Is our marketing team doing enough? Are they using the resources allocated efficiently? If these are some of the questions that go through your mind every day as you look for ways of increasing the overall sales of your company, then you are in the right place.
Your marketing team is the most important part of your business and to ensure continued profitability, without putting a strain on your staff, you will have to implement the following strategies:
- Develop an excellent onboarding program
The most productive marketing and sales teams are formed as a result of highly elaborate and detailed onboarding programs that strive to familiarize new sales teams with the culture of the organization as well as the involved practices.
As the marketing manager, your onboarding program should incorporate early career support and an orientation of the new marketing team to your company culture and current performance insights into the organization's marketing strategy. These include intent, the current business standing, and incorporation of activities that will enable the new team to build and develop beneficial relationships.
These steps will help ensure that you and your marketing team move in one general direction. It also reduces that risk of employees falling off the plan.
- Automated programs
Most organizations have their marketing and sales personnel undertaking admin tasks. Mixing of the roles not only undermines their position but also wastes a significant amount of time. Programs like CRMs (e.g. Salesforce) are very intuitive and advanced such that your marketing team will employ more time in the field doing the actual selling. Most administrative tasks undertaken by the marketing personnel can be automated saving time and increasing actual sales.
- Training and Professional development
Even though training sometimes feels like a backtracking in the whole marketing process, it isn't. The reason being, in the long run, your marketing team gets equipped with advanced marketing techniques, and they also learn more about your products and services. Marketing mistakes are learned, and this reduces the risk of errors made in the field.
Research shows that employees who feel taken care of by an organization, through small incentives like training end up being more productive and they can quickly rise through the ranks in the company. You should, therefore, train your sales and marketing team about new strategies, marketing tools, and the learning tools too. All this information can be gathered from webinars, books, conferences, and seminars.
- Listening
The importance communication has, is stressed at many corporations and its emphasis has, is also pronounced in marketing. Listening and communicating with your marketing team are critical, as information is shared, ideas coined, and remedies offered to problems experienced.
Employees get demotivated when they are sidelined; once this happens, their productivity and efficiency, reduced. To ensure that neither of these is affected, you must take into account or acknowledge a team members ideas. As a team leader, you should be in a position that will allow secure communication with your team members. A healthy team is a happy team and the happiness results from simple gestures like being heard.
- SMART delegation of roles
Responsibilities are delegated all the time in the workplace. However, you must have the right person at the job. A SWOT analysis could be carried out to determine the strengths and weaknesses of your team members. Once you have drawn up the strengths and weaknesses, you will be able to assign tasks based on skills or strengths exhibited to increase productivity.
This is also an important talent identification process where the not-so-strong contenders can be assigned some of those roles to enhance or sharpen their skills.
- Measurement of performance
Varied marketing strategies are ranging from on-location advertisement, print, and onscreen advertisement, as well as digital and social media marketing. However, regardless of the marketing channel used, there should be metrics available to assess the performance of the marketing campaign.
The research, content and the results should be tested, measured, and reviewed. To measure the metrics, an appropriate measuring tool must be at hand to put all the figures into perspective. MQLs and Google Analytics are just some of the tools that can be used to measure your marketing teams’ efficiency, productivity, and the profitability of the marketing campaign.
- Agile work strategy
An active marketing strategy is required to have a smooth flow of operations. The approach incorporates an approval process, how roadblocks are handled or circumnavigated, types of deadlines in the team, how marketing campaigns are prioritized, etc. You must also ensure that the work strategy is flexible, and proactive in case change is needed.
- Reviews and improvements
In the work and implementation strategies, there should be an allowance for reviews within agreed and reasonable timelines. Mistakes are made, deadlines missed, and there will be a whole lot of miscommunication and confusions in the workplace, but, how are these handled?
For growth and collaboration, these should be put into consideration and lessons learned from the mistakes made. Such reviews ensure that the project specific requirements and targets are met.
- Motivation
You can motivate employees through praise, or financial incentives. Praising your marketing team for a milestone or for reaching a goal, or even closing a deal with a lead is seen as the best possible way of enhancing productivity. Criticisms in the workplace aren't known to encourage productivity.
Financial incentives, bonuses, or commissions are effective in some cases to motivate marketing teams to yield better results the next time. The persons who miss the incentives get motivated to work harder.
- Clear leadership
As the organization’s marketing manager, you need to have a visionary leadership style. You should be able to fix SMART goals, roles, and priorities for your team geared towards giving every marketing personnel the chance to work on their best while building themselves up and enhancing the organization's productivity. This will help in achieving the set strategic goals.
Use of innovative tools also boosts productivity, and you may consider including team building activities to encourage cohesiveness at the workplace.