Ten Levers of Success I Use to Build a Marketing Center of Excellence That Bring Strategic Impact
I’ve always had the mindset of staying ahead of the competition, regardless of the gap in between us. And that’s the exact words I tell entrepreneurs who seek my advice. Because once you’ve established a stable business, that’s all the more you can’t stop.
One of the ways you can accelerate your business growth is by creating a Center of Excellence (COE). It’s a vital component of any organization that wants to realize digital transformation for their company.
Gartner describes effective CoEs as “concentrating existing expertise and resources in a discipline or capability to attain and sustain world-class performance and value.”
In the context of marketing, concentrating this expertise and resources in the Center of Excellence framework means you can scale your marketing efforts with more effective strategies and efficient processes that give more value to every dollar you spend.
Essentially, a marketing COE would ensure you launch your campaigns at a targeted yet practical level.
Some of the many benefits you get out of a marketing Center of Excellence:
- Continued education
The pace of change in marketing is a well-known challenge. Your COE creates consistency in education and learning for marketing teams and the overall organization by tracking and updating best practices.
- More efficient use of resources
High-demand capabilities like skills, knowledge, and experiences should be centralized to widen the reach of the capabilities and streamline their access across the organization.
- Faster delivery
Eliminating bottlenecks by streamlining access to critical capabilities increases the speed of delivery, research, development, and maintenance of critical business processes.
- Increased quality of services and product
Standardizing best practices enables uniformity of service and product delivery and quality end-to-end customer experiences.
- Cost optimization
You can decrease cost by eliminating inefficient practices that reduce redundancy, maximize reusable assets, and optimize the use of all resources.
Ten success strategies that drive results
Creating a Marketing COE takes a significant investment of aptitude, time, and assets. From defining clear principles to continuously improving processes and allowing room to scale, here are ten strategies you can implement to help establish your own marketing Center of Excellence.
Clear strategic alignment and well-defined vision
Every COE must have a well-defined vision that is core to the organization’s strategy and long-term goals. Your marketing should align not only with your business objectives but also with every work you do.
In order to make your solution adaptable to business changes and how marketing evolves, as well as resilient to issues that arise, you need to define clear rules on how to build your COE. Each step in your process needs to have logging, traceability, accountability, and supports your long-term goals. This sets you off in the right foot and promises longevity in your approach while making sure you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.
Assigning completely independent and holistic team
COEs are not impacted by day-to-day business of an organization and have the flexibility to innovate. Your marketing Center of Excellence must be independent and armed with the right skills to understand and develop end-to-end technology, products, and services. This includes architects, product managers, people managers, technology researchers, etc., bringing competence and talent to the table.
For instance, a COE around content marketing must bring together a team the creates content for sales, video content, customer service, and research team to create a more effective and efficient content marketing engine. Respecting and engaging the expertise of the different disciplines is key.
Led by trusted leadership
The success of a marketing COE hinges on a visionary leader with an unstirring passion for making an indelible mark in the craft. Creating the vision, mobilizing resources, and keeping momentum ensure that your COE can continue to create an impact. Right leadership will:
- Create visibility in the organization and ensuring access to relevant stakeholders
- Enable authority and decision-making that balances marketing and operations
- Ensure the ability to align with the organization’s changing priorities
- Facilitate continuous growth of competence and capability
Understanding customer relationship
An in-depth view of customer needs is critical when setting up a Center of Excellence. Insights on industry trends, regulatory changes, innovations, and disruptions are essential perspectives that drive innovation and let you adapt to changes. In addition, predicting potential challenges and risks that can aid customers and forge stronger relationships is an important component in a marketing COE and the 360-degree view of the business.
Enables effective resource management and stable, monitored establishments
Your marketing COE members must have access to shared resources such as tools, templates, calendars, and the like to function efficiently. At the same time, your organization must create a proactive monitoring routine that everyone adheres to for best practice and consistency. A proactive monitoring routine establishes repeated quality assurance and clear testing process that ensures your initiatives always follow best practices.
Strives for demand management and continuous improvement
Identifying execution gaps and areas that need focus and investments enables resource allocation to get work done and improve pipeline management. The fast-changing marketing environment must be foolproof, so business needs are identified and gaps are made known so a resolution can be immediately implemented for both your business and your customers.
A documentation repository for holding all team artifacts can help your COE members check information and learn as they go. This will help accelerate time-to-market and improve quality that hinges on continuous learning and adaptation. And it leaves a legacy that doesn’t rely on specific talents to function.
Promotes value and risk management and coordination across teams
I noticed when working with bigger companies how many divisions, departments, and teams become siloed in the way they work simply because there’s improper coordination across everyone. There are many solutions that allow companies to gain visibility into how work is impacting top objectives and how each body of work contributes to business objectives and KPIs.
Aligns with well-defined success criteria
Measurements drive behavior, and the correct behavior drives performance. It is critical for the organization to define success KPIs that are demonstrable to justify investments and continuous focus on a marketing COE. A centralized tracking, auditing, and reporting ensures that you are always on track of your activities and sees to it that every marketing initiative, project, and effort drives you to your COE’s goal.
Unlike implementing new technology, or redesigning your website, creating a Center of Excellence for marketing is a game-changing action. Once it’s created, it will also require diligence in its updating and enforcement.
Using these principles to roll out your marketing Center of Excellence allows you to latch on to your business goals with a task force that enables you to do so across all aspects of the business. Each one is a critical element to establishing an effective COE. Building it right with the relevant area of focus is imperative to make sure your COE can help your company solve some of the key challenges around key talent and innovation in the long run.
It might be time for you to build your marketing Center of Excellence. Let’s talk about how you can start today.
About Jeev
A serial entrepreneur with a rich history of launching disruptive online businesses and taking them to the top, Jeev owns dozens of “go-to” reviews and rankings websites. Jeev has invested more than 20 years researching human behavior and how to leverage different sales methodologies to effectively influence decision-makers.To find out how Jeev can help you, visit jeevtrika.com.