Most businesses, if not all, need effective marketing strategies and plans to thrive, and how best to execute these plans if not with a marketing team. Building a working marketing team for a business can help boost sales by increasing brand awareness, thus generating revenue for the business. In the next paragraphs, you’ll find tips on how to build an efficient marketing team for your business.
Have a work plan
As with almost any process. planning is key when managing a marketing team. You need to have a workflow, and a strategy you intend to use for executing your marketing plans. Doing this will help you identify the roles that are needed and will as well guide your selection of people for these roles. By having a work plan, you can set targets, and time frames for their execution. However, you need to be adaptive to change and flexible with your decisions, it may not always go the way you planned it.
Also, you can easily assign workload to team members. But while doing this, avoid giving too much. When team members are overwhelmed with too much work, it tends to limit their efficiency.
Get the right people
There is a right person for every job and the same rule applies when building a marketing team. Definitely, a good knowledge of marketing is a major requirement, however, more is needed for efficiency to be achieved. Hire individuals who are revenue-driven because obviously, that is the major focus of the business. Likewise, ensure that each person understands the demands that are specific to their roles. By hiring the right people, you build a network of individuals who are goal driven and that is a perfect recipe for successful marketing performance.
Team members should understand the different marketing tools available and how to use these tools for effective market conversions. They should have knowledge of email marketing and Search Engine Optimization. Although it is not compulsory to know it all, a good knowledge of most of these marketing terms should do. And when the team is built, ensure that the primary focus is to improve your brand’s marketing. Saddling team members with other responsibilities outside this could distract them from their main purpose.
Set time for training
Irrespective of how savvy your team may be, there is a need to have regular training. This is no easy task, but it is necessary for maintaining the efficiency of the team and is always a good opportunity to reiterate the goals of the team. Likewise, it is a way to build better team members. Training boost efficiency as they create an avenue to learn more about each team member’s roles. This training should be packed with enough information so members can learn as much as they can, also maximize your training time and ensure that for most of the time, the main focus of the training is taking priority.
However, know that proper training could cost a lot of time and money especially if you are being consistent with it. But no doubt, it is a worthwhile investment in the end. Luckily, there are better ways to do training without having to spend so much. You can find several free marketing classes and courses online that will be beneficial for your team. Although it might not have it all, it is a good way to start. Encourage members to also engage in personal training, especially ones that are specific for their roles.
Boost efficiency by creating smaller groups.
You’ll be surprised how creating smaller groups can help boost your marketing team’s performance. Create small in-house groups and set each on a particular target or project such as creating ads or handling offline marketing, if possible give a time frame for execution. The size of each group will depend on the overall size of the team. When selecting members for these groups, try shuffling between team members, or better still you could be intentional with your selection. The idea is to pair members in a way that each will have a quota to contribute to the work.
Team members tend to work better when assigned to groups, this is because they have more specific roles and are able to apply their individual skills to produce good results. For instance, a group that is focused on social media marketing will be comprised mostly of members that have a good grasp of media content and ads.
This should also apply to every other group in the team. By doing this, you find that these small groups are much more productive than when working with a larger team. Note, however, that there could be a few challenges here, one of which is effective selection of group members. But overall, it is a great team-building strategy.
See how effective your strategies are
As much as you put enough effort into creating and implementing marketing strategies, you should also measure the result of your effort. Utilize efficient analytical tools to monitor and measure the outcome of your marketing campaigns, ads, website content, and basically any tool that has been employed. This is also a good way to identify the benefits of integrated marketing communications.
It is preferable to use a tool that is specific in its metrics. This way you are able to identify what marketing tool made the most conversations, and then intensify your effort in this area. In the same way, if you are working in groups, it helps to identify each group’s performance and make decisions on possible needs for change.
Asides from helping to make informed decisions, team groups are also able to identify loopholes and work towards providing better results. While analyzing results, bear in mind, that mistakes are unavoidable, and it is always difficult to get the perfect point: the motivation should be to have better results in the future.
A marketing team is a major pillar of any business enterprise. Although some firms hire external agencies to do the job, it is preferable to work with an in-house team. This way there will be room for proper monitoring and management.