Closing the ‘colouring-in’ department

There is a persistent and troubling notion that all a marketer does is produce sparkly, insubstantial assets instead of robust business outcomes.

Because of this, it’s very often the marketing departments that are the first to suffer when economic pressures hit.

In a recent conversation with Laura Ongaro (EMEA Director of Marketing & Communications at Fiserv, and our newest client) she related a story to us about how, on her first day with a previous employer, she was introduced as the new ‘Head of colouring-in’.

Feeling Laura’s pain, and suspecting that there are many others who can empathise, we have invited Laura to share some of her own insights on how to raise the value perception of marketing departments and help their business value to shine:

Laura Ongaro

Unite and conquer

We recently revamped our model here in EMEA to bring Sales, Marketing, Product and our Agency (Earnest) together into a single ‘go-to-market’ team. As a result of working so closely together, better communication and more well-rounded ideas have emerged. In turn, the business sees that we are a single entity and this builds confidence.

Keep moving

Fintech is an innovative industry so it’s essential that we always push ourselves to stay ahead. The activity that gets marketing on the map comes from thinking and acting differently.

We put our go-to-market teams out of their comfort zones every day in order to create market-innovating campaigns that produce results. We’re also open to bringing in outside expertise when we need a fresh perspective. I can’t reveal anything here, but we’re about to launch something best-in-class with Earnest very soon…

Report the value

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[Header photo: Leisy Vidal on Unsplash]

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If you have any value-perception boosters you would like to add, or some marketing department war stories you would like to share with us, please do drop us a line.

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[Header photo: Leisy Vidal on Unsplash]

Marketers often focus their reporting on marketing impact and can’t help but list out pages of charts and data containing impressions, click-through rates, web visits, interactions and so on. This is definitely all useful for optimising campaign activity, but the business simply doesn’t care about it.

They want to know about the commercial impact of marketing activity. So when we report back into the business we focus on the high-level impact across the go-to-market teams – leads, pipeline, sales – all leading to ROI which really makes them sit up and take notice.

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If you have any value-perception boosters you would like to add, or some marketing department war stories you would like to share with us, please do drop us a line.

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[Header photo: Leisy Vidal on Unsplash]