Blog for marketers and marketing teams

Marketing results dashboards exist in many scents and colours. From super-simple to super-complex. From super-quick to ‘don’t start’. This article is written for those who are satisfied with measuring a few KPIs. You don’t need a supersonic marketing dashboard to monitor this. However, do you want to avoid creating a separate Excel document again? Then it’s best to do that right away in your marketing planning. In this way, planning and results are linked to each other.

Marketing meetings are a must to make marketing teams work efficiently. But they are also often a headache for marketing managers and marketing team leaders. Reason: they are not consistently (sufficiently) organized, there are no procedures or agreements, the preparation is insufficient, the meeting itself shoots in all directions and lacks its purpose, the to do’s discussed are neither documented nor complied with, the tools are fragmented, after the meeting numerous informal consultation moments arise that cross the meeting, … and so on. In this article I would like to share my marketing meeting experience as a marketing team leader at Husky and show how we are constantly making our marketing meetings more efficient.

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.

The communication plan is one of the cornerstones of a professional marketing policy. Marketers who work without a communication plan are condemned to work ad hoc within a multitude of tasks with deadlines. In other words: hopping from task to task is not the most ideal way to conduct a communication or marketing policy. The communication plan draws the lines (vision) for the future, divides the umbrella concept of ‘communication’ into different projects, gives peace of mind and puts all noses in the same direction.

Participation in one or more public fairs or trade fairs is part of many marketing plans and budgets. Anyone who plans an event knows that there are many steps in a planning process that must lead to a successful trade fair participation. From my point of view – as a marketing consultant and founder of a planning tool for marketeers – I see a lot of ad hoc work during this planning process. Marketers run from deadline to deadline and never get a grip on or an overview of the planning process for the trade fair. I plead for a radical turnaround, away from ad hoc work and rushing to the next deadline. The solution? Divide your fair trade participation into 6 clear stages, with detailed workflows attached to each stage. In this article I sketch the 6 key stages for a successful trade fair participation and give you tools for workflows and trade fair planning.

Recently I witnessed a heated discussion among business managers and clients of marketing agencies. The starting point of the discussion was the question “What type of agency am I?”. In the end it turned out that the way owners looked at their marketing agency was not the way clients position marketing agencies in the market. A mismatch between corporate image (how does the market look at me) and corporate identity (what do I want to radiate to the market). Seriously, because every marketer builds an image or identity and works on an identical brain position among customers and prospects. Isn’t that right? And me, I leaned back and enjoyed myself while the clichés and jargon were projected in the room.

The spectacle then kept haunting me for days. How do I actually look at the world of marketing agencies? How do I make a decision for one agency or the other? And how many types do I think exist? Read with me…

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.

The new feature Proofing in Husky helps marketing agencies and marketing teams work together more efficiently to review and approve graphical marketing material faster and easier.

Do you want to make the communication strategy visible to colleagues, management, stakeholders or customers? Then a written communication plan in Word or Powerpoint will not be enough for you. What you need is a 2-dimensional visualization of projects, channels and moments within a certain timeline. This is what most communication plans in Excel look like: a horizontal the timeline at the top (first dimension) and vertically on the left the projects, channels and moments.