According to the American Marketing Association marketing is "a function within organizations and a collection of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing the customer relationship in ways that are beneficial to the organization and its stakeholders. Fantastic, but actually delivering that value requires discipline. But how do you ensure that? Start today with these four tips.

1. Get the right team

If you value discipline on your team, the key is to start with the right disciplines on your team. Today, a marketing team is structured differently than it was 20 years ago. The linchpin on your team is the project manager. He or she is the point of contact and coordinates all the ins and outs of the team. Depending on how you do marketing, you probably need an online strategist, a social media manager, a front-end developer, a content marketer and - indispensable in a modern team - a marketing automation specialist. If you have a small team, several people master several of these disciplines, but a trafficer, a designer and a marketing manager won't get you anywhere in today's digital world.

2. Provide tools that can grow with your team

Not everyone has the luxury of putting out all those jobs at once. Then you just start with a small team of multidisciplinary people. There's a catch there, though. This small team chooses software to work with. Then make sure that as your organization - and therefore your team and number of assets - grows, the software and infrastructure can grow with you.

3. Provide automation

We cannot do without automation today, without it there is no discipline anyway. Realize that marketing automation is a discipline. Don't think: our IT department will solve that. Those technical guys often think in storage, but a repository is not a storage system. It is not just about storage, a good solution ensures that your assets are efficiently structured, easy to share, internally and externally, that different formats are supported, that repetitive tasks are automated, that user rights are properly covered and that you can easily search. And, more importantly, that you can easily find anything. That's how you get discipline.

4. Secure your processes in templates

By capturing your processes in templates, you complete the discipline. And we don't just mean templates to create a communication expression, but templates for your processes themselves. Work according to well-defined processes and record them in a template. Only then will they be transferable in your team, and you won't have to keep reinventing the wheel and guarantee the continuity of your marketing operation. For example, make sure you upload files in the right way, with the right metadata. Once you have established such a process, stick to it. Not to be rigid, but if you give everyone a free hand, you will create a huge mess in no time. If something doesn't work well, discuss it and adjust it in consultation. Prevent anyone from coming up with a different process on their own, because before you know it you have another hard drive with a big pile of cluttered files and your DAM is a zombie.

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