Managing a marketing team can be challenging at the best of times. Communication between you and your team is the first step to success. Without communication and clear guidelines, your team may perform poorly and this will reflect across your brand.
Different communication strategies can work wonders for your team. Marketing teams can thrive with cross-discussions and meetings, ensuring employees are all on the same page. Research shows that connected employees gain 20-25% productivity in organizations with this open communication structure.
Here are some tips to manage and lead a marketing team effectively.
1. Standardize your processes
Standardizing your processes is essential, whether you are running a small or large marketing team. There will always be employee turnover, so it is vital that no one person’s knowledge leaves the company. Make sure that none of your processes rely on a sole person’s knowledge or understanding. As the company grows, the processes need to be scalable. New team members will be able to be trained more efficiently after formalizing and standardizing your systems.
Standardizing processes in your marketing team is important for some practices, however. This includes CRM data, which helps your team find information about customer data in a standard fashion. If you are not standardizing information or keeping your information in an unorganized spreadsheet, it can be detrimental to your team’s growth.
Try to stay ahead of the curve when standardizing your processes. Many businesses aren’t standardized until something begins to, or has already, gone wrong. Avoid angry customers or missed targets by giving your old processes a refresh.
2. Develop an onboarding process
Developing an onboarding process is a great way to engage new employees to be a part of an organization, increasing the likelihood of loyalty to your company. Having an effective onboarding process makes training easier. As a business term, ‘onboarding’ refers to an induction process where a new employee becomes ‘up to speed with the business, however, the definition has been expanded to include the words ‘organizational socializing’.
Creating an effective onboarding program means that your employees will have greater satisfaction and commitment to the company, resulting in a reduced turnover and an increase in performance.
Some topics you can include in an onboarding process include organizational culture, employee characteristics and expectations, and the business strategy. It is also important to note that each team will have different expectations of their role, so having unique onboarding processes for each team is important.
3. Enable company-wide conversation
Effective communication is key to running a successful marketing team. Every business will struggle with communication amongst different departments and employees. Sometimes, even with a great communication strategy, dialogue can still break down.
Try to monitor your business’ current communication styles, techniques, and most importantly, effectiveness. Once you have mapped your team’s style, ask yourself whether one team effectively understands another team. If the answer is no, then you may need to implement a new strategy.
Companywide conversations allow employees and internal team members to communicate openly. You can do this by creating group chats, chat rooms, or other places of contribution for each of the departments.
By creating open communication channels, your team will be able to communicate with their co-workers, share their ideas and thoughts, ask thought-provoking questions, and consider others’ contributions. The benefits also include seamless communication with hybrid, remote, and internal employees, archiving messages for future reference, eliminating long phone calls, and employees having multiple conversations with their peers.
4. Create micro goals in the form of a checklist
Breakdown your largest marketing goals into smaller, more achievable goals that can be tracked easily.
This can be done in the form of a checklist, which breaks down what you expect your team to do daily, weekly and monthly. Ensure your entire team is aware of these lists. This can be done easily through sharing a Google Doc or email.
These smaller, more manageable goals help measure success in real time. You can ensure your team is meeting your standards by checking the progress that they have made, compared to the progress you estimated.
5. Invest in technology
Technology is an essential investment your company needs to make. Technology is becoming more important in our digital age of technology, so ensuring your team is on top of the game is vital for their success.
A simple Google Drive will not cut it anymore, so companies are moving towards digital asset management platforms (DAM) and brand compliance software. With updated DAM software, such as IntelligenceBank, your team can get work done faster, while staying on brand. Content management and compliance is made easy with DAM software, where you can approve your team’s content before it is released.
As a marketing manager, you can upload, store, and manage assets from one secure location, with permission-based access to ensure that your team has the appropriate and correct information for their role. DAM software is also a step up from your classic Google Drive, as it allows you to tag files and documents, making it easier than ever to find what you are searching.