FMI Agency takes learnings from this year’s digital marketing projects and provides guidance and advice on how marketing directors can better drive efficiencies through digital marketing tools in 2024.
The Digital Marketing ToolKit for Marketing Directors 2024 Edition
As multinational corporations seek to cut overheads by reducing headcount, remaining staff in businesses are taking on increased workloads with fewer colleagues and team members to support. According to a Workfront study, 80% of marketing professionals who participated in the study claimed that they are overloaded with work.
Increasingly marketing directors are widening their geographical areas of responsibility, and combined with the increased work volumes, are seeking a digital marketing toolkit as a way to reduce their marketing workload and inefficiencies.
How to implement a digital marketing strategy and planning toolkit
For businesses selling through channel, there are often times where there are many marketing activities happening in multiple territories, across hundreds of channel partners, reaching thousands of channel staff. This can make the directing of marketing particularly challenging, regularly trying to design, manage and execute many campaigns with your team in the limited time available.
Irrespective of territory, business objectives will largely speaking be the same, to drive brand awareness and increase sales. Whilst products may differ, rules and regulations may be localised, and partner requirements vary, there will be similarities, and these should be leveraged by marketing.
Providing resources your marketing team actually want and need is necessary to achieving an effective marketing strategy. Allowing them to contribute to the sourcing and decision making on digital marketing toolkits used will ensure that they are onboard and supportive of the overall marketing strategy.
Frequent marketing director pain points
Legal and compliance
Most marketing directors, particularly those working in a regulated environment, will know the lengthy time and resource repeatedly required to ensure that any marketing activity campaign is fully compliant and approved by their legal department. This can sometimes mean that campaigns do not come to fruition and the opportunity to engage a partner can be missed.
Delivering against objectives
With thousands of channel staff to engage, marketing directors need the confidence that their teams of marketing professionals are implementing the right campaigns to their partners, specifically aligned to meet the agreed objectives. What is the ROI on a campaign and how are marketing managers deciding which campaign to activate and when? Without micro-management it can be difficult to ensure that all campaigns implemented are being done so specifically to meet the end goals, such as brand awareness or driving sales.
Third-party supplier management
When delivering marketing campaigns and activities across multiple geographic regions it’s necessary to have fully approved and vetted third-party suppliers who can deliver. From local print production and translations, through to region specific food and gifts it can take time to source and onboard new third-party suppliers with procurement, resulting in poor performance or missed delivery slots.
The problems of marketing directors being overworked and being responsible for such large multi-territories can lead to inefficiencies and the same task being done repeatedly. This is where digital marketing tools come in.
Driving efficiencies through digital marketing toolkits
Customisable digital sales and marketing tools, such as a partner toolkit, can support corporations to get the best out of their marketing teams. These tools can be designed and implemented to help address the pain points that most marketing directors suffer, even driving performance and output to exceed business expectations and surpass targets.
Define a set of business goals and objectives and decide the campaign activity to be delivered against these. By agreeing campaigns up front, legal and compliance will be able to pre-approve the mechanics, terms and conditions and data privacy requirements. This not only reduces the repeated task of reviewing new campaigns, but it will also reduce the time required from partner approval to implementation. Marketing teams then select their campaign activity with ease and certainty.
Designing and agreeing campaigns in advance will allow the business to ensure brand consistency. Whatever the local region or geographic territory, marketing directors will have confidence that the campaigns being activated with partners will be both compliant and positioned to achieve business objectives. Working within pre-agreed parameters will ensure marketing managers feel assured that the campaign activities they are delivering will also support their personal performance in their role.
Whatever the size of corporation, there is never a bottomless budget for delivering channel partner marketing campaigns. Particularly during challenging business times it’s necessary to carefully manage any outsourcing. With campaigns planned in advanced, marketeers will have a list of pre-approved third-party suppliers who are fully vetted and approved. Supplier management and pre-appointment will not only provide reassurance to the marketing manager, but ensure brand standards are upheld and maintained through the delivery of high quality products, be it merchandise, hampers or gifts.
A partner toolkit designed for marketing success
A partner toolkit can be set-up in such a way that marketing directors have confidence in their department to deliver both this year and ongoing. With a relatively low investment, marketing communications can be centralised, clarity provided to your department and campaign activation centrally managed and controlled.
By formalising the management and delivery of activities and campaigns with your channel partners we can provide immediate efficiencies and gains to your business. Our digital marketing tools and partner toolkits have proven to reduce workloads, make time efficiencies and ensure overall success of marketing departments.
Ways to reduce marketing workload
Create a digital marketing toolkit that improves workloads, efficiencies and departmental success:
- Agree your business goals
- Set campaign goals and KPIs
- Seek buy-in from internal teams (marketing, legal, procurement)
- Design your fully customisable partner toolkit with FMI
- See it come to life as an interactive digital marketing tool
- Reap its success and drive efficiencies going forward
If you are a marketing director struggling with increased workloads and an inefficient way of working, then talk to FMI. We are brand engagement experts and can support you to overcome these challenges with the provision of the right digital marketing toolkit for your team.
