This is a followup from a recent post entitled From Agency Silos to Data-Driven Collaboration.
At Stuzo, we have had the opportunity to work in multiple roles working with organizations to become more collaborative in the way they work with their employee, agency partners and vendors when it comes to marketing initiatives. We’ve helped out as strategic consultants, UX contractors, and even the technical vendor providing platform-based solutions to help expedite this shift for organizations.
Here are some tips to help go from a silo’d approach, to a more connected and efficient marketing and agency ecosystem.
- Integrate a central collaboration hub across organizational systems to share project information and related data across teams and departments. Make content sortable, discoverable, and searchable by campaign type, vendor, goals, platforms, and teams. Nothing is worse that having amazing learning loops and knowledge but no means to surface it when timing is critical. Make sure you consider the following tactics below and how they can plug into your collaboration platform.
- Implement project learning loops, internally and externally, that can be repeatable across projects, across agencies, and across disciplines. From the tech agency to the media teams…having a repeatable method by which you engage vendors and work with them to deliver feedback is critical to improving with each and every program. If you don’t have the power to implement this org-wide, any project owner at the brand can start by instituting this on their own project charters. Equally important to gathering the feedback is ensuring it is adequately organized and accessible internally to help others make decisions from the learnings.
- Share KPIs and data-driven learnings and results for each program. At the end of the day, the data is often the point that sticks and speaks to the success or failure of a program every time. Having the ability to quickly and easily access data at your fingertips from relevant projects upfront can save you much trouble along the way (and help shape at-risk projects or create the next blockbuster). Consider ways in which others will access this, surface it, and what data will help make future project decisions.
- Routinely update and groom your vendor directory within this shared environment. Make sure associated projects are updates along with key information from your retrospectives and campaigns together. Consider inviting your vendors to own a portion of their presence to keep it groomed and updated with best practices, white papers and perspectives to surface to your company.
- Review your current governance processes for the way in which agencies and vendors are engaged all the way through to how projects are closed out. You certainly want your teams to be nimble and adapt, but you also need to provide some key guidelines and requirements to make sure projects provide value not just as a one-off but for the entire organization. We often recommend starting light with the processes layer, and then allowing adopters to jump on board to help shape the growth of governance over time.
- Remember, it’s all about the people and engaging your constituents appropriately to make this work; particularly, in this case, your employees, agencies, and vendors. To help transition to this more open, connected, and efficient marketing organization requires people be sure to find the appropriate ways to engage your audience.
If you would like to learn more about how Stuzo can help you go from an Enterprise of Silos, to one of connected data-driven collaboration, get in touch with us. Stuzo has the experience on building out custom enterprise vendor and collaboration portals, employee gamification layers, and other enterprise integrations. Our experience as a vendor in this channel also enables us to consult and provide guidance on how to deliver best-in-class social, mobile, and digital campaigns – in a smart, lean, and data-drive model.
