In recent years, marketing effectively and efficiently has become more challenging for many businesses. Never before has there been so much pressure on marketing folks to stay updated with new technologies, the latest trends, and so forth. With so much strategizing, planning and execution to perform, it’s a task in and of itself to maintain efficiency and productivity.
While it may be impossible to change the current marketing landscape, there are some strategies to employ for you and your team to help bring more sanity and effectiveness to your marketing efforts.
Realistic Goal-Setting
Before the hustle begins on your next marketing campaign, get a clear idea on what exactly you or your team is trying to accomplish. If you have an entire team working on one specific marketing issue, ensure that all team members are clear on exactly what to do and when to do it.
You want to set yourself and your team up for success by setting goals and objectives that are realistic and practical. The more you’re able to do this, the better you’ll be able to set budget constraints, deadlines and strategic goals. By setting and jotting down realistic goals, you’ll give your team a 50% better chance at finding success.
Reassess the Planning Process
There’s never been a marketing team in any business that can’t get better at their planning process. Start out by going through your prior year’s campaigns. Keep in mind your current objectives while evaluating those past performances. Take time to fully analyze what did and didn’t work. For initiatives that didn’t work as planned, replace them with new strategies. Plan, assess, plan again, then reassess.
Share detailed company goals with your marketing team. Ensure that all their activities contribute directly to the entire company’s vision. If state goals happen to change, communicate this information with your team.
Daily Stand-Ups
You’ve probably heard about the concept of daily stand-ups. Maybe you’ve even seen other departments in your organization doing them. If you and your team haven’t engaged in daily stand-ups, it’s time to get started. Begin each day with a quick 10-minute huddle. Ask each team member to highlight their key daily priorities and the challenges that they will face to accomplish them. Daily stand-ups help keep everyone in the loop concerning which team members are working on certain projects. It keeps the team highly accountable every day.
Use Collaboration Tools and Automate Tasks
Whether your marketing team has two members or 200, they need an easy way to stay connected and fully engaged. Throughout the business world, more marketing teams are utilizing an array of collaboration tools that allow teams to edit documents, exchange task updates and share valuable ideas. It’s interesting to note that 87% of the highest performing businesses utilize project management software.
With a solution such as ProofHub collaboration software, marketing teams can communicate and collaborate in a way that’s in context with their work. For example, if one teammate is trying to determine the best practices on how to track emails from a recent email marketing campaign, this software will allow them to collaborate with other teammates who may have experience in the process.
Avoid Soul-Sucking Meetings. Keep Them Productive.
How many hours each week are spent in meetings? How much of that time is time well-spent? Would you believe that the average time spent in meetings is between 31-60 minutes every single day? In the business culture of today, it can be difficult to end meetings when they have run their course. But there is something that can be done with that problem.
Keep all meetings to-the-point and as brief as possible. Only invite individuals to meetings that are able to positively contribute to them. Swiftly end meetings that turn into long, drawn-out complaint sessions.
Block Out Distractions
In days gone by when there were no smartphones to contend with, focusing on work seemed to be much easier. In today’s world, we have distractions all around us.
The main challenge most marketers face is constant distraction. As a professional marketer, you’re bombarded with meeting requests, Slack messages, emails, text messages and social media alerts. These constant interruptions make it hard to get in, and stay in, a rhythm that allows a focus on long-term strategy. All of these distractions constantly force you to live in the moment.
To help remedy this, begin with the basics: mute (or turn off) your phone. Work in 60-minute intervals where you focus only on the task at hand. The reality is that it’s not you vs. distractions. It’s you vs. yourself. Rid yourself of distractions to improve efficiency.
