How Marketing Orchestration Fosters Stronger Leadership Alignment

Summary

This blog emphasizes the importance of a principled approach to orchestration and stresses how leadership alignment is crucial for successful orchestration. It highlights how marketing orchestration, through unified strategy, consistent messaging, cross-channel coordination, data-driven decision-making, improved efficiency, and real-time visibility addresses go-to-market hold ups.

By Sarah Threet, Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing

Do you find implementing new processes in your marketing department akin to herding tigers? Maybe everyone seems aligned on changing a process from the start, but the actual execution and accountability to testing the change can become the real challenge. It’s not as simple as agreeing to test a process change because there needs to be a disciplined approach to making process changes. 

A principled approach to orchestration illustrates how the work gets done, starting with planning and going through execution to optimization. The approach examines the inputs and outputs of campaign development and execution steps to drive cross-functional collaboration, improve agility and performance, and fulfill your market potential. 

This approach cannot work if leadership is not on the same page about implementing process changes. When execution lacks structure, each team figures out a way to make it work for themselves and that’s how silos get formed. If leaders aren’t communicating, then they allow their teams to do their thing so long as they hit their own KPIs. When testing a new process, if each leader isn’t holding their team accountable to the test, results on the effectiveness of the change will be inaccurate. 

There is always going to be some resistance to change. To change things more easily, we need to directly ask our teams why that change is hard and then come to an agreement on what changes we are going to test.  

So how does marketing orchestration make any of this easier? 

 

Unified Strategy:  

Proper marketing orchestration ensures that all marketing channels and activities are aligned with the overall business strategy. It creates a unified approach so that every marketing effort contributes to the organization’s broader goals. Developing a unified strategy involves collaboration between marketing teams and other key departments who have different information to contribute to the business goals.  

Having a clear orchestration process aligns leadership because it ensures that there will be touchpoints where strategic concerns are discussed and ironed out. A structured cadence provides ample opportunity to get clarity on the shared goals and objectives. It is crucial for leadership to continuously be on the same page about these shared goals as it establishes that decisions are made with a focus on enduring success rather than the short-term gains for one team. 

Consistent Messaging:  

Proper orchestration involves adhering to established brand guidelines across all communication channels, including maintaining a consistent tone, visual identity, and messaging style to reinforce the brand’s image and values. Coordination within the orchestration process keeps content calendars synchronized, preventing conflicting messages and maintaining a cohesive narrative throughout various marketing channels. 

Leadership needs this cohesive framework to guide their teams to go to market with a consistent message. Primarily, this is an outward facing benefit for the brand, but internally, consistent messaging strengthens organizational core values and provides a clear direction for the company. 

 

Cross-Channel Coordination:  

Marketing orchestration eases coordination so that all channels work together seamlessly. It easily enables multi-channel campaign management and improves the overall impact of marketing efforts. Coordination is proactive in approach, so it is easier to prevent conflicts or duplication of efforts; the platforms or systems integrate different marketing channels so that campaigns are complementary.  

Leadership requires this orchestration of channels to sync their teams so that execution is more purposeful. It also keeps leadership easily up to speed on who is doing what and when so that they can make more agile decisions mid-campaign. 

 

Data-Driven Decision Making:  

Well-orchestrated teams use data in their decisions and provide a unified view of marketing data, enabling real-time insights, attributing success, and leveraging predictive analytics. This comprehensive approach helps marketers make informed decisions that are grounded in data and aligned with overall business objectives.  

With this unified view, leadership can easily see which channels are providing the most revenue, what messaging and content resonates best with their ICP, where along the funnel needs more support, and identify any emerging opportunities and trends that they can proactively approach. 

Importantly, orchestration provides a framework for inputting and tracking the data, avoiding inconsistencies and inaccuracies. Data is consolidated from each channel into one central base rather than being siloed per team. Inconsistent data across teams hinders decision-making and leaves leadership debating which story to follow in informing their strategic changes. 

 

Improved Efficiency:  

Proper orchestration leverages automation, minimizing risks and errors and thereby improving efficiency. Moreso, orchestration makes it easier to see redundant tasks in the first place. A centralized approach makes it easier to see and understand what tasks are being performed across different teams and channels. Redundancies can be identified when teams share information about their activities and campaigns. 

Through automation, teams can reduce manual efforts and avoid duplication of work. Rather than reactively fight fire, teams can spend more time optimizing strategy. Leadership can delegate resources to more proactive work. 

An improved workflow aligns tasks and activities to specific objectives, so it makes it easier for leadership to spot when a marketing effort may be less impactful or relevant. Pulling that activity from execution of the strategy frees up resources to test other efforts. 

 

Real-time Visibility:  

Real-time visibility in marketing facilitates agility and the ability to adapt to rapidly changing market dynamics. This enables leadership to respond quickly to changing conditions, optimize campaigns on the fly, and deliver more personalized and effective marketing experiences. 

Orchestration assists in this through streamlining and integration of multiple channels, activities, etc. With all the information centralized, marketing decision makers can see day-by-day how their efforts impact their audience. 

Orchestration tools help monitor how customers are interacting with campaigns, enabling marketers to make timely adjustments to improve engagement. By analyzing customer behavior as it happens, marketers can dynamically adjust content and messaging to cater to individual preferences and behaviors in real-time. These tools also ease dynamic testing, identify bottlenecks in the buyer’s journey, and provide alerts and notifications. 

  

In Summary: 

When leadership works within their own silos and from their own data, their goals are going to look different, and their teams are going to prioritize those goals rather than executing on a larger objective. If you find that communication in your department is lacking, bottlenecks are frequent, marketing efforts regularly conflict, and that every team has strikingly different data, then there is a need for orchestration improvement. 

Be mindful that proper orchestration takes time and continuous iteration. It is not a one-and-done solution. And while orchestration provides the structure to better communicate with colleagues, it still requires that leadership foster a culture that encourages communication.  

The likelihood of success significantly increases when teams work towards the same objectives, and leadership needs to hold that line. If there is a process to adhere to, it will be a lot easier to identify who is holding up what and where. Orchestration requires that leadership hold not only their own teams accountable to the process, but that they also hold one another accountable as well.  

It is important to note that leadership alignment does not only benefit the operational aspects of business, but it is also crucial for supporting and retaining talent in several ways. Their alignment creates a positive and motivating work environment. Learn more in the next post in this series.