There are a number of reasons why marketing campaigns fail to produce the desired results. Sometimes the targeting is off, the content isn’t attracting enough attention, but often it’s because the marketing strategy was poorly implemented and executed, or worse, there was no strategy to begin with.
Having the right strategy, implementing it correctly, and being agile are sometimes all it takes to produce the right results and keep teams focused and motivated.
And no one understands the importance of this more than Frans Riemersma, co-founder of Boardview.io. Frans and the team have created a tool that helps marketing teams better adapt, visualize, and execute their marketing strategies.
You can connect with Frans on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.
1. Can you tell us a bit about your background and expertise in the MarTech industry?
Both marketing and development are my passions and playground. Guess where I ended up? Optimizing marketing environments, of course. I have been doing so for over 20 years for multiple Fortune 500 companies. In total, I have been involved in over 200 MarTech projects, and counting.
I have optimized marketing operations environments by redesigning processes and implementing tools. Romek Jansen and I have developed a method to implement MarTech stacks in a shorter time period and with higher adoption rates.
We explained our approach in our book, Marketing Resource Management; The noble art of getting things done in marketing. Efficiently, in 2008. The book presents a MarTech canvas to quickly plot marketing technology stacks in order to optimize the overall MarTech stack, known as the Ten Functional Areas of Marketing.
2. What specifically does Boardview.io do and how does it fit into the larger online marketing picture?
Marketing teams generally lack a plan. During my 20 years in the field, I’ve learned that marketing strategy plans are either absent or abundantly tracked in a plethora of disconnected files.
Consequently, other departments have no idea what marketing is doing. How could they? There is no shared up-to-date plan. To them it feels as if marketing does not even know what they are doing within their own department.
Boardview.io presents marketing teams a visual representation of their strategy. It shows the goals marketing is currently working on, like Content Marketing strategies, Lead Generation strategies, Social Media strategies, etc. Working with a goal tree takes marketing from being task driven to being truly goal driven.
Goals can be quickly updated during weekly meetings. Goal progress can be easily shared within and across teams by sending a weekly infographic via email. Now, everyone can track what marketing is doing and how they drive value for the entire company. We have seen CEOs starting to love their CMOs! Even sales managers fell in love with our users from marketing teams.
In addition, Boardview connects with Zapier so you can integrate it with task management tools. This allows marketing managers to make their strategy actionable. Marketing staff now know how every task they perform adds to the success of their company.
Boardview.io connects the boardroom to scrum boards, so to speak.
3. What have been some of the biggest changes in online marketing that you’ve seen over the past 5 -10 years?
Enterprise software is out. MarTech stacks are in.
The shift from enterprise software to MarTech stacks is fundamental. In marketing technology, adoption has always been the biggest hurdle to take, even if all the features are there. There is an instinctive resistance against big tools that are forced upon the staff and require elaborate training.
People prefer to pick their own tools to execute the tasks that come with their territory. A B2B tool should be as intuitive as a B2C tool. Using integration tools like Zapier and IFTTT, the apps people are already using can be easily connected.
4. In your opinion, where do teams generally go wrong when developing and executing their marketing strategies?
Contrary to popular believe, strategy should not be carved in stone. Back in the old days, CMOs would write their plan once per year and execute it throughout the next 12 months. Those days are over in the current agile era.
In volatile markets, the only constant is change. You learn new things every day. To stay in sync with the market, they should be updating their strategy constantly, but they don’t.
Also, managers don’t break their strategic goals down into monthly or even weekly goals for their staff to work with. Inevitably, their staff will start to feels lost.
As a result, meetings are often endless, confusing and overcrowded. Agile goal management helps to get things right. Having a 30-minute weekly standup discussing strategy progress is all it takes.
According to research (see the graphic in our post), sending goals and action commitments to a friend creates public commitment and also correlates with higher goal achievement.
Agile scrum boards have proven helpful for the staff. Likewise, agile strategies help managers to get the control without ending up “micro-management by spreadsheets”.
5. What do you think are some MarTech and digital marketing trends we’ll see in 2017?
An important trend will be that marketing departments manage marketing software like an ecosystem.
MarTech stacks give marketers the flexibility to change tools when required, maybe even per campaign. Some best practises for stacks will emerge, and they will be shared among companies. This will encourage SaaS tool developers to improve their products even further. All for the greater benefit of marketing, of course.
Click here to read our previous Ad Tech & MarTech Q&As.
