Marketers in Germany are facing both pre-existing challenges and a new era of campaign complexity. The COVID-19 pandemic simultaneously heightened the traditional need to prove ROI amid a climate of budget cuts, and increased the acceleration of digital transformation across Europe – applying even more pressure on German marketers to cover more multiple campaign channels and customer touchpoints.
Even before the pandemic, a report by BCG claimed that a top priority for 38% of German marketers surveyed was a “desire for flexibility”. The sudden and almost overnight shift to relying on teams to collaborate as they work alone from home would only serve to enhance that desire.
To navigate marketing challenges old and new, CMOs are prioritising an overhaul of their tech stack – which currently makes up 26% of total marketing budgets. Of course, introducing new tools can raise as many challenges as opportunities: too many disparate solutions can create chaos, noise and siloed projects. Many are turning to Smartsheet to unify their tech stacks, bring the right people together at the right moment, and ensure that hundreds of moving targets across multiple lines of communication are hit.
As a result, they’re empowered to work the way they want – gaining more space for creativity, team collaboration and insight.
“There’s a level of calmness now that we didn’t have before this schedule was completed; that’s really important for this team,” McCutchin says. “Everybody now has the same view of what we’re supposed to do; all the oars are in the water going the same way. Before, we never knew what was around the corner, but now using Smartsheet we’re all planning for the same thing and we all have the same line of sight to it. Who wouldn’t want the ‘Smartsheet calm’ in their life?”
Mame McCutchin, Program Director at Ogilvy
A single ‘hub’ for campaign management
In today’s world of online and offline marketing opportunities, customer buying journeys span more touch points than ever before. Marketers have to create more content, to tighter timelines, and with smaller budgets – all while striving to create cut-through in a crowded competitive landscape.
To keep track of planning and executing these projects, content delivery and many campaign channels, marketers are looking for a single platform that unifies work, technology and people, along with other essential tools. For many, that’s Smartsheet.
Smartsheet can integrate existing platforms and ways of working such as Adobe Creative Cloud and Box for easy-to-access and holistic project management. There’s also Smartsheet’s 10,000ft resource management software to keep marketers up-to-date with what team members are working on.
Through Smartsheet, managers can have a clear and real time overview of which tasks are complete and which are in need of attention – with the ability to ensure work is assigned to the right person, at the right time. And the broader marketing team can effectively balance workloads, reduce their risk of burnout, and gain the time and space to create more impactful content.
“[Smartsheet] gives us and the client a clear view of where we are in the project life cycle. We can also see clear dependencies in real time and how they impact on the timeline. This means that the client is more aware of their responsibilities, for example in signing off a piece of work, and what the impact is of not completing it on time.”
A Smartsheet customer in marketing
There’s also a solution for the capture and analysis of crucial data. Smartsheet can help you optimise your campaigns by collating all the campaign data so you can see where to make updates and changes. It aligns with your marketing tech stack and presents a full view of the data to make it easier to monitor and apply the learnings into future campaigns.
“With Smartsheet and 10,000ft, I don't have to keep all this information in my head. I have about 23 active projects right now. These platforms help me track progress and answer questions on the fly. They help me be smarter in meetings for people who need answers. They support how I show up for my team and with leadership.”
Corrina Wertzberger, Associate Project Management Director, Haberman
Collaborate & create
The sudden shift to remote working since COVID-19 hit workforces has left its mark on how marketing and creative teams collaborate. While German companies struggled less with keeping teams focused and aligned than other countries (37%, compared to 54% in the US), it’s still a significant concern, affecting more than a third of German businesses.
Marketers are using Smartsheet to keep teams focused, working collaboratively (from a range of locations) – and creating great work. Smartsheet integrates seamlessly with key creative platforms like Adobe Creative Cloud, giving marketers the visibility and context needed to effectively produce high quality content at scale, without leaving the Adobe Creative Cloud environment.
Meanwhile, Brandfolder empowers marketers to track and organise all creative assets and discover all content within their workflows, reducing the creation of repetitive assets to drive greater transparency and efficiency.
This takes the stress out of the planning and replaces it with the breathing space to foster a culture of creativity. With one version of truth, teams can create, review and refine content all in one place. This avoids distraction and stress from lost edit requests, missed feedback, version control and siloed production.
“Smartsheet frees up our designers to spend time being creative, brainstorming, and concepting big ideas with their team instead of spending hours on data entry, pulling metrics, and chasing answers through emails. Smartsheet lets us focus on the fun stuff.”Karen Pytel, Design Lead, Design Operations and Strategy, McGraw Hill
Demonstrate your ROI
The fallout of the pandemic has meant companies are reducing budgets – often citing the lack of events as their reason for targeting marketing departments. Many are finding this demonstration of ROI very tough with 39% of German marketers ranking it as their biggest challenge. As such, many European marketers use partner services (including marketing technology platforms like Smartsheet) to boost ROI by 80%, or even to demonstrate the link between output and ROI more clearly.
Going through the pain-staking process of proving the value of your team’s work is no longer an issue for the marketers using Smartsheet. The platform draws all performance metrics into one place and removes barriers in data and analytics, giving marketers a clear view of their success and contribution to business goals. Smartsheet’s ability to record the different trends of a campaign and automatically pull it into a visual dashboard also cuts the manual labour involved in reporting, putting precious hours back into marketers’ hands.
Thanks to Smartsheet’s features such as key integrations with platforms like Salesforce and Power BI, proving ROI is finally both tangible and quick without the need to trawl through the data manually. And the dashboard makes any campaign successes easy to see and understand. Not only can it demonstrate past ROI, it can also forecast the value of future business.
“Before, if we had to make a case for a budget request, I would ask the team to run some numbers: look at the volume of activity that we executed upon last year, break it down by these criteria. It was always like a science project of manual data pulls and checking the data in case it wasn’t correct. It took a lot of time and wasn’t efficient.
Now we have this dashboard showing me all of that in real time, and taking it even a step further to visually show the trends.”Anna Poulakis, Senior Director of Marketing Automation, PTC
Smartsheet helps teams collaborate seamlessly; it simplifies a complicated marketing landscape with centralised project management and saves priceless project time often burnt on trying to prove ROI. The combined benefit of all Smartsheet’s features means marketers can apply their focus where it should be – making campaigns as creative and impactful as possible.
Learn how Smartsheet can help you streamline your campaigns and support a dynamic workforce.