MarketingSherpa Blog

Some ads, campaigns and branding ideas are pretty bad.

So much so that an old “Saturday Night Live” sketch — featuring Jerry Seinfeld playing the host of a “Jeopardy”-like show with stand-up comedians guessing the punch line — included the frequent answer from Adam Sandler’s character, “Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one!?”

Cold comfort, though, when your own advertising and marketing ideas don’t see the light of day: “How is that dreck getting made, while my brilliant ideas are being overlooked?”

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In the MarketingSherpa Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, we asked marketers about their local mobile marketing efforts …

Q: What percentage of customers/prospects interact with your organization’s LOCAL mobile marketing tactics?

While marketers who do track these numbers saw some very impressive results (about a quarter of marketers finding that more than half of their customers engage with social check-in, opt in to geo-fencing communications, and redeem mobile coupons), the biggest surprise is the number of marketers who simply don’t know.

“The fact that the research suggests 50% don’t know how effective they are is evidence that although mobile consumption is increasing and marketers are increasingly adopting it as a marketing channel, analytics and measurement have still yet to catch up,” said Grant Osborne, head of agency, FIRST. “I believe tracking and analysis of mobile (both mobile Web and apps) will be a great source of gaining competitive advantage in this space this year.”

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In the MarketingSherpa 2012 Executive Guide to Marketing Personnel, 52% of marketers from large companies agreed that their marketing departments’ potential are undermined because “management is autocratic, uses poor skills, is not encouraging, or has poor ethics.”

If this is a challenge you face as a leader, your problems run deeper than any one blog post can fix. After all, as John C. Maxwell has said, “There is no such thing as ‘business ethics;’ there’s just ethics.”

However, one way you can improve your department or agency and avoid being an autocratic, unethical leader (ouch) is by incorporating community giving into your team’s workflow.

Sometimes it can be difficult to carve out the time and resources to give back to the community, but the rewards for you and your staff are too numerous to ignore.

As an employee, to me the benefits are obvious. It feels good to not only support my coworkers with their philanthropic projects, but to know that they would similarly support me.

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An Instagram photo of MECLABS employees at the Susan G. Komen walk in Jacksonville, Fla.

Participating in events also provides a great bonding experience, and gives employees a chance to work together outside of the office.

However, as great as it is for employees, it can be harsh as a manager who has to answer to the bottom line. Reid Stone, CEO, HEROfarm, and Kurtis Loftus, President and Creative Director, The Kurtis Group, talk about how to balance the benefits of giving back with the realities of business.

“It benefits the bottom line when all of a sudden employees and managers are all communicating in a better way … which ultimately leads to more profit for the company. So internally, it’s phenomenal,” Reid said.

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An email recently came across my inbox with an interesting attachment, and I’m really looking forward to sharing it with the MarketingSherpa blog audience, because it’s a positive example for something I’ve seen many marketers struggle with – internal marketing.

In fact, when we asked 1,646 marketers their most pressing challenges in MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Executive Guide to Marketing Personnel, here’s what they had to say …

Chart: What challenges undermine your marketing department’s potential?

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As you can see, roughly three-quarters or marketers said, “either a lack of funding or resources inhibit our growth and development.” So how can you get the resources and budget you need?

Back to that email I was telling you about. It was from Karen Doolittle, Director, Marketing Research, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Karen said, “While not a member of your organization, I quite often visit your website and attempt to glean information on the current state of affairs of email marketing.”

From the first line alone, I could tell that Karen is, what I like to call, a high-information marketer. The type of marketer that constantly looks for ways to improve her department’s performance. So I’m including her email attachment here, because I think all the other high-information marketers who read the MarketingSherpa blog can learn from it. She called it an …

Email Performance Whitepaper 

As you can see from the above link, what Karen did was quite simple, yet also pretty profound. I’m going to use an old quote that I love from Todd Lebo, Senior Director of Content and Business Development, MECLABS, to explain why, “Business leaders will never storm into the IT department and say, ‘I was taking a shower this morning, and had a great idea for some new PHP code.’ But they will come into the marketing department and say, ‘I was taking a shower this morning and thought of a great idea for an email send or a headline or a print ad.’”

What Karen’s piece says to business leaders is, “Hey, trust us over here; we know what we’re doing. And if you give us the funding and resources we need, we can keep doing it and keep improving.” But it uses data to prove that point, without having to make any claims at all.

Karen was kind enough to hop on the phone with me recently, go over the background of her internal whitepaper, and provide some tips to help you replicate this idea in your own organization. Below are selected edits from our conversation.

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What challenges undermine your marketing department’s potential? When we asked that question to 1,646 marketers while researching for the MarketingSherpa 2012 Executive Guide to Marketing Personnel, here’s how they responded …

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So today’s MarketingSherpa blog post is aimed at helping you overcome challenges #1 and #3: to help you get budget approval to build your skills. With Email Summit 2013 coming up in February, we’ll use a MarketingSherpa Summit as the example for this blog post to show you the factors you should consider when conducting a little internal marketing of your own.

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