After about 6 years working in marketing in leading roles, I found that the biggest challenge of a Marketing Manager is not to achieve revenue targets but to make all other departments in the same organization understand, support, and accompany short- to long-term marketing strategies.
Some HR managers asked me during interviews why I think the human resources department plays a big role in marketing.
It’s hard to explain to a non-marketer in a few minutes about the customer journey, the touch points, the brand attributes, the customer experience, etc. to let them know that not only the HR department but also every other division within the organization contributes big parts to successful marketing campaigns, and more critically, to a brand.
Most other teams think that marketing should be responsible for advertising products and services to customers so that they know our name. They don’t know that Awareness and Interest/Appeal – Ask are just the beginning stages of the customer journey map, which is a key factor in a marketing plan.
The main goal of marketing lies in the following stages: Desire, Act, and Advocate in the 5A model. This crucial road is involved in other non-marketing departments, especially operations.
The above picture is an example of the customer journey and touch points that I have made for the education field.
It’s easy to see that dozens of agencies can help you with all the initial stages of a marketing strategy – Ads, helping you increase brand awareness through search ads, social media, TVC production, events, booking influencers, seeding reviews…, whatever. However, no agency will offer a service called “process improvement” or “enhancing touchpoint quality” to help you achieve the ultimate goal: improving conversion rate.
This is where the value of a talented marketing leader is demonstrated.