Marketing Leadership: Looking beyond the tip of the iceberg

On an everyday level, 80% of the marketing focus is on output. Whether it's a promotion, a campaign, a banner, an ad, or multiple of these, it's all about output. The tangible stuff that engages with consumers, clients, and prospects and hence leads to interaction and, ultimately, sales.

For good reason, because sales and revenue provide the oxygen for most companies.

However, seen from a leadership point of view, output is only the tip of the iceberg. As a marketing executive you’ll appreciate that there is a lot more to running a smooth organisation with a lean set up that is agile and able to turn around volumes and tasks.

Think of it as an iceberg where the tip is given 80% of our attention whilst the bulk of the workload is off the radar:

To take control of the rest of the iceberg, we need to look outside of the marketing toolbox to find the answers. A good example of this could be a proven concept, such as business excellence, that helps you understand some of the key components needed to be truly excellent in leading an organisation. And lo and behold - digging deep into the iceberg reveals some meaningful aspects (enablers) that lead to the output that might or might not lead to results:

Original EFQM model for Business Excellence (pre 2020)

For more details about the EFQM (European Foundation for Quality Management) model, please visit the website: http://www.efqm.org/

Any marketing leader needs to be a Master of their own value chain

Digging into the iceberg and get rid of manual processes, Excel-sheets and emails can be complex and frustrating. It most certainly will involve people, processes, and a multitude of internal and external stakeholders that all contribute to the marketing value chain. However, it is equally rewarding and satisfying as the effect it can have on employee satisfaction, agility, and results can be monumental.

We used to think of the marketing value chain as linear and well-structured. Today we understand that we need to think of this value chain more as an algorithm. A complex formula that changes and operates multiple variables to create control over an equally complex content.

The change in the value chain has been driven by multiple factors - some of these being:

• A change in the market structure - suppliers can also be competitors, and the landscape changes rapidly
• More internal and external stakeholders than ever before - believing that you can create results in a marketing silo is a big delusion
• More considerations than ever before - from climate change to equal rights (pick and choose from UN sustainable development goals with 169 individual targets)  
• New skills required - media, production, systems, markets, technologies  
• More skills required - from first-party data to added legal requirements (ie GDPR)
• Data and analytics - know your customer and prove your value
• More products - # SKUs are on the rise in all categories, and new categories are emerging
• More competitors - stay alert - disruption is everywhere
• More channels - customers are everywhere
• More media formats - tech never sleeps
• Globalisation and localisation - the world is your market

So the marketing discipline has never been more complex, and the value chain is a multi-headed beast. Getting control of this is the single most important task of any leader in the marketing sphere.

Obliterating the silos while giving you control

Marketing Work Management

Realising that the tip of the iceberg is not the whole of the iceberg is the first step. Understanding the components that tie together effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity is the next. This is the true source of Marketing Excellence seen from a leadership point of view: Taking in the full skill set of specialists and orchestrating them in best-in-class workflows allows you to do better, do more, and with an unprecedented time-to-market, letting you execute big volumes of great quality.

Marketing Excellence equals EEP

Effectiveness = Doing the right things
Efficiency = Doing things right
Productivity = Output / Input

We started with the glue, and that is why everything still sticks

The Encodify Marketing Work Management platform

Encodify is a leader in the Marketing Work Management space. We pioneered the MarTech industry in 2001 with a simple but brilliant idea, thus inventing the MWM category.

Based on our no-code technology, we have since built industry-leading best-practice Marketing Work Management solutions helping all stakeholders in the marketing value chain to collaborate efficiently. Today we are setting new standards by converging DAM/PIM, workflow, proofing, and project management to help clients innovate and optimise their ways of working.

From a systems landscape point of view, we integrate seamlessly with other specialised tools if and when it makes sense to tie everything together - no tool should be an island and removing a super specialised tool to get control of the total value chain could bring you value you had never dreamed of.

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