Briefs. The marketing kind.
Many job ads for marketers look like a wish list for your sixteenth birthday – grandiose, ambitious, shiny and long! The likelihood of finding someone who can set and manage budgets, hit revenue targets, calculate attribution, lead a team, write great copy, hook into the back end of digital and drive SEO, create beautiful imagery and deliver it day after day, week after week, is unrealistic.
It seems ‘marketing’ has grown in complexity and relevance, yet business decision-makers see it as a puff role, more akin to advertising and continue to put little effort into developing a marketing strategy and hiring the right team and people to deliver it. Instead, the unicorn hunt begins.
If there are three essential competencies for any marketer, we believe they are less about the pretty things and more about being accountable to engaging the team and the outsourced experts to do awesome shxt, do it well, on time and on budget! We think the jobs ads are simpler, and the interviews focus on understanding how well someone has developed these three:
Proactive - Management of the business, clients and potential challenges
Quick learner - Ability to pick up new skills and information at speed, iterate on ideas and learn from mistakes
Accountability - Actively manages solutions through to completion, to ensure best outcome for all
It’s also about what they do with them and where they spend their time. Often marketers today are working alongside expert providers for brand, creative and digital. Knowing how to engage an agency well is a art and a science. We can’t halp with the artistic side but here are two resources that might help with the science side.
check out these resources
The first is a blog written for us by a lass who’s a depth of marketing leadership experience both for organisations and working for agencies:
Read up: https://www.bolstur.com/blog/getting-the-best-from-your-agency
The second is an Aussie bunch of experienced folks who’ve put together some gems and we love that they’ve also put in BOLD how important having *and sharing* your marketing strategy is. Some credible and valid points too on why you need a good brief to engage your agency.
Check it out here: https://ipa.co.uk/media/12104/better-briefs-booklet_10_single-pages.pdf
The key takeout for businesses now is have a developed marketing strategy and hire the right mix of people to activate it. If you don’t have a marketing strategy, hire someone/s to develop it, then check the crew’s levels of learning agility, proactivity and accountability, give them scope to turn the strategy into tactics, along with the tools and context they need …. then get outta their way!