Digital marketing has always been a fast-paced environment. You cannot compete with others if you don’t have a robust and agile digital marketing strategy. More importantly, you need to be quick and accurate when executing marketing tactics in order to stay ahead of the market.
Leading the pack isn’t something that you can do without an agile digital marketing team. At the same time, the marketing team needs to work together seamlessly and remain productive as a whole. These next few tips and tricks are the ones to use if you want to boost productivity substantially.
Set Clear Expectations
One of the first things you need to do when trying to boost the productivity of your marketing team is to set clear expectations. What kind of marketing campaigns do you want to run for the business? How often do you want the content to be put out?
Setting clear expectations allows the team and its individual members to perform optimally. They know exactly what to achieve to meet your expectations, which means they can be more focused on the tasks at hand rather than figuring out what to do.
Clear expectations are also good for alignment. You can have team members convey their own expectations (i.e. regarding work pace and environment) so that the team can work effectively as a team rather than fragmented units.
Get Them Involved in Setting KPIs
The most effective KPIs are the ones that everyone understands and know how to achieve. The only way you can set KPIs that everyone buys into is by getting them involved in the objective-setting process. Team members are more likely to strive to reach their KPIs when they have a higher sense of ownership and involvement.
Of course, there is still the need for clear, measurable, and achievable KPIs. This is where you as the team leader or business owner comes in. Your job is to make sure that the KPIs set by the marketing team meet business objectives and the goals you have in mind.
With clear KPIs acting as the North Star for the team, the rest of the marketing campaign can be crafted to perfection. Once again, this leads to team members focusing on the tasks at hand rather than trying to figure out how to best achieve the targets set for them.
Project Management as a Foundation
Never underestimate the power of good project management. While some teams may see project management as a hassle, implementing methods like Kanban helps your marketing team be more effective and productive. Tools like Kanbanize certainly make implementing good agile project management easier.
Using the Kanban method and Kanbanize, you can set custom boards for marketing campaigns. Team members can see tasks being represented by Kanban cards; this also means you can get a bird’s-eye view of marketing campaigns at any point.
Good project management is handy for setting work commitment points and organizing backlogs. In fact, systems like Kanbanize let team members be more proactive when taking ownership of tasks and participating in marketing activities.
Provide the Right Tools
Another way to boost the productivity of your marketing team is by providing them with the best tools. Designers need to have access to tools like Photoshop and Illustrator without jumping through hoops. Data analysts, on the other hand, could benefit from services like Brand24 and tools like Google Analytics.
Providing the right tools is the first half of the equation. The next part is making sure that the tools get used as part of the workflows; more specifically, you want to make sure that the tools you provide make work easier instead of more complex.
Find tools that can be integrated into your workflow seamlessly. Get input from team members about the best tools to use. Don’t hesitate to invest more in tools that simplify marketing tasks. For example, investing in a Hootsuite account could help social media managers become more effective in scheduling posts and increasing user engagement.
Leverage Strengths and Weaknesses
Treating all team members equally isn’t something you want to do. You have to take their strengths and weaknesses into account in order to optimize their performance. After all, a good team leader or business owner must always be able to leverage those strengths and weaknesses for the benefit of the organization.
Strengths are easier to handle. When your social media manager is also good at consuming and analyzing user data, for instance, pairing the manager with the data team could result in valuable insights improving your digital marketing campaigns.
Weaknesses, on the other hand, are trickier to deal with. Ideally, you want to match the weaknesses of a team member with the strengths of others in order to balance the team. Learn to fill gaps and provide the necessary resources for team members who are actively engaged in developing themselves and overcoming their weaknesses.
Invest in Development
Speaking of self-development, it is also worth noting that marketing is a very dynamic field. Your marketing team needs to evolve and grow with the market, and the way to encourage that evolution is by encouraging self-development. In fact, you should go a step further and invest in people development to strengthen the team.
Marketing training, online courses, and other forms of people development are good for the team. However, they are not the only way you can encourage team members to grow personally and professionally.
You can also allow team members to have personal projects and to explore their ideas. It is even better when those projects can be integrated into the marketing campaigns of the company. There is something about personal achievement that really increases productivity on another level.
Here’s one last secret to boosting team productivity: be productive. Yes, leading by example is an excellent way to get the rest of the team to improve. When you are involved in marketing activities – and in nurturing your marketing team to be more productive – you can expect to see better results sooner than you think. Combined with the other tips we discussed in this article, you will have no trouble getting the marketing team to work better, faster, and more effectively.