Wix Shares How To Optimize Enterprise Marketing via @sejournal, @martinibuster
Search Engine Journal spoke with Paula Ximena Mejia, VP of Enterprise Marketing at Wix, about building high-performing enterprise marketing teams. She shared actionable strategies to achieve marketing goals and identify what holds a team back.
The discussion focused on multiple topics, including:
- Telltale signs of misaligned goals and inefficiencies
- How to overcome resource constraints
- Stakeholder engagement to improve collaboration
- Tech audits
- Best way to use of AI in a marketing team
Reasons For Inefficiencies In Marketing Teams
Emailing with Paula about enterprise marketing she made it clear that marketing inefficiencies arise from losing focus of the overall goal. What she describes can happen almost silently and affect the productivity and success of marketing teams without hardly noticing what’s going on.
Paula shared:
“Marketing teams frequently encounter inefficiencies because they lose track of the goal. There’s a reason why certain activities are designed and executed but throughout that process, the end goal can be lost. It’s important to eliminate siloed information, bottlenecks in workflows, and challenges in managing limited resources to keep eyes on the prize and end goal.”
How To Address Misaligned Goals
Misaligned goals is something that affects marketing teams of all sizes. Over a career spanning over 20 years this is something I’ve seen quite a bit as a consultant for B2B enterprise corporations all the way to smaller offices. It’s easy to be consumed by the process and mistake them for goals.
I asked Paula what a company can do to avoid misaligned goals and one of things she touched on is pursuing trends that don’t align with broader priorities. She also mentioned “cross-functional collaboration” which is about getting employees that specialize in different areas to work together successfully on the same project.
She shared:
“Misaligned goals often emerge from unclear communication or when teams pursue trends that don’t align with broader organizational priorities. To avoid this, managers and team leads should focus on defining clear, measurable objectives that tie directly to business outcomes. It’s the project manager or team leads’ important role to make sure they understand senior leadership goals and establish processes for regular goal alignment by reviewing initiatives across teams and ensuring everyone is on the same page.
Cross-functional collaboration is key. Engaging stakeholders early in strategy discussions can unify the team’s direction.
Finally, leverage data analytics to measure progress and refine strategies, ensuring that efforts are always aligned with business goals.”
Telltale Signs Of Inefficiencies And Misaligned Goals
Are collaborative inefficiencies and misaligned goals problems that an organization is typically unaware of? Paula shared the warning signs to watch for.
“Many organizations remain unaware of inefficiencies or misalignments until they manifest as missed deadlines or underperforming campaigns. It’s not uncommon for management to lose touch with some of the more day-to-day challenges so it’s important for them to be in constant communication with their teams about some of the below:
- Keeping project timelines
- Number of rounds of revisions which is commonly due to unclear communication
- And inconsistent messaging across campaigns.
Additionally, if teams are experiencing burnout or higher-than-average turnover, it’s a clear indication that resource constraints or inefficient processes need to be addressed.”
Overcoming Resource Restraints
Resource constraints are a common challenge, there is only so much a team can handle, right? I asked her if there is a framework or steps for helping a team get up and over those challenges.
Paula advised:
“Overcoming resource constraints begins with evaluating your team’s current bandwidth, skills, and tools to identify gaps. From there, it’s important to prioritize high-impact projects and delay or eliminate lower-priority tasks to free up resources.
Structuring your team effectively is another step. Cross-functional teams provide agility, while specialists offer expertise in niche areas, so choose a structure that aligns with your goals.
Outsourcing can also be a practical solution, allowing you to tap into external expertise without overburdening your team. Conducting a tech audit is essential to ensure your tools are optimized and integrated, eliminating redundancies and automating repetitive tasks.
Lastly, continuously reviewing and refining team processes helps maintain adaptability and efficiency as market conditions evolve.”
That last part about a tech audit is an interesting bit of advice. Sometimes there’s a better tool that can make life easier for a marketing team.
Where Does AI Fit Into Enterprise Marketing?
Speaking of tools that marketing teams can use, I next asked her how AI fits into a high functioning marketing team. She said that AI use is often a siloed task.
Paula shared:
“Marketing teams are still navigating how to leverage AI to its fullest potential. We use it all the time for specific tasks but it’s often a siloed task.
The main thing I’m looking forward to this year is seeing AI tools that enable better cross collaboration across marketing teams. It’s important to approach AI as a tool that can help, and not use it to replace the human touch and creativity. The key is to strike a balance—use AI to enhance your processes while maintaining critical human judgment.
As a marketer we’re still the ones in the driver’s seat and we have the responsibility to ensure that AI is being used correctly – and delivering quality.”
I had recently listened to a podcast she participated in where she talked about AI silos, so I asked her to elaborate on how that affects marketing and for her advice on improving collaboration with teams that are using AI.
She answered:
“AI silos occur when individual teams or employees adopt AI tools independently without collaboration or integration. This leads to fragmented processes, duplicated efforts, and inconsistent outputs, all of which undermine marketing efficiency. The impact can prevent teams from leveraging shared insights and can create disjointed campaigns.
To address this, organizations can centralize their AI strategy by appointing a project owner to oversee its implementation. Standardizing tools and processes ensures consistency, while cross-team training helps employees understand how to use AI collaboratively.
Establishing regular check-ins to share insights and results can further strengthen teamwork and ensure that AI is driving value across the organization.”
Advice For Building A High-Functioning Marketing Team
Misaligned goals happen when teams prioritize trends or their own narrow objectives that may not align with the overall priorities of the project.
Engaging stakeholders at the start of a project to establish shared objectives is key to keeping the entire team working together toward the same goal. Analytics can help track performance, help identify marketing gaps and identify where to refine a strategy to make it work better.
Tech audits is a brilliant suggestion because it can improve the ability to reach objectives and milestones. Careful implementation of AI is important to ensure that the team is using it collaboratively instead of in silos.
There’s a lot more to unpack in that interview, it may be useful to read it twice.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Golden Sikorka
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wix-shares-how-to-optimize-enterprise-marketing/538490/