As an experienced Business Leader and the primary advisor for leading our Youwe UK department, as well as creating strategies that influence the growth of the Youwe Group as a whole, it can be said that trying to ‘navigate’ your way through marketing orientated tasks and objectives in general; notwithstanding roles such as being a ‘Marketing Director’ often harbor more struggles than successes. Trying to get to grips and touch base with all outstanding tasks and ongoing projects requires extreme 'updatedness' and know how, where the well-being of your marketing department is concerned. As a director, you are involved in every process, often leaving you with no time to fully over-look each project, so that best practices are both adhered to and achieved. In essence, as a Marketing director, you essentially become a ‘Jack of all trades, Master of none” - leaving you with knowledge/insight on everything, however, not enough to make significant contributions  evenly.

With this problem in mind, I thought about the many different solutions, tools and technologies that could potentially alleviate the stresses of what it is to be a marketing director in an extremely digital and perpetually growing environment. Keeping this thought process and problem in mind, I eventually arrived at a wonderful solution that now makes my own life as a Marketing Director as well as many others much easier. For quite some time, we developed digital marketing strategies from our clients based upon our own methodology. What we found was that all the strategies we presented, were effectively sets of actions that could be grouped into tactics and thereafter aligned to a set list of objectives. Retrospectively, we also categorized and grouped tactics into strategic sections that paralleled outstanding digital marketing objectives. Essentially, the strategic roadmaps for potential clients were a subset of a master set of actions and tactics from a master list we curated as a data model that stored this data, that is consistent and useful for all clients and their corporate/business priorities. Subsequently, this allowed us to create a roadmap defined by a list of set objectives influenced by situation analysis’s and associative actions. Through this hierarchical framework we were able to report and represent the solution we had in mind – in the form of an interactive roadmap rather than a static document.

After giving it a name and working with the tool myself, we were able to create Apaze in a fully realized and digitally tangible format. Apaze offers many different solutions and capabilities that can be tailored towards different company and business projects -that ultimately enable digital growth and scalability. The most significant aspect of Apaze in line with my own responsibility as a Marketing Director, is that I can now align all key stakeholders and shareholders as well as manage financial budgets overseeing all the different projects, we have within our marketing department. By achieving a clear overview of the ongoings of all outgoing projects, Apaze gave me the ability to become increasingly involved in all projects, allowing me to concentrate my efforts equally across the department – saving time and expenditure, whilst enhancing marketing efficiency. Conclusively, integrating Apaze within your company or marketing sector/department creates a valued and robust ecosystem that streamlines workflows and efforts on all actors within a company/business.