Last updated on April 30th, 2016 at 07:34 am
The question on every growth marketer’s mind is: “How can we grow this week/quarter/year?”
In lieu of more budget or resources, growth comes from being more tactical and more efficient. When it comes to improving efficiency, it’s often much easier said than done. As marketers, our jobs are complex. Adhering to a data-driven mentality requires constant vigilance, attention to detail, and focus on driving revenue.
Here are five ways to make your marketing team more efficient and reach next level goals this year:
- Hold growth meetings:
Growth meetings are more than team progress reports, they are ways to focus the team around growth marketing and key revenue drivers for the week. They’re ways to check in with your team about blocks and potential problems that arise. Successful growth meetings involve all the key collaborators on a project. Sometimes, this is more than the core marketing team, it can involve designers, developers and content creators.
A successful growth meeting should be around an hour, touch base about growth initiatives from last week, and collaborate on growth initiatives for the current week. Teams should make hypotheses about revenue driving initiatives and follow up on last week’s tests.
- Set realistic timelines:
Marketing team members can be ambitious. As a result, we can underestimate the amount of time it takes to execute on a project. Marketing is a highly collaborative profession — we depend on different teams within the organization as well as many external vendors. In the marketing world, there are plenty of things that we don’t have control over, but being too aggressive with timelines can not only disappoint your team and management, but throw off your marketing calendar as well.
Accurately estimating the amount of time projects and leaving a little wiggle room cuts down on the constant fire drills. It’s so much better to under promise and over deliver than the other way around.
People are terrible at estimating the amount of time it actually takes to do projects. But, they are good at being able to tell how long a projects will take in comparison to each other. Scrum playing cards are a fun and quirky way to help.
- Create a backlog to make prioritization simpler:
One of the biggest challenges I see in my work with marketing teams is that there are simply too many important and urgent projects to get done at once. After all, if everything is first priority, then nothing is first priority. A backlog is an idea borrowed from Scrum, it simply involves getting your team in the room and writing out every project and initiative you have for the month or the quarter. Once you have them written out, the team and management can determine which initiatives are urgent, high priority, and second priority. The remainder of the projects and ideas can be captured in the backlog, so that great ideas don’t get lost in the shuffle.
- Collaborate between teams:
A large portion of inefficiency in marketing teams results from misalignment between teams. In the B2B space, misalignment between sales and marketing means that marketers are making educated guesses about which channels and verticals will best convert, while many of the generated leads cannot be closed by sales.
Ultimately, misalignment between marketing and sales results in poor customer experience. Potential customers might get dropped by sales or marketing messaging that misses the mark for the customers who are truly helped by the product.
Instead, sync marketing and sales projects and budgets with aligned goals.
- Standardize processes and leverage project templates:
A big culprit of inefficiency in marketing teams is reinventing the wheel every time a project has to be completed. For example, forgetting one critical piece of webinar promo results in panic and a fire drill.
Creating standardized processes and workflow templates customized for your team’s workflow help teams smoothly and efficiently produce work. Start with the things that your marketing team does every week or month, and create standard email templates, folders for assets.
The takeaway
These simple yet tactical shifts in the way you manage your marketing team have the potential to create monumental results, both for your internal team and your clients.
