Why won't your marketing director be working long hours

 

Marketing director - "shooting" position. Why and what to do with it?
A marketing director in one company rarely works longer than a year and a half. According to Spencer Stuart, the average term in this position is just under 24 months. Half of all marketing directors stay in the same job for about a year. The average length of employment depends on the industry: from 10 months in e-commerce to 34.8 months in financial services companies.

What do you want from marketing

Business executives often set unrealistic marketing goals based on their needs. They may be unrelated to the prehistory of the brand and product. They may ignore the need for regressive planning. Even common sense can sometimes slip away from these objectives. For example, they require sales of 200 million when the average is 10 million, or to raise them by 15-20% when the average business growth in this area is no more than three percent. Or to turn the turnover of 6 million into 12 million simply because this is the figure sold to investors.

Real resources, market elasticity and the company's position in the competitive environment are often not taken into account or even discussed. And such a plan as a task is given to the marketing director with a fixation in his KPI.

What happens next?

Variant 1. The task is delegated to a cool marketing agency. Naturally, the company does not get any millions in the end, as there were no prerequisites for this initially. Another change of contractor means a change of epochs, revolution and transformation, for which the company is still not ready, as there was no work on mistakes.

Option 2. The company has an excellent marketing team. In this case, the director of marketing within the company virtually repeats the fate of the marketing agency. His career does not last long because the initial conditions of the task do not change after the failure of his predecessor.

There may be many reasons that do not give a result. Here's a sample list.

Your goals and objectives are far from reality...
Management does not see or does not wish to recognize that the company is unable to achieve its objectives at this time. They want to see growth in sales and other indicators as soon as possible, although there are no prerequisites for this. In this case, the Marketing Director can either give inflated figures or report on items that have little or no impact on the market, but look beautiful in the reporting documentation.

You have the wrong level of specialists.
The complexity of the marketer's work is that his qualification should allow him to participate in all business processes: from product strategy at the initial stages to logistics and after-sales service.

Ideally, marketing should be responsible for everything. Argumentative and difficult. But it is the ability to analyze the situation in the neighboring department that makes marketing directors outstanding. An excellent specialist should understand that his ability to attract clients from different channels directly depends on how clients perceive the product, how they interact with it, what functions are important to them, why they choose it, etc. It is also important that they tell each other about the product: they praise it, curse it, stay true to it or give it up forever. This is all very important data, which often simply does not reach the marketing director.

You have a communication problem between departments within the company...
In many companies, different departments are not friends, and their heads compete for the attention of the CEO. In other words, there is no normal horizontal communication. This becomes a big problem when it comes to interaction between marketing, product and IT departments, which need to set joint tasks and monitor the situation, while also attracting users.

You do not trust professionals.
A talented marketing director puts a lot of work and inspiration into the company's development. The expert designs a possible future, constantly checking with the changing situation in the market. The result is a strategy that needs to be presented to the top manager or owner in a reasonable and understandable way. In order to convince them to accept it, the marketer goes through debates, libations, calculations, evidence, analytics, audit of different options. It shows that terms can be long, and costs can increase several times. That it may be necessary to refine the product itself and attract new resources for this.

It is not enough to give a marketing director only responsibilities. It is important that the management trust him. The professional must have the authority and freedom to act and be listened to. No feedback If the customer does not like the mailing list on the product, he or she does not always unsubscribe. This requires effort: open the email, read it, find the button you want, click, confirm. More often letters fly into spam or are simply ignored. And it is refusal that would help the company to notice the problem and to react adequately. When exactly did the customer lose interest in the product? Why? What has changed or deteriorated? Is it the product itself or the service? Has the customer traded your product for a competitor's product or refused it at all? When a marketer does not have this information, all other work becomes meaningless. There is such a category of customers and managers - hunters for beautiful "facades". They are ready to accept only good news. That's why performers have to give them only those indicators that create the appearance of positive changes. An excellent analogy: imagine a burning plane that is at its peak, and behind its helm - wide smiling pilots. These are marketers nailed to the KPI. When steady economic results are not seen, there is always a signal from the marketing fields: something is wrong with the product, with the service, with the trajectory of user experience. And no change program will help if it relies only on promotion and sales channels. We need a set of measures to objectively assess business processes, including through marketing tools. This helps employees inside the company not to strive to show their work from the best side, but to find problems and solve them. Method 1: correct choice of indicators From what deceptively excellent reports are formed? From catching up with cheap traffic. From plumming the budget for discounts and bonuses in exchange for regular communication with the brand. From unbridled dumping for the first positions in the aggregators. The "Positive" can grow from misplaced labels, through-analysis curve, non-convertible leads and KPI. The most common example is to count not the redeemed product, but the one that users have put in the basket. Many different metrics or KPIs are often used to hide the fact that there is no growth in the main indicators - final revenue and marginal profit of the client's company. This approach is, of course, better revised. Method 2: Reputational marketing It is cheaper to buy a new client than to return the one who left. Every time a customer is dissatisfied, he immediately "flies" back to the market and never comes back. Marketing is easier to influence customers to come through advertising than it is to leave feedback on the site and on social networks. But the latter is the most important thing. Now marketing experts from different companies are more often trying to solve this problem. But the most obvious way to manage reputation - to dampen the hotbeds of negative, "pouring" the top positive reviews or skillfully practicing the bad to buy newcomers. But this will not help the business to get back the customers already missed. Therefore, it is better to consider the interests of all parties. Method 3: Working with unspoken opinions It is difficult to recognize problems. It's an unpopular method, but it's necessary. Digital marketing should work with unspoken opinions, not write optimistic reports. What is important here is the managerial position that the real data is significant. Marketing professionals - whether it's an in-house department or an outsourced agency - need tools that can help them navigate the desires and needs of users/customers and predict their behavior.