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3 simple ways MBA degree holders can scale marketing operations
December 13, 2017
As businesses grow, they might also want to grow their marketing operations. Here's a look at how you can go about scaling up marketing effectively.
For a young start-up, marketing efforts might consist of little more than an intern with social media savvy and a bit of guidance from the founders. For larger businesses, ongoing marketing plans might see a whole team hard at work promoting the goods or services on offer.
No matter what the size, though, as a business grows, new possibilities and greater access to resources will typically invite and necessitate more ambitious marketing. The question, often, is about how best to scale up marketing efforts effectively. Simply investing more, after all, will not necessarily lead to better results.
Want to ensure your workplace's marketing scales up in a sensible, cost-effective manner? Here are some strategies to use to make it happen.
Refine your marketing strategy to make it scalable
Increased investment in marketing only works if a plan exists for how to do so sensibly. At the core of such a plan should be a deep understanding of the key differentiators that set your business apart from any competitors, and a roadmap outlining ideal targets for geographic or product line expansion. These ideas, though potentially complicated, must be distilled so that they can be succinctly communicated to individuals who are not familiar with what your business does and where it is headed. These simplified yet illuminating messages can form the basis for future marketing efforts at many levels of scale.
Performing this sort of analysis requires a broad, long-term vision that is common among graduates of a top-level MBA program. Skills in competitive analysis, evaluating opportunities for global expansion, and crafting effective strategy are all important outcomes for graduates, and can form the basis of a laser-focused approach to marketing growing businesses.
Use MBA program training to identify & acquire useful technological tools
Many hands make light work, but it is also true that a single piece of quality software can make a world of difference in lightening a marketing workload. There are a great many technological tools out there expressly designed to help streamline and automate the marketing process, and by adopting one or more of them, it's possible that you could help your marketing team greatly increase their impact.
A marketing automation suite, for instance, could help your business create email marketing campaigns that deliver personalized communications to prospective customers at different stages of their decision-making process. Other tools can be used to automatically search and curate relevant web content that could be shared with interested followers on social media, or streamline other types of repetitive work done by your marketing team.
Today's MBA degree programs recognize the important role that well-selected technology can play within a business's operations, with many now making exploring digital tools an important part of their curriculum.
In WU Executive Academy's MBA programs, for instance, enrollees explore key technological systems employed in the world's top companies, receiving expert perspectives on how to adopt new tools for maximum effect. Using this training to select automation solutions for your marketing efforts could help you make dramatic improvements to efficiency in relatively short order.
Give more responsibility to your team after completing your marketing degree
It may seem unusual to recommend ceding an amount of control over your marketing efforts after completing an MBA in marketing. Graduating from this type of program, after all, will mean you have acquired deep knowledge of many elements of business, with particular emphasis in marketing – who better to make marketing decisions than you?
The trouble arises when, as marketing scales up, there are many more relatively minute details to be handled. Devoting too much time to solving these problems will take you away from other important work, such as developing strategy or creating innovative approaches to marketing the business. Delegating effectively can free up your time for these important responsibilities, requiring only that you place trust in the team you work with every day.
Achieving the right balance of delegation may prove difficult, but graduates of MBA schools hold a key advantage in this respect, given their access to thought leaders in their industry. Taking a moment to reach out to your alumni network, or to peers from your program, could help you gain valuable perspectives about how best to divide your attentions, and better utilize your team.
