In the second part of our interview with Lee Odden, the TopRank Online Marketing CEO shares his insights on the role of cloud technology in marketing and the biggest obstacle facing marketing teams today. Click here to read part one.
1. What obstacles prevent marketing teams from getting things done efficiently?
Lack of leadership and vision by management teams. Not using processes for efficiency, ongoing training to develop growing competence or software to scale. It’s different with every company of course. There are almost always issues of not having enough staff in the marketing department or being held back by legal approval in regulated industries. In the end, the marketing team leadership needs to have a clear picture of what they’re trying to achieve and enable both processes for efficiency and adaptability to the changing digital market place.
2. What role does technology play in overcoming these obstacles, particularly cloud technology?
It’s interesting, we’ve never run a network in our business, we’ve always used the internet as our network. Now that cloud and SaaS is becoming more common for virtually all types of software I think the ability to connect disparate teams is becoming more common. When the full spectrum of content strategy, documents and assets can be accessed, reviewed and implemented via a web based system, there’s a lot of advantage over client side software. Operationally, it’s a lot more convenient to use software and technology resources as you need them vs. being stuck with a fixed amount and unused.
3. In the accelerated marketing environments so typical of today’s world, what workflow management techniques have you found most effective? Do you see anything new and radically different that works, or do more “tried-and-true” methods prevail?
Process is important for workflow and software plays an important role but sometimes process can get in the way of truly creative solutions. Workflow management needs to be effective from an end product perspective so the client gets what they want. It’s also important for quality consistency and efficiency so the agency can manage production properly. Scope creep is alive and well in even the most fine tuned workflow process so I think it’s important to find a balance between best practices and being adaptable to changes that evolve new best practices or unique situations.
4. How is a company’s content marketing impacted by the quality and efficiency of its production/review/approval processes? Does it impact their ability to focus more on the content?
If the content doesn’t get out the door, everybody loses. Production, review and approval processes need to work well in order to deliver quality on time content.
10. What are some things you’ve seen successful marketing teams do to quickly improve their efficiency?
Hire TopRank Marketing : )
As I mentioned above, software plays a key role in developing efficiency for content marketing. I don’t know how anyone could scale in a qualitative way without it.
