Saw this great blog post from Adam Sutton at MarketingSherpa, a research firm specializing in tracking what works (and what does not) in all aspects of marketing. Adam brings up a chart from the firm’s 2012 Executive Guide to Marketing Personnel that lists the top eight challenges undermining marketing teams today (see below). The firm surveyed more than 1600 companies for the guide.
Two challenges caught our attention, mainly because they’re the two that do not directly relate to personnel and can be addressed rather quickly with the right technology in place;
- “Either a lack of funding or resources inhibit our growth and development” and,
- “We are using ‘dated’ or ineffective technology.”
According to the chart, a lack of funding or resources is the number-one challenge undermining marketing departments’ potential. Not surprisingly, this is the only challenge that small companies (<100 employees) cited more as their biggest challenge than large- and medium-sized companies. Sutton notes that pilot tests are a great way to shake the resource tree:
“In short, a pilot is a small test. You take a small amount of resources and try something new, like optimization testing. You start small, work to prove ROI, and then show the potential and results to executives. If you can show that spending $1 will earn $3, then you’re likely to get it…”
The “ineffective technology” challenge is not surprising either; anywhere between and 50% and 66% cite it as a major challenge. The growth of channels to reach customers, including online, through mobile devices and on social media, has created an accelerated marketing environment in which the technology for streamlining and automating processes is still trying to catch up.
A platform like ProofHQ nestles itself nicely in a marketing team’s operation to solve both these problems. Intellilink, an independent research firm, surveyed ProofHQ customers and found that the median rate of return from a ProofHQ implementation was 4,441% with an average payback period of only four weeks. This means that for every $1 spent on the solution, clients gained $40 back every month by making proofing workflow more effective. Also, it’s simple to deploy and easy to use, yet powerful enough to handle virtually any type of content for the myriad marketing collateral companies have to manage today.
