Mind The Gap: Mitigating the lull between marketing phases

Avoid the dreaded “why am I even doing marketing” conversation

T.S. Eliot wrote that the “world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper,” but he might as well have been talking about marketing. After all, every campaign starts with a rush of energy and excitement, but most of them end in a puff of smoke as senior managers question the value of the work - or even if work is being done at all. It doesn’t have to be this way, but to prevent the dreaded death-by-entropy, both parties need to be aware of why these situations arise so often.

Marketing campaigns usually occur in several phases rather than as a single continuum of activity. Even when there is a long-term retainer contract in place, there are discrete stages of work. Most marketers try to “maintain momentum” and as a result they often (by design or omission) don’t adequately wrap up their work before beginning the next project. It is during these transition times that most problems between management and their marketing teams or outside agencies arise.

The first six weeks is almost always the honeymoon period: unless there is an active dislike between the marketing team and the C-suite, there is usually enough activity to make everyone feel happy. Constant emails, frequent meetings, documents to review - its easy to keep marketing “tangible.” If there is a design element baked in, there are logos and colours to approve, templates to evaluate and pictures to look at. So far so good.

Unfortunately, that phase of work doesn’t last forever. Daily meetings are replaced by weekly calls, and marketing teams often fall victim to the maxim, “out of sight, out of mind.” Senior executives begin to feel that not much is happening and pretty soon distrust can creep in because they're not getting the constant, tangible results that they were used with phase one. Once trust becomes an issue, the clock toward the inevitable starts ticking. And once you hear, “what the heck are we even paying for,” it’s time to update the ol’ resume.

It doesn’t have to be this way. But in order to prevent this all-too-common scenario, marketers need to think about their work from the perspective of the top brass. For example, every department is held accountable to success metrics. Engineering teams have deadlines for product releases. Finance groups are responsible for delivering business data in the right form at the right time. Logistics executives need to make sure that all inventory is properly shipped and accounted for. Marketing is no exception. Be sure to have a detailed calendar for all of your work so that management knows that you are on track and on budget.

This includes creating timelines that cover post-launch work. For example, make sure that your public relations team is committed to writing a certain number of articles or press releases per month - and that they build all of those deadlines into your long-term marketing calendar. Have your design team set dates for regular updates to collateral or your web site.

This isn’t about making up things to justify your existence! It’s just that most senior leaders aren’t as “in the weeds” on marketing as you’d like them to be and most of them don’t really know what goes on in a marketing department when it’s not in their faces every day. Better reporting can go a long way to helping manage the transitions between BIG DELIVERABLES (i.e., the things that the top brass actually gets interested and invested in) so that they see constant activity rather than periods of productivity separated by lulls and gaps.

Why does this matter? For starters, only 18% of FTSE CEOs come from a marketing background. That means that more than eight out of ten leaders of major companies don’t really grok what marketers do at a molecular level. And in the world of high-tech startups, the number plummets to the single digits. That means that marketers face an uphill battle to get a seat at the table, much less heard and valued.