The challenge of the modern cmo – aligning the marketing team under a single and integrated plan

The scope of marketing has exploded over the last twenty years. From digital strands – email, mobile, SEO, consumer apps – through to more traditional events, print advertising and direct mail, almost every channel has seen an expansion in the tools available. Marketing data has got more sophisticated too – today’s CMO has access to everything from website analytics to lead nurturing data to project management applications.

All of which is hugely powerful, hugely important…hugely beneficial, you’d think?

Well, yes and no.

The trouble is, the marketing landscape has got so complex that it presents a new and tricky internal management challenge. Take a look at this graphic, for example. It’s undeniably complicated, showing just how many departments and applications can be used to form a comprehensive modern marketing function. Needless to say, managing all that can be tough.

But the challenge is about more than just making sure everyone’s working hard and meeting targets. It’s about taking all of these really very separate areas and ensuring they’re working together and meeting the same targets.

It’s about aligning the company’s overall budget and ROI across every separate strand of the marketing department, ensuring that each team receives appropriate spend and is fairly, accurately measured.

In short, it’s about ensuring that the entire marketing team – enormous though it might be in a large enterprise, is aligned under a single plan.

Achieving this isn’t just beneficial internally – it has a direct impact on customers. A fragmented marketing function is bad news for customer experience and bad news for potential buyers because it rapidly leads to complexity and confusion. If you’re not sure what plan two of your separate marketing divisions are working towards, how can you expect your customers to be receiving a clear message?

Clearly, then, we’re talking about processes like consolidation and automation – the former to ensure that everyone’s on the same page and the latter to ensure that as little time as possible is wasted on managing disparate tools and processes. Particularly if a marketing team has grown organically over a long period, it’s common for different teams to be using a plethora of different platforms – one application to manage email campaigns, another to manage lead analytics, and so on.

How an integrated marketing automation software can ensure unity within your marketing function

So, if the main modern challenge is to ensure that the marketing departments are aligned in order to deliver a single clear message to customers, what can the CMO do to facilitate this integration? The answer lies in smart technology and, more specifically, in marketing automation software such as Microsoft Dynamics Marketing (MDM), designed to bring all of your marketing functions – and crucially, from campaign planning all the way through to reporting analytics and ROI – onto an easily manageable platform.

Microsoft itself describes its Microsoft Dynamics Marketing suite as providing a ‘single source of truth’, which is a neat way of describing…

• A single source for financial information – budgets, spend and ROI
• A single source for all campaign planning and execution
• A single source for content creation, storage and access
• A single source for analytics and performance data
• A single source for project management

Perhaps it sounds too good to be true. But the beauty of a platform like Microsoft Dynamics Marketinglies in its simplicity. Isn’t this easier than managing multiple different campaign platforms, going to one place for budgets, another for project management and another for business intelligence?

Unifying a disparate and complex marketing department behind a single unified plan is the first step to ensuring that every element of every marketing campaign is part of a cohesive whole.

If you’re concerned about the unity within your marketing function, why not speak to Prodware? We’re experts in the design and deployment of smart IT solutions, and can help even the most harassed marketing director unify their team behind a single, sophisticated plan through integrated and feature-rich marketing software.