Four Obstacles That In-House Marketers Face(And What To Do Instead)

The following is adapted from the book Smarter Marketer: 11 Golden Rules to Help In-House Marketers Thrive in an Ever-Changing Digital World by David Lawrence and James Lawrence.

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Jackie, the in-house Marketing Manager of a well-known Australian hotel chain, was ready to pull her hair out. For over two years, she managed significant budgets across a range of channels and was directly responsible for her campaigns hitting specific revenue targets. She achieved decent results, but she felt constrained. Something was holding her back from making real progress.

When we sat down at our monthly client meeting to discuss strategy and results, she looked exhausted. As co-founders of a digital marketing agency, we’d witnessed this level of exasperation from senior marketers many times before. Her furrowed brow spoke volumes, and her frustration was written all over her face.

‘Remember last month when we talked about the new direction for Google Ads proposed by senior management, and how we all agreed it was a bad idea?’ she asked. ‘Well, that bad idea is now my major project this quarter. I guess we need to get cracking on the rollout.’ She ended with a long, drawn-out sigh.

Jackie was a smart marketer. She had solid ideas on how to drive increased revenue for the company, but management — with their dominating personalities — thought they knew best. They kept her so busy executing their ideas that she struggled to actually deliver on their stated goals. She spent so much time reacting to shiny new objects and to looming firestorms, she had no room to plan for sustained long-term success.

She reached the breaking point when her director, someone who was not tech-savvy, spent an entire evening in Google Ads, rewriting copy and tweaking a few settings to ‘improve performance’. Needless to say, his changes did not improve anything. In fact, they resulted in a budget blowout and a dramatic drop in return on investment. For Jackie, that meant an even heavier workload the following month, when these losses had to be recouped.

Can You Relate?

Jackie’s situation is, sadly, all too common for in-house marketers in companies large and small; they are stuck in a vicious cycle.

Managers breathe down marketers’ necks, suspicious of their value, while marketers feel they must constantly defend their worth and manage expectations. All the while, any coherent strategy remains out of reach.

Whatever the industry, we repeatedly witness in-house marketers like Jackie struggling to succeed, confronted with too many options and surrounded by contradictions. Here are a few obstacles they face:

• They are unsure if they should focus on what they know or leap into the unknown. It’s hard not to chase the shiny new marketing toy spruiked at a recent conference, championed by the boss, or referenced in an industry blog.
• They feel undervalued within their organisations. We’ve lost count of the number of in-house marketers who come to us and say things like ‘The Director of Sales and the Managing Director are blaming marketing for every missed sales target’, or ‘The rest of the business constantly tells us how to market the organisation and second-guesses every campaign we run’.
• They are given completely unrealistic objectives. All too often, we deal with marketers who are working with unrealistic targets, or timeframes that can’t be met. We hear things like ‘I love your proposal, but will it help us reach our goals this quarter?’ Under enormous pressure, they are forced to look for quick-win tactics at the expense of long-term, sustained success.
• They are frustrated with the rapid speed of change. It’s difficult to work in an industry in which some skills become obsolete no sooner than they are mastered.

Maybe you can relate to this list. Maybe you feel stuck. Maybe you feel you are jumping at shadows. Perhaps you feel you are constantly prescribing solutions before you actually get to diagnose the issues. Perhaps you feel lost, unsure how to find what will work for you.

It’s time to zoom out and see the bigger picture.

Moving From Reacting To Planning And Strategy

Throughout this book, we encourage you to slow down so you can see the bigger picture. We do this by pointing you to proven rules instead of specific tactics. We understand you need answers, but we also understand the answers you’re seeking will never come if you can’t stop moving enough to ask the bigger questions.

This book is not the Idiot’s Guide to Digital Marketing. It’s not going to tell you exactly how to run a Facebook campaign. It’s not a list of tips and tricks for Google, and it’s not going to promise a miracle cure requiring no work from you. You won’t tweak your campaigns and become an overnight success twenty-four hours after reading this book. In short, this is not the equivalent of a get-rich-quick book for marketing.

Instead, this book will change the way you think about marketing in this digital world in which we live.

What To Expect?

Rather than use typical chapter titles, we have organised this book by declarations — eleven rules you can live by for marketing success. Together, these rules provide a proven framework. You might only need to focus on a couple of rules, and that’s fine. But the truth is they all build off each other.

We know the marketing tactics popular today will change vastly in the coming years. However, we firmly believe these rules will remain relevant for many years into the future.

These chapters represent the signposts that helped us gain clarity with our businesses and our clients’ campaigns. Since before the turn of the millennium, we have had front-row seats to watch as marketers struggled to adapt to a digital world. We’ve worked with hundreds of clients on thousands of campaigns. We speak with the smartest people in the industry. We attend and present at the leading digital marketing conferences within Australia and worldwide. Here, we have distilled our experience and knowledge into a single volume, with a single goal in mind: to help you become a smarter marketer.

These eleven rules exist because they work for us. They are tested and proven, and now we’re offering them to you.

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To keep reading, pick up your copy of Smarter Marketer: 11 Golden Rules to Help In-House Marketers Thrive in an Ever-Changing Digital World by David Lawrence and James Lawrence on Amazon.