Streamline Your Brand’s Storytelling
We hear this all the time: “I know our organization has great stories to tell, but we struggle to tell them.”
This is rarely due to marketing teams lacking the skills or resources to tell great stories. Rather, it’s a structural issue caused by a stifling of the information flow that enables storytelling within an organization.
In our experience, more often than not, the problem lies in the existing processes that drive a brand’s storytelling program, not in the creativity or capabilities of the marketing team. What marketers need most is today’s version of an editorial team. They need everyone in the same boat, paddling in the same direction.
Sometimes there are too many cooks in the proverbial kitchen, or, when everything is important, nothing gets prioritized. Lots of assigned ownership can look like no ownership, in practice. When there are too many stakes to be claimed, it's all too easy for participants to defer action to peers or assume another teammate is carrying an item forward. The results of poorly defined project roles or unclear communication channels are unanswered emails, missed deadlines, and time consuming meetings that don’t move projects forward.
We find the most traction with, and for, our clients with three foundational elements in place for their editorial or communications team. When any of these points are lacking for an organization’s internal resources, one of our first goals and set of actions as an agency partner is to help establish them and build a functional editorial team with:
Diligent Point(s) of Contact
Dedicated Expertise
Project Management + Accountability
Diligent Point(s) of Contact
Disjointed communication is a common symptom we see among client teams where roles are unclear and/or stakeholders are plentiful. Establishing a regular person or team for managing and communicating project updates–along with the proper cadence and format–will help ensure initiatives have a chance to move forward. If you like the rowing analogy, imagine one person to guide the rudder and direction of the boat. Dedicating one diligent point of contact for marketing projects, and including appropriate alternates and escalation channels, will keep big-picture goals in view and establish a sense of reliability around deliveries and milestones.
Think about an Olympic volleyball team and how vocal they are in a match: they all have their eyes on the same ball, but constantly shout out who has “got it!” to maintain precision and avoid calamity. The same concept applies to your communications team, demonstrating the importance of those initial service level agreements (SLAs) at a project’s onset. SLAs help clearly identify points of contact, communication channels, and proper cadence to set teamwide expectations project-long and avoid surprises. Open communication lines with the right subject matter experts for discovery, and with stakeholders for timely updates, help ensure smooth and continuous progress for communications projects and campaigns.
Dedicated Expertise
“Water, water everywhere, yet not a drop to drink...” More like, ‘Subject matter experts (SMEs) abound, yet no one seems to have time for marketing…’ So goes the painstaking process that too many communications teams face when there are myriad SMEs within their organization, yet none (reliably) have a moment to spare for marketing tactics, or are difficult to hold accountable to assigned action items.
Dedicating go-to expert resources does little for the marketing team that cannot get in touch with them, or when SME priorities and workload won’t allow time to contribute meaningfully to marketing assignments. Estimating time requirements and dedicating SME schedule availability is every bit as crucial to success, as including the right names on the project email distribution list.
Imagine a marketer in a product-manufacturing environment that is mostly driven by engineers. As the brand communications person they’re naturally the in-house expert on bringing technical messaging to industry consumers, with some minor translation of “engineer-speak” necessary for sales materials. The Engineering teams naturally bring expertise on the product itself, like specifications and best use-cases across technical industrial applications. However, their performance metrics dictate more time spent in development meetings and testing labs than participating in brainstorm sessions about outbound communications.
Project Management + Accountability
Communications teams usually have little leverage for holding internal project teams accountable for task items when the right expertise and time allowances aren’t established on the front-end.
That same marketer from the manufacturing environment above can’t get time on the schedule with the right engineering experts to gain insights into which product specs are proprietary, and which are crucial benefits to include on active sales-enablement materials. Or, when a relevant media outlet has availability and is ready to run an editorial piece with a contributing engineer to support PR efforts for the brand, no one is available for the interview and editorial process to meet trade publication deadlines. The result is limited, slow, inconsistent brand communications. Worse still, incomplete and misguided product literature that is fraught with errors will leave the brand’s reputation for precision open to scrutiny.
While Marketing teams are usually associated with flashy campaign ideas, sticky content concepts, and all things “brand communications,” they must be worth their salt in project management too, or have dedicated agency partners and experts alongside to help. Brainstorm sessions and budgets go wasted if teams can't glean important and timely information from subject matter experts, or hold teams accountable for decision-making, tasks execution, follow-up, and progress reporting.