Originally published on The Little Grey Cells blog.
Enthused and motivated teams, that have a shared marketing language and purpose, are more likely to put solid, considered and effective methods into practice.
It is widely recognised that organisations get the most from employees when they are energised, comfortable to approach situations in innovative ways and are empowered and trusted to do so.
Businesses that provide their teams with the time and opportunity to consider, evolve their practices and establish agreed methods and improvements to how they approach marketing, find that this investment in their key resource is swiftly repaid.
By changing career from being an educator to a freelance marketer, I came to marketing with a fresh outlook. Many years as a senior educator, tasked with turning around failing establishments, taught me about the difficulties that present when trying to install and apply best practice within a large organisation. The tension is nearly always caused by the two age-old factors: time and money – and typically a lack of both.
As a marketer, who had studied marketing to MBA-level, and supported small and large businesses, I was not entirely surprised to discover that the same tensions that existed in education also exist in business – and in marketing.
Stuck in the ‘hamster wheel’ of the day-to-day, the pressure is always on marketing teams to ‘get stuff done’. This drive to deliver initiatives and produce assets often force marketers to swerve drawing on their academic knowledge of effective and thorough marketing processes.
Too often the order comes down from above for marketers to leap to tactics before they have the opportunity to research their markets; before they have established a clear strategy – one where segments are targeted, positioning is clarified and thus the most effective messaging for their target customers is delivered in the next campaign.
Just as in education, as I supported teams in marketing, I was meeting talented professionals who knew the best ways to get results but who were rarely able to apply their specialist knowledge within their organisations.
This led me to design the Mx workshops. Using my expertise and experience in designing and facilitating training for adult professionals, I assembled a three part programme of workshops that give marketing teams the environment to discuss, share and strategise how to apply marketing best practice within their organisation.
Drawing on my experience, I knew that attempting to teach marketing, or lecture about key concepts to experienced professionals would be pointless. A new approach was needed.
Through my Mx workshops, I provide a safe focussed space for marketing teams. It is time for marketing professionals to discuss, share, question and investigate how their knowledge of key marketing concepts and their shared experience can be applied to a variety of scenarios and tasks.
These facilitated discussions and challenges allow the participants to begin to form plans on how they could apply marketing concepts and techniques to their specific organisational situations and marketing initiatives – and ultimately work better as a team – sense-checking that MBA-level theory and industry best practice is always front-of-mind.
The workshops I have designed are set around the three key stages of marketing:
- Market orientation: research/diagnosis of the market
- Strategy: segmentation, objectives, positioning, messaging
- Tactics: creatives, effective briefs, advertising choices, media choices
With our 2024 course cohort full, we are now taking bookings for 2025. If you think it’s time to galvanize your marketing team, please get in touch. Prices start from £15,000 for the 3 x 3hr workshop course.
