Marketing team management: how to do it strategically and productively?

Managing a team isn’t as simple as it seems. Marketing, for example, involves so many moving parts and different tasks that it can be difficult to keep up with what’s happening on a daily basis, and even more so month by month. Add to that several people working on separate but sometimes related projects, and things can get even harder to handle quickly.

Marketing teams become more effective when they are responsible for the scope of work in their planning and continuous evaluation and create workflows that support productivity.

For example, marketing is interdisciplinary, so its success requires a collection of people with different skills, knowledge, forms of communication, and work styles. It is necessary to bring the team together to work for success, but this requires good management, and that is what we will talk about in this article.

Check out the tips we will provide so that you can manage a marketing team in a strategic and productive way!

• 3 essential characteristics for a strategic manager
• See 7 marketing manager skills that are non-negotiable
• 5 essential performance indicators for marketing management

Define a clear strategy#

That seems obvious, but the lack of a strategy is surprisingly common. If your team doesn’t know what they need to do, how can they decide what they need to do? A strategy must involve workflow, budgeting, tactics, indicators, goals, customer profiles, competitor analysis, and promotion plans.

If you don’t know how to set goals, use the SMART model: the goals must be specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and timely. Some examples include increasing an email list by 10,000 by the end of the year, increasing lead form inquiries by 15% over the next two quarters, or increasing the frequency of posting on a social platform three times this month.

Remember that the strategy isn’t static. You must review it over and over again while running campaigns to add and adjust.

Direct your marketing team#

Giving good direction is the means to obtain good results. Use the defined strategy to decide what to do (and, more importantly, what NOT to do). Remember that focusing on the objective is part of the plan. Being able to communicate the strategy to get where you’re going is essential to give the team good direction.

You must know the professionals you work with. What are each one’s strengths and weaknesses? How do they work best? What will help them achieve the best results? That’s the job of a good leader. Everyone is different and wants different things. Understand what motivates them, and if you don’t know, ask.

Don’t micromanage your marketers#

The common trait of marketers is that they like to make their own decisions and to have the freedom to create and achieve their goals in their own way. Let them do this outside of normal training and development sessions (which are mandatory). Give them the freedom to make mistakes so they learn and develop competencies faster.

Hold better and strategic meetings#

Learn how to manage meeting times and frequency. Studies and research show that excessive meetings are a major problem in workplaces. Unproductive meetings don’t just waste your team’s time; they demoralize them, too.

So how do you organize better meetings? Create an agenda for each meeting and share it with the team in advance. Set shorter periods, such as 15 or 30 minutes instead of an hour (even if you don’t use the full hour, it’s time for your team members to block their calendars).

Marketing team leaders must adopt a proactive facilitation stance and keep people on track during meetings, encouraging issues that are between two members to be discussed outside the meeting itself and keeping the agenda.

Another way to solve the problem of meetings is to have the team schedule one day a week without any meetings. This time can be used for strategy and production, which are best executed individually and with uninterrupted focus time.

Empower your marketing team to think “outside the box”#

The key to thinking outside the box is balance: you want your team to innovate and adapt as needed, without straying from your central goals and plans. To manage this, you need to provide some structure, tools, and measures to keep the marketing team on track with their objectives, motivating them to push the boundaries.

The initiatives you defined in your six-month plan need to be carried out, but if your team sticks their heads to the ground and doesn’t continue to innovate, you will probably be left behind and risk wasting a lot of time and money.

We’re all part of teams that we work hard on, but we don’t know exactly why or what we’re building. Being in that position isn’t as exciting and is very demotivating when someone is in a position where they don’t have a clear vision of their role or impact.

To combat this and keep your team inspired, constantly remind them of the big vision (six-month marketing plan). Take it a step further and ask a team member every week to articulate the vision of your six-month marketing plan to the rest of the team to demonstrate their understanding.

It’s important to actively evaluate her understanding and ensure that you’re not just telling her what the vision should be. Making your marketing team, as a whole, understand the great vision will motivate them and you will see it in passion, innovation, quality of work, and generally in the general level of effort and willingness to go above and beyond.

Finally, make sure that, as a department, you define your processes as a team and follow them consistently. Marketing is a channel that requires constant innovation, but consistency is absolutely essential or your team will move from strategy to strategy and you can never see the consistent and predictable growth that all organizations desire.

As the leader of your department, ensure that you manage your team consistently, so that the department’s strategy leads to the company’s business objectives.

Now that you are in tune to manage your marketing team strategically and productively, what do you think of having a chat to learn how Wikimee optimizes its results with team and project management solutions and with the automation of processes and tasks? Talk to one of our advisors right now!