Developing a Collaborative Marketing Function

Driving a collaborative approach to marketing campaign development and execution

Project Overview

A financial services provider wanted to take the next step in evolving their marketing campaign practices, which required greater partnership between Marketing and Business Development across multiple regions.

Client Challenge

The company had all the tools in place to create new, innovative marketing campaigns, but there was a lack of cross-departmental collaboration, scalable processes, and visibility into marketing’s return on investment (ROI).

Departmental silos

Historically, marketing had not worked with the Business Development teams to build lead generation processes and campaigns. Nor had the Data & Analytics team provided insights to formulate a targeted campaign approach.

Inefficient campaign processes

Without clear interdepartmental communication about marketing campaigns, several processes were taking longer than necessary, creating superfluous assets, and missing key stakeholders.

Leadership visibility barriers

Due to the lack of cross-functional collaboration, there was a leadership visibility barrier into marketing activities and their ROI. This made it more difficult for marketing to get buy-in for new campaigns, staffing, and budget.

Approach

Taking an outside-in view of the company’s processes, RevGen identified key points where cross-functional collaboration became necessary, revamping and streamlining marketing campaign development from ideation to execution.

Solution

The first step to improving the marketing workflow was understanding who the stakeholders were and ensuring everyone was bought-in to the new execution plan. We did this by involving all key parties in the creation of the new process and initial campaigns. Then, we used a pilot campaign to demonstrate that the new processes would achieve the outcomes the company wanted.

Building interdepartmental bridges

Not only did we hold discovery discussions with stakeholders across the organization to understand the perception of marketing’s strengths and opportunities, but RevGen hosted workshops to collaboratively ideate on campaign concepts. This helped understand areas of growth, where visibility was lacking, and gave us insight into channels and assets to leverage.

Scalable practices

It was important to outline a new process that would scale as the organization’s capabilities evolved. With the help of customer data, we were able to identify behavior patterns of prospects to better generate new, high value leads in the future.

Proof-of-concept pilot

To ensure buy-in to the new process, we developed a pilot campaign that strategically deployed assets through multiple channels to demonstrate the client’s thought leadership to new prospects and existing customers alike.

Results

With the stakeholders aligned and the launch of the pilot campaign, we were able to shepherd the client through the change management process, landing on a new, effective marketing methodology and greater cross-functional partnership.

New opportunities

As part of the pilot campaign, RevGen outlined webinars that resulted in several new business prospects for the client, including an opportunity valued over $10M.

Visible marketing ROI

Through increased collaboration, the marketing department demonstrated their value to the larger organization, opening doors for new partnerships and proving the value of their investments.

Repeatable success

With RevGen’s guidance, the company now had a suite of tools at their disposal to make the next marketing effort just as successful, including the new process, a campaign brief, reporting responsibilities, metrics dashboard, and a retrospective evaluation