Is Your Marketing Department a Herd of Baby Goats?

Have you noticed how many baby goats there are on the internet lately? Have we finally tired of dressing pugs up as Angela Merkel, and sharing videos of cats being startled by produce? Did I miss the take-your-goat-to-yoga memo? Apparently nobody else did.

Now I think baby goats are adorable, and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a few up close, which is how I know they are kind of a mess when it comes to focus. Adult goats have a disturbing amount of focus, but the baby ones struggle to stay on task in the face of too many fascinating inputs. Which is the way in which they resemble most marketing departments.

Let’s face it, most of us have too many agencies, suppliers, freelancers and consultants hanging about, and I’m quite sure if you were being honest, you would admit you’re not entirely sure what they’re doing.

Speaking of not know what people are doing, how many people in the marketing team are stumbling around with vague job descriptions or no job descriptions at all, like  it’s some sort of adult Montessori experiment?

How many people in your organization are doing marketing and aren’t actually in the marketing department? Secret marketers and hobby marketers can be found lurking in sales, product management and even in the Customer Abuse Department.

Some of them are real marketers who got lost; many are pretend marketers who stepped in when you were too busy, too distracted or too under-resourced to help with a project. And now that project is a thing and that thing is sitting someplace well away from your care, custody and control. It’s probably going to mess you up at some point, and you know it.

How about the people who aren’t in marketing who keep calling and calling for stuff? How many points of contact does your group have with the Sales Squirrels? How about the Keebler Elves in finance? How many people do you need to bribe in the Productivity Prevention department just to get access to some application?

On that note, how many applications, reporting cubes, online community forums, keyword optimizers, automation platforms, dashboards and content management technologies are you trying to coerce into giving you something that might pass for insight or at least a justification of your existence? Most marketers have automation tools they don’t even remember buying.

All of this is contributing to the frantic, distracted, mostly ineffective herd of baby goats that is the average marketing department.

If you have the urge to jump straight up in the air for no reason and can’t resist chewing other people’s clothing, you might be a marketing baby goat. Happily, a bit of a Spring clean can go a long way to restoring focus and making the room smell better.

Start with the suppliers

If you have a P-Cube in your company, this is a nasty task you can scrape onto their plates. If not, maybe someone in finance can do a a vendor analysis for you. Basically, this involves making a list of every third party you’ve given money to in the past year and calling them up to see why. In addition to scaring the crap out of them, it’ll give you a clear view of what each does, what it costs and where they add value (or not). The idea here is to get rid of anyone you don’t plan to use again and try to consolidate some of the outsourced stuff to fewer vendors.

Next, look at the marketers

This is a fun job you can get HR to help with. HR people love job descriptions, and the chances are your marketing job descriptions are crappy, old or missing entirely. In the course of pulling these job descriptions together, you can ask your HR friends to help you map out all the secret and hobby marketers while they’re at it. There’s a good chance you’ll find a few smart, talented folks to bring into your herd, at the same time as you can probably get the rest to sit down before they hurt themselves and your brand.

Now the technology

Automation platforms are more pernicious than friendly realtors these days, and they hang about almost as long. I will bet that you have a bunch of them that were supposed to work together, that were supposed to give you a pretty dashboard every month and that have mostly delivered unintelligible reporting you’re embarrassed to share in case you get asked a question. Time to get the P-Cube and, if they’re involved, the Productivity Prevention group to take a look at what you’ve got, where the data sits and how you can wriggle out of whatever contracts you signed when they gave you that fun selfie stick.

None of this is an overnight fix, but if you start now, you may just find that by the end of the year, you’re feeling a bit less like you work in a petting zoo.

Photo credit: By Pinoydiscus (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com