How do you foster a culture of innovation and experimentation in your enterprise marketing team?

It's essential that your marketing goals align with your company's goals. Otherwise, your marketing efforts will be ineffective.

Speak to as many senior stakeholders as possible. More often than not, key business objectives are the result of collective bargaining between multiple interests. Try to get to the root of what these are and find out how your strategic partnerships can serve specific stakeholder needs.

The most successful teams I have worked with are able to remain agile and flexible in their roles. As a marketing leader, it's important to give team members direction, especially if you have a lean team. By establishing a general workflow for projects, managers can set expectations and KPIs for each member based on their strengths. Once the team has established a steady production flow in day-to-day activities, it becomes easier to manage and adjust to unforeseen changes in any particular project. Project delays aren't caused by unproductive employees; they are caused by a lack of direction. Great managers are able to help their teams prioritize tasks so team members are able to hit their goals regardless of shifts in project goals.

It's a good idea to dedicate 10% to 20% of your marketing budget and resources to experimental ideas. These are typically wild bets. Most won't be fruitful but a few will end up being ROI positive giving your business a big edge over competitors.

Changing a culture requires rethinking everything about your business. You need to ask yourself: How are our actions shaped by extrinsic and intrinsic motivations alike? You may want to start with your own behaviors, documenting them and asking what needs to change to encourage others to change too. But soon the net will broaden. Are your teams structured in a way that enables cross-pollination? Do staff have the time in their day to take ownership over new ideas? Are your compensation structures geared toward innovation? Nothing can be off the table.

Just because something is innovative doesn’t make it inherently successful. And therein lies the mundanity. In order to create an impactful culture of innovation, firms must adopt rigid, systematic processes of evaluation. First, an idea must be conceptualized. Then, information needs to be gathered on who needs to be involved and in what capacity. Existing benchmarks must be studied and data gathered to define what success looks like. And even then, careful consideration should be given to both risk factors and resource investment — all before any work in earnest really begins. Then, of course, there comes the need to thoroughly document, report and review experiments in the field before any potential widespread adoption.