Marketing is not Marketing. It's also different than Marketing.
Designing effective technology training for different marketing roles
As KPMG prepared for our launch of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, it became crystal clear how many valid definitions there are for marketing. A digital marketer that manages our social media channel plays a very different role from the marketer who looks after one of our biggest clients on the Field Marketing team. Many large professional services firms like KPMG also have tech alliance partnerships with co-branded marketing programs that are aligned to, but can be executed very differently, from other marketing programs. Demand generation and lead management focused individuals focus on capturing, nurturing, and distributing leads. All these individuals are “marketers”, but when it comes to marketing technology, they are impacted by and benefit from the technology differently - therefore need to be trained differently.
Part of our transformation and preparation for the new marketing technology launch has been organizational in nature - to bring together people who were doing many different disciplines of digital and demand gen marketing into one shared service ‘center of excellence’. We created an engine room for marketing where the creative and digital work gets produced. Similarly, we combined geo-based marketers with our key account marketers into one powerful team that has responsibility for large and smaller accounts, as well as market and account-based branding opportunities. The reorganization prepared us to train a complete set of individuals and scale the benefit of new tech capabilities for the firm overall.
In order to have the most effective training approach, we looked at different use cases and needs of various marketing populations. The roles each group plays within the marketing organization and the broader firm required a different set of learning plans, so we tailored a training approach to each of those groups. We broke down the Marketing function into three main categories - product/segment marketers, field marketers, and power users. While there are many flavors within each of those categories alone, due to the number of business lines and complexity of the business overall, we kept the training approach to those three groups for simplicity and practicality of delivery and communications. Of course, within the power users group, we had to be very specific in that group’s training plan, so they had the necessary hands-on experience with the Marketing Cloud technology they are responsible for.
Training laid the groundwork for the team's understanding, and naturally, as we actually use the tools, adapt our campaigns to become journey-based, and optimize based on measurement view in campaign dashboards, each team will gain additional experience and perfect their craft "by doing". The beauty of the Salesforce technology is that it brings the 'many faces of a marketing organization' together in a more transparent and connected way. Each Marketer plays their unique role - many flavors of marketers - for the whole marketing orchestra to play a symphony in collaboration with each other.
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