I was spoiled.

He had never said no to me until two days ago when I asked him to trim the trees growing over to my side of our yard over our neighbor’s fence. He politely and apologetically said: “Miss Pam, I am so sorry that I have projects until mid-September. I won’t be able to do it now, but I can recommend someone else to do it for you.” I was a little disappointed and annoyed, but I understood.

Working in the corporate world, I have had a lot of stakeholders and business unit partners. Some of them were my internal customers that I worked with to create strategy and be their liaison lead for collaborating with other marketing functions. Some of them were my internal partners that I needed for their support and help to get things done. In general, I never wanted to say no to them, but I often had limited budget, time and/or resources. You know how it is sometimes; you just can’t please everyone.

The trick is to actually say no, yet be respectful of their concerns and needs to retain a productive relationship. Over the years, I found the following five tactics to work well for communicating bad news and still getting things done with internal stakeholders and partners:

1. Say No With Facts & Data

The best way to take emotion out of an argument is to present statistics, facts, and data. Let the numbers speak for themselves. This works well for technology companies with data-driven corporate cultures or stakeholders with analytical mindsets. Use the stats as supporting points to explain your decisions.

Several years ago, I told local marketing teams to move 100 percent of their media dollars from print to digital. The China marketing team didn’t like that decision and presented solid data confirming that print still mattered to their target audience. I made an exception to allow a healthy percentage of Chinese media budget to remain for print.

2. Say No When There Really Is No Choice

This often happens in top-down communications when management makes a decision to do things in certain ways without consulting every person or department that will be affected. They may not have explained the reasons or logic and may not even be able to for legal or other reasons.

For example, a CMO says no to a multi-region advertising campaign and decides to focus on one or two key growth countries due to reduced budget and resources. You should communicate this to other team members, explaining that this is a hard decision for management to make, but it’s the right thing to do in the circumstance.

3. Say No by Providing Alternatives

I usually come up with a couple of alternatives for my stakeholders if I can’t do things exactly as requested.

When I needed to say no to the local teams that requested headquarters create specific content for their countries, I made sure that I proposed other finished content options for them to edit, translate or localize. I also worked with them to ensure they received the support they needed. It’s not ideal, but they understood. Although I couldn’t give them A, I would try to find B and/or C to ensure their needs were taken care of.

4. Say No by Prioritizing

Another way to say no is to let them know that this can’t be done now, but the request will be completed at a later time. This may work well for non-pressing deliverables such as content creation for secondary target audiences or products without paid media support.

I let my stakeholders know that I can’t do it this month, but I should be able to complete it next month. Eddie was busy until mid-September but he also made sure to let me know that he is available to do it after the second week of September.

5. Say No & Do Something Nice

Saying no with a plate of homemade cookies does minimize stakeholders’ ire. My stakeholders simultaneously detested and loved me when I brought desserts and food to meetings. They immediately knew that I had bad news to share, yet they loved to eat the goodies. Filling up their tummies helps to distract or mollify them a little and make the ‘no’ go down a bit easier (sometimes).

It’s Never Easy

Even if you do everything you can, you may still end up with bitter or grumpy internal stakeholders. Yes, you should expect to hear an earful of complaints, protests, and occasional shouts. The key is to be sincere, honest and be willing to lend a hand (or ear) when possible.

I am very happy that Eddie is doing well. He works hard and deserves it. I know he won’t have time to do small projects for me anymore. It’s time to find a good handyman who will say yes.

The post 5 Ways to Say No to Internal Stakeholders and Partners appeared first on Relevance.

A lot of us are cynical about annual planning. We all have experiences in which we poured out our hearts and souls to create a solid marketing plan or campaign, then the budget was reduced or the product got delayed or canceled. Sometimes changes in economic conditions or a company’s outlooks force us to go back to the drawing board.

Here is the dilemma of planning that can lead to therapy sessions: If we plan, chaos intervenes. If we don’t plan, chaos still intervenes.

So should we take more of a zen approach along the lines of “everything is nothing, planning is not planning”?

Why bother writing a strategy?

Here are the inherent benefits of planning that we subconsciously recognize, even if we don’t usually think it through:

1. Know what to do to accomplish end goals
2. Mitigate foreseeable chaos

Yes, the end goals may change, but having a plan allows you to adjust quickly (hopefully). Chaos does happen often (Murphy’s Law), but we minimize some mistakes and dramas upfront through planning.

For businesses, the sole purpose of a plan is an exercise for management to align budget and resources with business goals. Through the plan, the path they will set… (OK, that’s Yoda speak.)

The Difference Between “a plan” and “planning”

In addition, we need to recognize the difference between  “plans” and “planning”.

Planning is an active way of discussing the goals, objectives, strategies and tasks that we need to accomplish as a team. Plans are the documentations of planning at one point in time.

Because the environment changes, we need to continually communicate and collaborate on execution of a plan with our stakeholders; plans need to get updated to reflect changes.  Planning is really an ongoing process that helps us adjust the course, keep on-track and makes accomplishing our goals more likely.

President Eisenhower says it so poignantly, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”  Planning is the prerequisite of business success, but success is not guaranteed by planning.

