We’ve come upon the third and final installment of this blog series delving into non-branded search and growth forecasting and how using “tried and true” methods for implementing strategies and analyzing data can lead to marketers using methods that are actually more “tried” and sadly, less “true”.  In this final post, we touch on the incredible potential seen when two key players in the arena collaborate without doing things the way they’ve always been done.

[Part Three] WADITW: The Marketing and Creative Relationship

The relationship between the marketing and creative departments is one of the most underrated within your organization. Our team has seen first-hand that when these departments are in sync they are much more likely to produce incredibly relevant AND financially impactful content for your organization. Yet communication between these two departments is often kept to a minimum because well that’s the way most businesses have always done it.

Here is a scenario we have seen happen far too often:

Marketing goes through a data mining exercise leveraging predictive analytics that identifies an audience likely to purchase product X next month. Naturally, they want to create content for product X to solicit to this highly targeted audience ASAP. Yet when this intelligence is handed off to the creative team to execute on there is a holdup:  the production calendar is booked 6 months out and they can’t turn around the content in time for it to impact the business. Not only is that a missed opportunity for revenue, there is now likely a growing frustration between the two departments!  This is the fault of neither the creative nor marketing departments —what we have here is more of a business systems failure.

The Creative department has a ton of ideas that they generate on their own and that is great!  The Marketing department has a ton of ideas for data driven campaigns which is also great!  But it is the merging of these two departments that is often difficult.

Consider a scenario when the two departments are in harmony:

Product management wants to feature the ten new products they are about to launch on all outbound marketing material next month. The creative team has a ton of different ways they can do this, but it’s hard to showcase ten products at a time to their entire customer base. So, they phone a friend: the marketing team. Marketing overlays customer segmentation on the customer base to help bring visibility into which new product(s) are appropriate for each of their customer segments.  By working together with Creative they produce individual pieces of content that are the most relevant for each segment. Everybody wins and the greatest benefactor is the customer experience.

In our personal lives It is well known that the left side of the brain is responsible for quantitative thinking while the right-side is more artistic.  The brain needs both to function, yet in our professional lives we often forget this.  Why?  Because keeping that separation is the way we have always done it.

Kevin Hope
VP | Intelligence + Analytics
[email protected]

Catch up on the first two installments of this series:
[Part One] WADITW: Non-Branded Search
[Part Two] WADITW: Growth Forecasting