5 Simple Ways to Increase the Productivity of Your Marketing Team
Over the years, marketers consistently cite lack of time as the top challenge that they face. Marketing leaders are aware of the demands that their groups face, and managing this ever-increasing workload successfully is a challenge. Below are five tips for greater productivity and increased motivation.
- Set Goals
Establishing clear and specific marketing goals and KPIs is one easy way of balancing these demands. As a minimum, the marketing team should have quantifiable metrics for revenue generation, customer experience improvements, brand strength and return on investment. Putting these performance measures in place not only helps you determine the effectiveness of your programs but also allows you to course correct and maybe ax ineffective programs. The resources decked against ineffective programs can then be allocated to launch new programs or enhance existing ones.
- Prioritize, Prioritize, Prioritize
Create a clear method for prioritizing marketing support, and include your partners in the process. While the methodology should be based on marketing’s KPIs, it is important to account for metrics that go beyond addressing day-to-day support, but also include key KPIs that special projects and newly formed business units will influence. Otherwise, your team could be choking the next breaking product or service by considering only day-to-day metrics. With a transparent process for resource allocation and project support, all teams can focus on the collective goal: COMPETING TO SUCCEED.
- Establish formal marketing processes
Once a project is prioritized, utilizing a formal (read: documented) process for marketing support will minimize some of the unproductive back and forth that sometimes happens between cross-functional teams. Begin by creating request templates and a formal meeting for cross-functional collaboration. The template should be brief and include the project goals (revenue generation, improvement of NPS, other KPIs) and a brief overview of the background and support needed. While it may seem bureaucratic at first, this reduces potential miscommunication between teams as well as the number of iterations that the marketing team will have to cycle through before “getting it right.”
- Allocate tasks and accountability
Once a project is ready for execution, proper and clear delegation is one of the easiest ways to increase productivity while allowing each team member to exercise his or her distinctive skill set will strength overall team success. Assigning tasks and accountability achieves multiple positive ends, such as:
- Giving team members personal ownership over the successful completion of their responsibilities, avoiding the “follow the ball” syndrome often seen at toddlers’ soccer games
- Allowing convenient tracking against soft and hard deadlines, so you can reallocate resources accordingly
- Encouraging collaboration by specifically identifying the people working on particular tasks
- Keeping team members focused and engaged
- Try New Things
There are many exciting trends to explore in the world of marketing. Exploring trends keeps marketing teams informed about industry developments, task automation opportunities and provides opportunities for skill development. (For instance, implementing marketing automation software can open up new avenues of productivity by streamlining and automating various labor-intensive processes.) All of this can increase the human capital of your team and make it increasingly successful.