To recap:

• Planning is an active ongoing process, while plans are the documentation of that discussion at one point in time.
• Planning aims to mitigate problems and changes, yet bear in mind that the only constant in life is change.
• Planning does not guarantee success, yet it’s absolutely necessary.

These two quotes reflect the essences of plans vs. planning.

Have a plan, but be ready to abandon it at any moment.
– Jennifer Baichwal

If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.
-Yogi Berra

Don’t fall in love with your marketing plans.  Don’t get frustrated with constant change.  It’s all part of the game.

And the saga of planning continues…

The post Plan to Replan: Why Your Strategy Can (and Should) Change appeared first on Relevance.

The 4P’s have served as the cornerstone of modern marketing for the past century. In a nutshell, the 4 P’s are the core concepts for creating the right product at the right price in the right place with an effective promotion.

The idea of 4 Ps of marketing has undergone expansion at various levels with more Ps added by many marketing gurus and experts. There is even a 4C concept floated. However, the 4Ps offer an effective platform for creating the basic marketing foundation.

Inspired by the 4 P’s, I create a new set of 4 P’s for global content marketing for my book, Global Content Marketing: Plan, Produce, Promote, and Perfect.

There are many challenges that marketers have to deal with while globalizing content. Global content marketing involves dealing with local language and culture which can prove to be tricky in some situations. Asian markets can be the perfect example where the homogeneous advantage that American markets offer is clearly missing. That’s why it is crucial to identify the challenges of scaling content globally, both internally and externally.

In content marketing, it is the words that evoke emotion. When language is a barrier, building emotional connections with your audience can pose more than basic challenges. Also, idioms that have a certain meaning in one country can have an entirely different meaning in another country.

The 4 P’s of Global Content Marketing

• Plan: Strategy before execution

Collaborate with relevant stakeholders on regional and country teams to create a global content marketing strategy that aligns target audiences, key success metrics, priority coun­tries, and strategic editorial topics with your business objectives.

Alignment of objectives and strategy is vital because it dictates con­tent creation, promotion, and measurement.

Also Read: But How Is Content Marketing Different From, Well, REGULAR Marketing?

• Produce: Create content that matters

Develop relevant stories that meet identified countries’ needs with different formats based on strategic editorial topics that address the target audience’s pain points, desires, and chal­lenges.

• Promote: Distribute content in the digital era

Establish a market-driven content distribution process with paid and social media. Publish the appropriate formats of content with the optimal frequency in targeted channels. Use tools and data to optimize the media buy and social media content distribution.

• Perfect: Measure and optimize to drive the maximum impact.

Continuously optimize and measure the impact of content marketing as part of an ongoing feedback loop. Define goals and use tools and processes to maximize the effectiveness of content production and content syndication. This step’s goal is to improve the previous 3 P’s: Plan, Produce and Promote.

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Global  = Headquarters & Local Working Together

When we add the word ‘Global’ in front of ‘Content Marketing,’ it feels like an extra weight is put on our shoulders, but ‘Global’ doesn’t mean that we have to market to all countries.

Let’s break down ‘Global’ and ‘Content Marketing’ into two elements:

Global in this context simply means headquarters working together with local teams to prioritize target countries, audiences and allocate budget and resource accordingly.

By the way, ‘headquarters’ isn’t necessarily the main office. It’s a group of people with organization-wide respon­sibilities who are not focusing on specific local markets. Corporate persons can also reside in the local markets, but they are responsible for organization-wide activities. In smaller companies, marketing may wear both hats of manag­ing organization-wide and local market responsibilities.

‘Local’ refers to regions or countries where the company has a local presence. Local presence does not necessarily mean the company has a physical office in a coun­try. To be efficient and save money, some companies choose to handle an entire region out of a single central office, but regional marketing will assess each local market differently.

Think and act both globally and locally

In today’s world, it’s no longer efficient to “Think globally, act locally.” For content marketing to scale to different countries effectively, we need to think and act both globally and locally.

• During the “Plan” stage, corporate sets up objectives and strategies, yet the local teams should weigh in and offer feedback. In other words, local isn’t responsible for just “act­ing” and corporate can’t do all the “thinking.” The local teams must contribute to the overall global content plan­ning or “thinking.”
• During the “Produce” stage, there is active thinking and acting on what content should be created, localized, and translated from both the corporate and local teams.
• During the “Promote” stage, the local teams are vigorously acting to implement region or country-specific promotional tactics to align with the overall content marketing objectives and goals.
• During the “Perfect” stage, the corporate and local teams may think and act collectively by determining the right measurement tools and metrics to use. In order to perfect local execution, the regional and country teams share promo­tional results and content measurements with corporate and other local teams.

In general, each company addresses global content marketing differently based on their organizational structures, budget allocations, corporate cultures, products, and services. Yet the 4 P’s of Global Content Marketing does not change. Global marketing requires close collaboration between the headquarters and local teams to achieve corporate goals. Once we understand what “global” means in this context, the weight on our shoulders doesn’t feel quite so heavy and we can see a clear path to globalize our content marketing efforts.

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