CEOs prioritise growth as the most important business agenda. However, in today's environment, simple incremental growth and marketing execution have become more difficult to achieve. Businesses sometimes overlook the importance of leadership in improving business operations. Today, we will discuss how marketing leadership affects marketing outcomes and influences various aspects of marketing strategy and execution.
Importance of Leadership in Marketing
Marketing leaders must keep everyone informed, from the team to other C-suite executives and stakeholders. Poor or inefficient leadership can result in misalignment, lack of motivation, and, eventually, poor marketing outcomes.
Marketing leadership should also be able to demonstrate ROI (return on investment) to demonstrate where the company is making progress in comparison to the marketing investment. In addition, marketing leadership can help with long-term growth objectives, such as strengthening business foundations and developing brand loyalty.
What is Marketing Execution?
Marketing execution is the process of putting your marketing plan into action. It puts your marketing objectives and approaches to life.
You're already aware that your marketing strategy serves as a guide for selecting, prioritising, planning, and executing projects that will ultimately benefit your company's bottom line. Marketing execution translates your strategy into real-world operations, allowing you to offer the appropriate material to the right people at the right time.
How Leadership Can Affect Marketing Execution
The role of marketing leadership in improving marketing execution is pivotal and multifaceted, directly impacting a company's ability to effectively communicate its value proposition, engage with its target audience, and ultimately drive sales and growth. Let's review some of the challenges businesses face that make it difficult to execute more effectively.
Not Hitting Your Targets
If you fail to allocate your budget effectively and prioritise the most important initiatives, you are more likely to miss your targets. Missing your targets can have a significant impact on your marketing organisation. If your targets are tied to achieving financial results, you may find yourself stuck in a negative cycle of decreasing budgets. Additionally, consistently missing your targets can damage the credibility of the marketing team.
Setting the Wrong Targets
If a target is set too high, it can have negative consequences. Firstly, there is a high probability of missing the target, which can lead to disappointment and frustration. Secondly, the team's morale can be affected as they may feel that the target is unachievable from the beginning. On the other hand, if a target is set too low, a marketing organisation can become complacent and lose motivation. This can result in poor performance, and the organisation might only realise this when they compare their results to industry benchmarks.
Lack of Tuning and Balancing
It's important to continuously measure, tune, and balance a plan to prevent it from deteriorating over time. While physical events may be popular in certain industries due to their high visibility, familiarity, and built-in momentum, they require long-term marketing planning and financial commitment well in advance of the campaign's actual impact. Additionally, the benefits of these events tend to be concentrated in a very short period, leading many marketing plans to quickly exhaust their budgets by prioritising events.
Not Realising Your Potential
Sometimes, it can be difficult to determine poor strategic marketing execution. However, you may get the impression that the company is not performing to its full potential. The marketing team plays a crucial role in company execution since they are responsible for defining target markets, outlining the vision, creating visibility, building pipelines, communicating with the market, and much more. If the marketing team is unable to execute its agenda effectively, the company will not achieve its full potential.
Getting Scooped by the Competition
When a company fails to perform at its best, it becomes vulnerable to being outperformed by other companies who execute their strategies more effectively. Losing your position in a market is a gradual process, and companies often find it challenging to change their go-to-market strategy because they have been doing things the same way for so long.
Explosion of Data
Marketing teams are often inundated with an overwhelming amount of data on a daily basis, which can be difficult to make sense of. Unfortunately, many marketers lack the skills and tools necessary to extract meaningful insights from this data, resulting in the majourity of it being discarded. Even with dedicated data scientists, it can be challenging for the most sophisticated marketing teams to handle the sheer amount of data generated daily. As a consequence, the pressure to obtain valuable insights from marketing data continues to grow.
Fractional CMO Service for Your Marketing Execution
gigCMO's Fractional CMO Service is designed to provide startups, scaleups, and SMEs with the expertise and leadership of a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) without the full-time executive cost. This service is particularly valuable for improving marketing execution across various facets of your business, offering a blend of strategic insight and practical, actionable guidance. Here's how Fractional CMO Service supports your marketing execution:
1. Tailored Planning
Each engagement begins with a thorough understanding of your business, followed by strategic planning based on our comprehensive playbook. This growth playbook covers 28 modules, ranging from foundational business strategies to advanced go-to-market plans, ensuring that every aspect of your marketing strategy is addressed with precision and insight.
2. Cost-Effective Solution
Hiring a full-time CMO can be a significant investment, often beyond the reach of startups and SMEs. Our Fractional CMO Service offers a cost-effective solution, providing marketing leadership at a fraction of the cost of a full-time executive. This enables you to allocate your resources more efficiently while still benefiting from expert guidance.
3. Focus on Growth and Scalability
Our service is engineered for growth. By emphasising both marketing leadership and operational execution, we aim to build and enhance your marketing capabilities for long-term success. This involves optimising sales processes, developing scalable marketing strategies, and ensuring that your business can adapt and thrive in dynamic market conditions.
4. Sustainable Knowledge Transfer
An integral part of our service is the sustainable transfer of knowledge and skills to your team. gigCMO's Fractional CMO Service aim to build and enhance your marketing capabilities, making our services an extension of your team rather than a temporary external resource.
5. Measurable Outcomes and ROI
Our focus on data-driven strategies ensures that all marketing efforts are measurable, allowing for continuous optimisation and demonstration of ROI. We help you set clear KPIs and utilise analytics to track performance, making it easier to see the value of your marketing investments.
6. Global Insights and Local Execution
For businesses looking to expand internationally, our service offers invaluable global insights combined with the ability to execute locally. Our playbook-driven approach allows us to guide you through the complexities of entering new markets, ensuring that your marketing efforts are both globally informed and locally relevant.
In today's competitive business landscape, CEOs recognise growth as the most crucial agenda, with marketing serving as the primary engine driving this growth. Marketing leadership not only keeps the team aligned but also ensures that marketing initiatives are executed efficiently, ultimately impacting the company's ability to drive growth and add value.
Elevate your marketing execution and unlock the full potential of your business with gigCMO's Fractional CMO Service. Whether you're aiming to refine your marketing strategy, scale your operations, or explore new markets, our marketing leadership and data-driven insights can guide you to success. Contact us today to learn how our Fractional CMO Service can drive business growth.
