The soulless word that every marketer dreads; PROCESS.

Usually the word is on the lips of a senior stakeholder and is in response to a new but disruptive marketing approach.

And the sad thing is that it’s often easier to cave in and obey the process, rather than fighting for your idea to be considered. This is particularly true in a competitive B2B market, where the quality of your marketing is measured by equally callous acronyms such as ROI’s, API’s and KPI’s….

Perhaps when you started your career in marketing you had every intention of being modern and creative – introducing new ways of delivering campaigns. But today, that PowerPoint deck or newsletter you’ve been curating for the last 5 years has become a trusted process. And sometimes this process can be a good thing – without it, marketing departments would be in chaos!

That’s why breaking your company’s ‘old way’ of doing things and changing your approach to marketing can be worrisome, especially when you have these senior stakeholders to answer to!

But change we must…because change is a necessity in marketing.

Change has brought with it new ways of marketing from SEO to PPC, from automation to AI, from mobile to virtual…It’s also brought a younger, more tech-savvy audience of decision-makers who are now far less likely to be engaged by your standardised PowerPoint presentation or e-newsletter!

Being an agency that works closely with B2B marketers, we’ve been lucky enough to witness both sides of the coin, that is, marketers who’ve been afraid to explore new avenues and have stuck to traditional approaches, and revolutionary marketers who have pushed forward with determination and passion to discover new ways of communicating with their audience.

We’ve also seen these revolutionary marketers reaping more benefits –  such as surpassed KPI’s, higher ROI’s and better lead generation, which has thus led to their very well deserved success!

So, what was it that these rebel marketers were doing differently to succeed and pave the way?

We’ve noted 3 core traits:

1. Synch with your senior stakeholders (or face rejection after rejection)! 

Show empathy and respect for your senior execs and understand that their perspective and judgements on your marketing are usually coming from a good place. It’s just that this ‘good place’ may have changed since they started their career with the company and your ‘disruptive idea’ may not look and feel like the marketing they’re used to seeing.

And after all, if you’re working closely with senior sales executives, it’s not their job to be the marketing experts anyway. That’s YOUR job, by definition; to help people discover new and clever ways of communicating with other people. And your agency’s too, if you work with one. But revolutionary marketers know how to get senior stakeholders on board by clearly outlining the benefits of employing a new marketing approach through means that senior stakeholders will accept, such as business cases and (you guessed it) PowerPoint presentations if needs be! To encourage your stakeholders to approve your new ideas, you have to first of all prove that you’re not going out on a complete whim and that there is in fact method behind your perceived ‘madness’!

2. Have a clear vision about what it is you’re setting out to achieve from your campaign. 

From our experience, marketers who have undertook concept workshops with us from the beginning and formulated messaging and plans on how to target their audience segments with their new techniques have always generated higher campaign performance and results, simply because they have stuck to a clear vision of what they want to achieve.

Ensure that you can clarify your vision for the campaign in a simple statement at the drop of a hat, for example –

“Our competitors have been doing X & Z to attract the key decision makers at Y. To gain competitive advantage of Y we’re going to do A & B, we’ll prove we’re doing this by measuring C & D!” 

3. Stay passionate about your job by being progressive and not giving in to process for the sake of process! 

Marketing is supposed to be exciting and creative. If it’s anything but that, then it’s on you to rediscover the passion for it – otherwise you’ll be doomed to a career of mediocrity and slowly give up on even looking for new and outstanding ways of marketing.

If you feel like you need a boost to rediscover your passion there are steps you can take. Discovery Workshops are one way, they’re a great way to inject fresh thinking from outsiders and key stakeholders to join mindsets and come up with something truly revolutionary.

Good luck rebelling – but don’t grass us up to your boss! 

Interested in Discovery Workshops?
Download our offerings brochure here.