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Simply speaking, a marketing bottleneck is when a team’s not able to produce campaigns or assets as quickly as they should, Mejia explains. “I think sometimes managers will feel it, but not as much as the people on the ground will feel it,” she says. “So it looks a lot like five rounds of reviews where briefs have to be reconstructed. It looks like team frustration. It looks like missed deadlines and generally the sense of things going too slow.” It’s a scenario that most marketers will likely recognise, according to Mejia. “It’s an extremely frustrating position to be in from a team point of view, but also from a marketing goal point of view. It’s quite toxic, because marketers are in a very fast paced environment where you are competing for attention, and the way you are able to compete is by putting your content in front of your audience at the right time. “If it takes you too long to do that, then you’re not able to get the feedback loops you need in order to create the most efficient processes, and you won’t be able to get the most out of your resources, whether that’s budget or people.” The bottlenecks are most likely to occur when marketing teams don’t keep the ‘why’ front of mind. Marketers focus on goals. They understand the goal of any particular campaign they’re working on. But why is it the goal? It’s a key step in the process that Mejia believes is often skipped. “In marketing, you can also get caught up in vanity metrics, and how many likes something gets,” she says. “I’m not saying that those metrics are not relevant. They very much can be. It just depends on why it’s important. And it’s not because a post went viral that you are necessarily succeeding. “You need to understand how it’s connected to your larger goal. So it’s both the goal and it’s the why. And this really trickles down from the team plan for the quarter or the year, down to the specific campaign.” As far as Mejia is concerned, marketing briefs are sacred, but so is quarterly planning because those documents, although she admits they can feel a tad bureaucratic, are crucial in keeping marketing managers aligned with company leadership, and keeping themselves aligned with their teams when it comes to deciding what types of campaigns they’re working on, why they’re working on them and, ultimately, what success looks like. “Those are really important pillars to make sure that things don’t get messy and fall apart,” says Mejia.

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Paula Ximena Mejia, Wix Studio: 3 Strategies to Solve Marketing Bottlenecks