What is the biggest issue marketing departments face?

Strangely though, that is not the biggest issue that marketing departments face.

There are two that are more critical to the performance of a marketing team, and that is time and competency levels. It takes time to do marketing, gain traction in a market place, adjust marketing campaigns when they are not working quite as good as they should. It also takes time to get up to speed, come up with ideas and executive integrated marketing campaigns, getting buyin from all stakeholders.

Competency levels are an issue across the board. No marketer is truly 100 percent competent across all marketing areas because marketing changes every day and it is impossible to keep up. Smart marketing departments factor this in and constantly train and upskill their people, knowing that the more knowledge they have of the latest in marketing techniques and technologies, the greater results the company's marketing efforts will have. 

While webinars from organisations like Marketing Profs and Hubspot may be a bore, most marketers who are open to learning will take away one lesson that is worthwhile.

Marketing departments that are focused on high performance allow employees a minimum of 3 hours per week for learning and development. If you ask most marketers, this is a luxury that they are not afforded in either small business or enterprise level marketing departments. The main reason being is cost to the organisation and not being able to directly show that the value in learning and development affecting a company's bottom line. 

The secondary issue that many companies face is that it is not Gen-X that are needing the biggest investment, it is millennials. And while knowing how to use Snapchat or Instagram is important, it is too easy to spend that time that they should be learning and developing their skills chatting with their friends and in general playing with their mobile phones.

Like most intelligent people, they will tell you that this is how they learn, but when you ask them to translate that into a marketing campaign, you will find that too often they miss the mark, don't understand the target audience, and are unable to use their own skills of promoting themselves on social media in the real world for clients.

That's where psychological profiling comes in. Find people who want to be the best and want to rise up the ranks fast because they are the one's that will go the extra mile and won't waste time when allocated learning and development programs.

Time and competency will always be a never ending issue that marketing departments face, and the challenge that people higher up the chain face is working out how to find a happy medium.