Miscellaneous

The challenges represented by ‘Budget evaporation’ relate to:

• Campaign managers who have mobilised initiatives with internal and external stakeholder teams
• Marketers leading pioneering projects that suffer from a loss of appetite for brave corporate marketing in a downturn
• Creative leaders who have developed innovative approaches and strategies to change mindsets and behaviours, to have the effort mothballed

This post is 1:50 from #WhenTheAgency, a witty collection of observations through the eyes of the tech marketing agency. All memes are available to drag and drop into presentations or social posts. Visitors are encouraged to share and create knowing smiles amongst your colleagues and peers.

The full library of memes for #WhenTheAgency is available here. Enjoy!

But efforts to distil are often followed with efforts to expand – especially in product marketing.

Here there’s an instinctive desire to cover everything that a technology is, does, achieves, costs and impacts. And inevitably this ends up being quite a body of content – not all of which is required by the customer. 

Check out the meme, ‘Un-distilling’. Have you reduced content, only to have it expanded? 

The challenges represented by ‘Un-distilling’ relate to:

• Head of Sales looking to arm their sales teams with short, punchy customer content
• Product or solution marketing managers needing to balance brevity and comprehensiveness in their product collateral
• Campaign managers trying to get the most concise articulation of the product engineered into the campaign flow and assets 

This post is 1:50 from #WhenTheAgency, a witty collection of observations through the eyes of the tech marketing agency. All memes are available to drag and drop into presentations or social posts. Visitors are encouraged to share and create knowing smiles amongst your colleagues and peers.

The full library of memes for #WhenTheAgency is available here. Enjoy!

Well, it should be. And despite the growth in social, it’s still the preferred channel for many marketers seeking cost-efficient communications and marketing.

But over-reliance on this one channel with blunt, excessive touches can damage attention and relevance – even if the prospect doesn’t opt-out. 

Check out the meme, ‘Inbox blitz’. Have you got the bruises? 

The challenges represented by ‘Inbox blitz’ relate to:

• Customer marketing managers responsible for extracting as much value as possible from customer bases 
• Campaign managers charged with briefing the marketing agency on the new campaign 
• CRM managers charged with protecting one of the companies most valuable assets – the customer database 

This post is 1:50 from #WhenTheAgency, a witty collection of observations through the eyes of the tech marketing agency. All memes are available to drag and drop into presentations or social posts. Visitors are encouraged to share and create knowing smiles amongst your colleagues and peers.

The full library of memes for #WhenTheAgency is available here. Enjoy!

And at the purest level this may be true. But we need to make sure these well-trodden values feel real, current and authentic for the new proposition at hand – and not a recycling of the same old same old.

Check out the meme, ‘Proposition fatigue’. Have you seen experienced the heavy eyes? 

The challenges represented by ‘Proposition fatigue’ relate to:

• Creative and marketing agencies commissioned to develop campaigns from new briefs 
• Campaign managers charged with briefing the digital, marketing, PR and social agencies 
• Product and solution marketing managers required to extract ‘the juice’ that makes prospects pay attention

This post is 1:50 from #WhenTheAgency, a witty collection of observations through the eyes of the tech marketing agency. All memes are available to drag and drop into presentations or social posts. Visitors are encouraged to share and create knowing smiles amongst your colleagues and peers.

The full library of memes for #WhenTheAgency is available here. Enjoy!

But when planning a programme or campaign, the process should start (and be led) by the challenge, intent and objectives – not tools to support the achievement of the task.

Check out the meme, ‘When toys rule the roost’. Have you seen too much love for mar-tech, and not enough for the marketing? 

The challenges represented by ‘When toys rule the roost’ relate to:

• Integrated and ABM marketing managers with many opportunities to deploy the tech stack within their initiatives 
• Creative and marketing agencies commissioned to develop new campaigns 
• Marketers with pressure to report on levels of detail where the analysis effort could outweigh the possible extraction of value 

This post is 1:50 from #WhenTheAgency, a witty collection of observations through the eyes of the tech marketing agency. All memes are available to drag and drop into presentations or social posts. Visitors are encouraged to share and create knowing smiles amongst your colleagues and peers.

