How's your workday going?

How's your workday going? Is it a messy tangle of to-do’s, meetings, instant messages, and urgent tasks? Or does your day allow for space to breathe, think, reflect — and time to focus on your most important assignments and goals?

Fourteen million marketers in North America report they struggle with work burnout. That’s 84% of marketers.

Why? Lack of process visibility and a rundown of the state of specific initiatives, tasks, programs, and campaigns.

According to our proprietary research, 68% of marketing organizations still run their complex operation using spreadsheets, Slack messages, and email. While other corporate departments like Sales, Finance, CX, and Product have transitioned to a function-specific unified system of record and action that runs all critical processes for the members of the teams, the CMO has no modern software solution to look for to increase productivity and prevent burnout within her group. She makes do with spreadsheets, slide decks, and the occasional task management software.

As a result, the entire marketing team - pressed to go to market at near real-time speed - is experiencing burnout.

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Process visibility and a rundown of the marketing programs are the biggest pain points.

Marketing is a department made up of multiple, discipline-specific sub-departments. Content, Comms, Product Marketing, Demand Gen and others, all have their unique processes that interconnect with each other creating a web of perfectly executed programs. The CMO needs complete visibility into every thread, pulling and redirecting them when required.

Yet, 4 out of 5 marketers will tell you they don’t have visibility into what’s going on in other marketing teams and how all workstreams merge to create the marketing plan. Most marketers manage their own project plan, providing updates periodically to other team members. Real-time visibility? Just make sure to update the spreadsheet.

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Task management solutions enhance complexity and increase work.

Influenced by their product management peers and agile best practices, marketers try to keep up with other departments and modern practices by adopting no-code task management solutions. This stacked-up clunkware – amounting to slightly better administrative tools for performing manual tasks -- only adds to the marketer’s work burden. Instead of simply DOING their work, marketers spend hours architecting processes from scratch and duplicating boards and line items daily to create new project plans. This practice leaves departments with no more than a glorified, slightly improved spreadsheet.

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The friction with business partners is mounting.

Marketing is the glue connecting between many departments when going to market. Because of businesses’ fast-paced nature, marketing’s business partners take a more active role in planning and executing marketing initiatives. In many instances, the business partner initiates the program or is a significant stakeholder in its success. Yet, business partners still need to connect to a request form to start a process, followed by endless meetings, emails, and Slack messages used to get the work done. This creates mounting tensions and friction between Marketing and their partners, resulting in an operational silo and fingerpointing.

How to increase efficiencies and reduce marketing burnout?

The answer is simple - organize all marketing activities around a single, company-wide, marketing plan, and allow business partners to take an active role in the marketing planning and execution process.

One marketing plan, 100% marketing - Make the marketing plan the COMPANY’s marketing plan, allowing everyone visibility and access to all marketing initiatives.

Best-practice automated processes - Marketers are not process experts. A product marketing manager working on a thought leadership webinar, or a growth marketing manager working on a lead gen webinar - need to execute on a… webinar. So why have multiple processes for the same initiative?

Marketing Activation - Allow business partners to participate in the planning and execution of marketing initiatives, giving them access to the marketing plan and the ability to ACTIVATE the marketing team as an expert, overseeing resource.

?At atrea, we are building the fastest marketing planning & execution experience for B2B marketers and their business partners. We’re merging AI with marketing process best practices to elevate the planning execution experience across the company. What we’re designing is less like traditional software and more like an autonomous marketing plan on steroids.

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