As 2015 draws to a close, it’s helpful to look forward and envision the kinds of marketing challenges that businesses will face in 2016.
Since no two businesses are exactly the same, the challenges you face may be somewhat different from the challenges faced by your peers, or those in another industry. Regardless, though, there’s enough common ground with a few challenges that virtually all businesses face at some point with their marketing.
Here, we’ll identify three marketing challenges that businesses the world over will face in 2016 and beyond.
Standardizing Marketing Processes
Marketing involves a lot of different processes that all occur at pretty much the same time.
Keeping track of and managing these processes can be difficult for a marketing manager.
That’s where standardization comes into play. The more you get into a routine and develop standards for all of your processes, the better your management will be.
This also includes centralizing your marketing. You need an online portal that allows you to control your marketing material, such as a marketing asset management system. A marketing asset management system helps you standardize and centralize processes so you can retain control over the operation without feeling like everything’s moving too quickly and haphazardly.
It really puts structure to your marketing, and that’s always a good thing.
Allow for Collaboration Between Corporate and Local
Often, corporate attempts to lock down branding and marketing at the higher levels, leaving little room for local operations to contribute. This means that a business won’t be able to add local flavor and nuance to its branding material. It also creates a bottleneck where ideas about the brand, as well as changes and revisions to the brand, are slow to make their way up to decision-makers at the top.
What’s preferable is a compromise. You can’t give total control over branding over to those at the ground level, but some collaboration is needed. A marketing asset management system helps provide a structure where higher ups can collaborate with local marketers while maintaining accountability and oversight over the entire marketing program.
It also allows local marketers the ability to customize branding material that has been approved and supplied by corporate.
Alignment Between Sales and Marketing
In 2016, there will be more of a need for sales and marketing to align. Unfortunately, for many organizations, that rarely happens.
Sales and marketing are two sides of the same coin, yet they often march to the beat of their own drums. That will need to change for a business to be even more successful.
One way to allow more collaboration between sales and marketing is to make it easier for marketing to create marketing material and give it to sales. (This also includes sales collateral.) If you have a marketing asset management system, you can create a portal by which you can have centralized control over the creation and distribution of marketing and sales collateral. You can order what you need, when you need it, keep track of inventory levels, and more.
A marketing asset management system can be a boon for a business to overcome these marketing challenges and others faced in 2016. What will you do as a result of what you’ve learned?