The full library of memes for #WhenTheAgency is available here. Enjoy!

But an overdose by the insights team, or a lack of translation from ‘digits to directions’ can leave any sales and marketing pro feeling a little overcome and snow-blind.

Check out the meme, ‘Fact flooding’. Have you experienced the side-effects of data overload? 

This post is 1:50 from #WhenTheAgency, a witty collection of observations through the eyes of the tech marketing agency. 

The challenges represented by ‘Fact flooding!’ relate to:

• Insights leads tasked with ensuring the marketing team has the latest data 
• Campaign performance and management pros charged with understanding, mapping, and optimising campaigns across the team
• Digital marketers with all the analytics at their fingertips, but with decisions around who should see what, and how 

This post is 1:50 from #WhenTheAgency, a witty collection of observations through the eyes of the tech marketing agency. All memes are available to drag and drop into presentations or social posts. Visitors are encouraged to share and create knowing smiles amongst your colleagues and peers.

The full library of memes for #WhenTheAgency is available here. Enjoy!

The focus then moves to the promotion to get the audience into the event.

That’s where the problems can sometimes start, when corporate databases, contact networks and paid media efforts fail to drive the right attendance in the time allowed. 

Check out the meme, ‘Audience AWOL’. Have you suffered from lack of attendance? 

The challenges represented by ‘Audience AWOL!’ relate to:

• Integrated marketing managers who have planned campaigns to use webinars for hero content
• Event planners relying on colleagues and adjacent functions to follow-through on event marketing commitments
• Sales leads who are relying on webinar attendees for their pipelines  

This post is 1:50 from #WhenTheAgency, a witty collection of observations through the eyes of the tech marketing agency. All memes are available to drag and drop into presentations or social posts. Visitors are encouraged to share and create knowing smiles amongst your colleagues and peers.

The full library of memes for #WhenTheAgency is available here. Enjoy!

It’s easy to understand why marketers seek a similar level of consumption and engagement.

But creating swathes of low quality, gated, click-bait content to elicit high volumes of ‘leads’ doesn’t help anyone. Customer can feel swindled, and SDRs suffer from poor response rates when they reach out. 

Check out the meme, ‘Quantity over quality’. Have you experienced the bloaty inefficiency? 

The challenges represented by ‘Quantity over quality!’ relate to:

• Campaign managers tasked with achieving unrealistic levels of investment return 
• Heads of sales seeking alignment between sales and marketing 
• Marketing and sales budget planners assigning ROI targets to demand programmes

This post is 1:50 from #WhenTheAgency, a witty collection of observations through the eyes of the tech marketing agency. All memes are available to drag and drop into presentations or social posts. Visitors are encouraged to share and create knowing smiles amongst your colleagues and peers.

The full library of memes for #WhenTheAgency is available here. Enjoy!

You think it’s time to plug-in sales. They think it’s time to clock-out.

Check out the meme, ‘Insights inertia’. Have you experienced the blank stare? 

The challenges represented by ‘Insights inertia!’ relate to:

• Integrated marketing managers who have shaped campaigns to drive demand and sustain interest
• Campaign leads who interface with sales to progress opportunities from intrigue to qualified interest
• Sales leads whose teams have limited recognition of marketing

This post is 1:50 from #WhenTheAgency, a witty collection of observations through the eyes of the tech marketing agency. All memes are available to drag and drop into presentations or social posts. Visitors are encouraged to share and create knowing smiles amongst your colleagues and peers.

The full library of memes for #WhenTheAgency is available here. Enjoy!

This is certainly a sign of success, but one that can cause frustration for internal project leads and their associate agencies.

Navigating the approvals of legal, tone-of-voice and visual brand standards – against a backdrop of continually moving divisional or tech domain brand evolutions is difficult at the best of times, 

Check out the meme, ‘Painful approval’. Have you struggled from the feelings of weariness and strangulation?

The challenges represented by ‘Painful approval!’ relate to:

• Project leaders with non-standard campaign models, relationships of extra-ordinary funding sources 
• Product marketing managers who themselves are attempting to nudge the brand standards for the functional interests 
• Head of regional marketing teams who require a nuanced approach to brand standards and portfolio articulation.

