MarketingSherpa Blog

Nothing is perfect in this world, and that includes your marketing department. Even if you’re confident that you have the best team in the industry, there are likely a few tweaks you wish you could make to push it higher.

Take your budget, for example. Who couldn’t use a few extra resources to test website copy? Or improve landing page design?

A lack of funding or resources is the number-one challenge undermining the potential of marketing teams, according to the MarketingSherpa 2012 Executive Guide to Marketing Personnel. This chart shows the top challenges that marketers feel undermine their department’s potential, according to research of more than 1,600 companies surveyed for the guide.

Click to enlarge

See how these challenges are more common in larger organizations? That means as you grow, you are more likely to see new challenges rear their ugly little heads.

Dr. Charles Coker, author of the guide, notes that six out of eight of these challenges directly relate to personnel. The most common, though, is a lack of resources with roughly three-quarters of marketers experiencing it.

So how do you get more resources? You can’t pull cash out of a hat, but you can start a few pilot projects.

In short, a pilot is a small test. You take a small amount of resources and try something new, like optimization testing. You start small, work to prove ROI, and then show the potential and results to executives. If you can show that spending $1 will earn $3, then you’re likely to get it (see the ‘related resources’ below for more information).

Related Resources:

Free Excerpt: 2012 Executive Guide to Marketing Personnel

Lead Nurturing: Pilot campaign increases conversion 32.6% with automated emails

Lead Generation: 4 critical success factors to designing a pilot

Lead Generation: How to get funding to improve your lead gen

B2B Lead Generation: 4 ways to use teleprospecting in your next pilot (and 2 ways to measure it)

Landing Page Optimization: How to start optimization testing and get executive support

Marketing Management: 7 steps to optimize your marketing team

Lead Nurturing: Market to personality and behavior, not job title

Marketing Career: 4 questions every marketer should answer (and what you need to know to start asking them)

About Adam T. Sutton

Adam T. Sutton, Senior Reporter, MarketingSherpa
Adam generates content for MarketingSherpa's Email and Inbound Marketing newsletters. His years of experience in interviewing marketers and conveying their insights has spanned topics such as search marketing, social media marketing, ecommerce, email and more. Adam previously powered the content behind MarketingSherpa's Search and Consumer-marketing newsletters and carries that experience into his new role. Today, in addition to writing articles, he contributes content to the MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa blogs, as well as MECLABS webinars, workshops and summits.

Prior to joining MarketingSherpa, Adam was the Managing Editor at the Mequoda group. There he created content and promotions for the company's daily email newsletter and managed its schedule.

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Categories: Marketing Tags: marketing management, marketing personnel, pilot projects