It has certainly taken time to build momentum internally and get the business unit leaders fully on board with our marketing transformation. We are now at the point where the team is embracing the marketing function and actually requesting services from the team. We initially figured it would take three months of nurturing, and the reality is that it has taken six months – but heck that’s ok, we’re there.
I’m sure you’re asking what have our marketing team achieved in the past three months? We’re now regularly producing and publishing blogs, very soon launching our new corporate website and six corresponding microsites, we’ve completed our first serious marketing campaign using Pepper Marketing, produced a stack of high value marketing assets for clients, streamlined the production of our monthly customer newsletter, cleaned up our CRM, evaluated and pressed the button to move to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, produced two new videos and organised our amazing 6th birthday party for all staff and partners. Check out the photos here >
With this momentum, we find ourselves, for the very first time exceeding capacity in our small marketing team and allocated resources. In other words, we have more work than we can deliver. This is an interesting position to be in when only nine months ago, we thought that employing two marketing graduates might be resource overkill.
The challenge is how we manage out of the eye of the storm – internal stakeholder expectations, delivering outcomes in a timely manner, maintaining high-quality outputs and driving results, which after all is what marketing is about.
We engaged our best friend Google to source industry best practice reports to figure out how much we should be investing in the marketing function – in our industry, size of the company and against the outcomes we’re aiming to achieve. We were surprised by the results, however, it does reflect our relative immaturity in marketing. The bottom line is that we are underinvested in the marketing function. For a B2B company of our size in the IT industry in Australia, we should be investing around 8% of our revenue into marketing. We have been tracking at 4-5%.
This learning was good to pick up as we are in the midst of our FY17 budget planning. We have developed a marketing investment plan that includes employing a third marketing graduate and engaging more external specialists for specific projects – and in turn, meeting the demands of our internal stakeholders to drive even more social and digital initiatives with our customers.
FY16 has been a challenging and exciting year for us in respect of our Marketing transformation – realisation we were off the mark, acceptance, radical change and now execution. We’ll keep you posted on developments during the new year.
