Removing Gatekeepers From Your Marketing

Every marketer has previously encountered one of these roadblocks:

• They wanted to create an ad audience out of recently closed lost deals but didn’t have access to the customer data in their CRM.
• They had to change part of the copy on their home page, but their developers couldn’t incorporate it into their next sprint.
• They needed a short graphic to illustrate a point they made on a blog post, but their design team was involved on other projects.

In these scenarios, marketers aren’t held back by a lack of good ideas. Instead, marketers struggle with gatekeepers.

Gatekeepers are unnecessary areas of friction in your growth machine that prevent marketers from delivering customers the best experience possible.

Gatekeepers can be anything from useless data scattered across various tools to a CMS or design solution that is powerful but requires technical expertise to use.

When marketers encounter a gatekeeper, the customer experience inevitably suffers.

Take your website for example. HubSpot research shows that a corporate website is the most widely used sales channel for marketers today.

When you are trying to give your customers an amazing experience, nothing is more important than your website. When asked who is responsible for updating a website, many marketers pointed to their IT team as the owner of their company’s website.

This is a classic example of gatekeepers adding unnecessary friction to your marketing. Your IT team doesn’t aim to generate leads or how customers perceive your brand. When marketers reach out to them with an update that needs to be made on their website, it won’t be prioritized.

Your customers’ experience inevitably suffers. Imagine if your IT team owned your email marketing or social media accounts – how could your customer experience suffer as a result?

Marketers in growing businesses must own their company’s growth engine. This used to be taken for granted, but as customer journeys have become more complex, the systems we use to reach our customers have also become more complex.

We’ve added unnecessary complexity to our internal processes and tools – to the point where only certain people in your company have access to data that can be used to improve a campaign or technical ability to update content as needed.

Today’s fastest growing companies do three things:

1. You use customer data across all marketing channels.

2. They optimize their marketing efforts by using comprehensive reports.

And perhaps most importantly:

3. They put marketers in the driver’s seat and remove gatekeepers at every turn so they can act quickly and decisively to best serve their customers.

The need for a clear owner of your company’s growth engine has only been heightened by the global pandemic. With external factors forcing executives to turn quickly at a time when collaboration and strategic planning is more difficult than ever, gatekeepers cannot be tolerated.

By employing tools that allow you to centralize your data, remove gatekeepers, and easily see what is resonating with your audience, your marketers can easily replicate the customer experience.

Take stock of your current tech stack. Which systems only certain teams have access to? Is this team the best way to understand what your customers want from your brand? Are you forcing gatekeepers to make unnecessary trade-offs between using a powerful tool and one that allows your marketers to take responsibility for your company’s growth engine?

By answering these questions, you can ensure that you can adapt to what 2020 (or 2021) has in store for you.