This post is 1:50 from #WhenTheAgency, a witty collection of observations through the eyes of the tech marketing agency. All memes are available to drag and drop into presentations or social posts. Visitors are encouraged to share and create knowing smiles amongst your colleagues and peers.

The full library of memes for #WhenTheAgency is available here. Enjoy!

In response, we’ve a collective desire to reduce the messages to the minimum of what’s required.

But sometimes the desire to keep the white paper to 4 pages, video to 2 mins or blog to X-hundred words just doesn’t work. Messages get over-clipped and new notions are strangled by restrictive word counts. If it doesn’t fit, don’t squeeze it in. 

Check out the meme, ‘Content shoehorn’. Have you done the pushing to close the doors?

The challenges represented by ‘Content shoehorn!’ relate to:

• Content marketers and their associate writers and agencies charged with production
• Product marketers who may be under pressure to over-expand agendas and messages
• Marketing leaders who recognise the value of balancing crisp, shorter-form content with realistic word counts to deliver the messages effectively.

This post is 1:50 from #WhenTheAgency, a witty collection of observations through the eyes of the tech marketing agency. All memes are available to drag and drop into presentations or social posts. Visitors are encouraged to share and create knowing smiles amongst your colleagues and peers.

The full library of memes for #WhenTheAgency is available here. Enjoy!

Also, it’s often the case for the task to be deferred to multiple stakeholders – often taking longer to mobilise than the campaign itself.

Check out the meme, ‘Data deferral!’. Are you part of the cycle – or struggled to navigate it?

The challenges represented by ‘Data deferral!’ relate to:

• Marketing and campaign managers integrating internal and agency resources and scope 
• Digital marketing professionals looking to ensure attributions at every point
• Marketing heads who need to lean on out of team resources to curate account data. 

This post is 1:50 from #WhenTheAgency, a witty collection of observations through the eyes of the tech marketing agency. All memes are available to drag and drop into presentations or social posts. Visitors are encouraged to share and create knowing smiles amongst your colleagues and peers.

The full library of memes for #WhenTheAgency is available here. Enjoy!

And with campaign analytics available across so many touchpoints through the digital journey, it’s not surprising that the ‘pixel’ ball is dropped occasionally. Just make sure it’s not a critical indicator.

Check out the meme, ‘Arghnalytics!’. Have you seen or done ‘the scream’?

The challenges represented by ‘Arghnalytics!’ relate to:

• Marketing and campaign managers integrating internal and agency resources and scope 
• Digital marketing professionals looking to ensure attributions at every point 
• Marketing heads who have approved campaign set-up and deployment but haven’t yet pre-flight checked the data and analytics.

This post is 1:50 from #WhenTheAgency, a witty collection of observations through the eyes of the tech marketing agency. All memes are available to drag and drop into presentations or social posts. Visitors are encouraged to share and create knowing smiles amongst your colleagues and peers.

The full library of memes for #WhenTheAgency is available here. Enjoy!

Especially for tech business who are in the early days of creating sustainable revenue and whose funding needs to stretch a long way.

But the skill-set and decision-making logic should be questioned when the client decides to use the internal web team to produce the creative, assets, and collateral for a campaign. Where do the technical and operational skills of the web team overlap with those charged with creating and producing an array of digital (and non-digital) elements? 

Check out the meme, ‘The wisdom of using the web team’. Have you seen or done ‘the cross’? 

The challenges represented by ‘The wisdom of the web team’ relate to:

• Marketing and campaign managers balancing support from internal and agency resources 
• Marketing leaders assigning budget allocations to tasks and workstreams 
• Web team managers tasked with responsibilities beyond their traditional key capabilities and training

This post is 1:50 from #WhenTheAgency, a witty collection of observations through the eyes of the tech marketing agency. All memes are available to drag and drop into presentations or social posts. Visitors are encouraged to share and create knowing smiles amongst your colleagues and peers.

The full library of memes for #WhenTheAgency is available here. Enjoy!