeholders, with management and, in the case of marketing agencies, with customers? In this article I review the most common techniques for streamlining the communication within and around marketing teams.

Marketers are confronted with graphic design almost every day. For example, the marketing agency provides designs for advertisements, brochures or mailings. A lot of teams also have a graphic designer or design department that supplies the marketers with graphic design for promotions and marketing campaigns. This entails a considerable flow of communication via email and PDF. One or more correction rounds are always started to bring the initial design to the approved version. In this article I will show how you can streamline the graphic approval process thanks to digital tools.

There are three ways to look at marketing investments. The first is to view them as a necessary evil, with the statement “we have no choice but to invest in marketing”. The second way is to consider marketing as a pillar for brand awareness and branding, as a life insurance policy to keep a company attractive for customers and prospects. The third way is to use marketing as an investment that pays off, that yields concrete results and in this way rolls out the red carpet for sales and business development. I wrote this article for those people who share that last vision.

Professional budgeting is essential in a modern marketing policy. It provides insight into budgeted costs, expected costs and real expenditure. Both at the macro level (plan, project, campaign. etc.) and within micro-budgeting (channels, specific timing, etc.). Marketers who have to manage without professional budgeting are blind in terms of budget, costs and ROI.

A day in the life of a marketer is like that of a juggler trying to keep colored plates up on different sticks. Writing blog posts, preparing events, updating websites, scheduling advertisements, placing social media posts, setting up meetings … These are just a few of the dozens of different tasks that a marketer sees in one day. Marketers are therefore masters of multitasking and can handle a multitude of different tasks in one day.

A communication plan answers the question “What do we communicate to put a project, campaign, product, event, brand, company … on the market?” It shows at a glance which mix of techniques you use to reach and convince the target group(s). The communication plan is therefore an indispensable document in a marketing context. But how do you approach this when different parties are involved in the planning process?

Marketing agencies and marketing teams work together on campaigns and marketing projects. But how far does “together” extend? In practice, after a briefing, the agency starts working internally, reporting and planning via mail, Excel, pdf and meetings. The one party, the agency, executes; the other party, the client, gives feedback. This is repeated until the campaign or project is completed. This works great for creative projects such as rebranding. But what if the agency actively participates in campaigns, for example for content, advertising or PR? Should “together” not really be “together”, in a shared marketing planning? Utopia according to one, because an agency organization does not correspond to a team organization with a client. Hard reality according to us, because marketing technology offers perfect solutions.

How do you put together an efficient marketing team? What do you do internally, what do you outsource? Due to recent developments in marketing the answer to that question is no longer that simple. That’s why we are happy to explain which specialists are indispensable within your dream team.

Fancy a game?

I admit: I’m only human. ‘Topless meetings’ spurred up my imagination when it appeared on my LinkedIn-stream of updates: “Topless meetings are the new trend”.