Stop the Swim Lane Madness. How to Create Great Marketing Teams.
It breaks my marketing heart to see the missed growth opportunities created by the “swim lane” speech. The swim lane speeches are given by C-suite leaders who don't know how to evolve for today's complicated buyer's journey. First of all, great marketing is about connecting dots in ways others can't see yet, and doing so with deep customer empathy. Second of all, we are living in the age of perfection rejection paired with always-on marketing. Architecting marketing solutions should not involve "swim lanes," as most CxOs like to espouse. Instead, they should actively involve a culture of smart bets and allow for Marketing, Sales, PR, Engineering, and HR to work together finding new applications for data that is too often hoarded by one department or another. A team that can think more like a consumer in terms of touchpoints and interactions and less like an org-chart, wins. Spend more time considering the upside of mastering the right way to market your reputation, brand + product/service, and less time about the downside of investing in something that works. Curiosity over criticism and legitimate collaboration would go a long way toward setting your team up for success.
Look, those swim lanes made more sense when there were fewer data and fewer complexities along both the B2B and B2C sales journeys. More so, great marketing teams are fast (not careless; instead, they've primed for action; a great article about speed by Jaleh Rezaei: https://firstround.com/review/your-marketing-org-is-slow-heres-a-framework-to-move-faster/)
Overthinking, over-writing, over-communicating, over-editing, and overly-corporate content are great ways to destroy your CMO, water down your brand to the point it's forgetful, and wear down the marketing team rendering you less competitive. This is especially true for brands that like to espouse how "authentic" and "relevant" they are. When innovative, nimble, and agile are some of the most-favored business buzzwords, it's a shame to see internal stagnation and silos stunt any significant momentum toward marketing agility that is authentic or relevant.
One of my all-time favorite clients said to me, "You're asking me for an opinion. Yes, it's on-brand. It's beautiful. But, I'm not the target. Go run this with the target and let them decide.”
If you're not the target, you don't spend time with meaningful data, and you have never run a marketing campaign before, you might want to temper how strong an opinion you have about the creative, the copy, and the plan. Ask questions, get curious, but please don't dictate to your taste.
According to Adobe/Marketo, whether you map the B2B buyer's journey using an infinite loop, a squiggle, or some version of a funnel, the fact remains that great brands and their marketers understand that all points of impact leave an impression and nudge a prospect either toward a purchase or away from one. Let's assume ten people making the decision each need five critical pieces of information--that's 50 touch points of excellence personalized to the query to get the sale. Marketing is a team sport, people are expensive, and you can't just buy a bunch of predictable ad words to create amazingness.
The traditional B2B buyer’s journey was a straight line, from start to finish — awareness, consideration, decision. But like most things in current times, the buyer’s journey has evolved to be anything but simple, and it’s shaped differently for everyone. Get their infographic here.
Warren Buffett once wrote, "We can afford to lose money — even a lot of money. But we can't afford to lose reputation — even a shred of reputation."
Offer value in every interaction. Your brand reputation is built piece by piece, and every interaction counts. Reputation is the ultimate sales-enabler. Manage your brand's artifacts with a strong foundational core, and you have a reputation that positively impacts revenue. Those artifacts are both internal (hello, culture) and external. Those artifacts include the tributaries into your brand, from website to social, packaging, customer care & success, applying for a job, swag, and your CxOs LinkedIn accounts. (there are many more, of course)
Here are four real examples:
Company A is a business SaaS product that proudly blacked out their social for BLM and has a Head of Diversity. They sent out incredible swag for the holidays, yet a black entrepreneur or maker didn't create any of those products—the artifacts matter.
Company B is a consumer subscription brand/product. After realizing how bromantic their startup years were, they gathered a diverse group together to look at their customer data and buying habits vs. the category and genuinely learned they had indeed over-rotated for consumers who look, think, and talk like them. Next week's email creative and website language kept the wonderful brand character they're known for, and it was more inclusive—the artifacts matter.
Company C is a VC financial entity that realized their content and collateral were overly complicated and formal -- it didn't represent the founders, their thesis, the times, or their portfolio well. While their IR-consultant had pointed out some of the disconnects and long-term damage this could do, it took the CEO overhearing a junior content writer completely undo a blog post because "he didn't like it... doesn't sound very smart to me." When he reviewed the original with the edited version, it was apparent that the damage stemmed from the brand entropy created by a lack of usable, practical brand guidelines was at the root of the issue. Don't break the artifact-mold after your logo and website 1.0 are live.
Company D "embraces every consumer" in their services model, and yet only the CMO and CPO had spent more than a few minutes reviewing customer success call notes. The last time anyone spent meaningful time with customers was when they fired their head of customer success. Their strategy was to keep pushing the engineering team to their limits to out-innovate the nearest competitor. Every innovation was celebrated in the press and blasted out in every newsletter. That's a glossy brand -- big hat, no cattle. They didn't make it through COVID, and they could have. If they'd listened to their customers and cataloged where the friction was coming from, they could have deployed capital where it was needed and salvaged a good brand. The artifacts doled out for your actual, here-today, real users matter a lot. Prioritize well.
These examples aren't about judgment; they're about exposing the depths of brand artifacts and why standing for something has to be real. It's not a solo performance or a well-crafted manifesto. Great brands have great character developed by a cross-functional team who has learned to live with a growth mindset and let go of the fear of making a mistake.
Empower your CMOs. Respect for their operating experience partnering with them by giving them space to be both artful and analytical (probably why you hired them) and help them learn to let some of their domain guard down. They've built up that defense mechanism over the years of literally everyone around them thinking they're great marketers too. Empower them to help connect the dots org-wide; it's what they do best.
