How to Best Manage Your Marketing Teams

These days, the structure of a marketing team is becoming more complex as more channels of advertising emerge. Now, in order to have a fully functioning team that has any chance of achieving tangible results, you need a PR person, a social media person, product and branding manager, an SEO person, a content creator, designers, analysts, and so on and so forth. The greater reach you wish to accomplish, the more complex your team is going to be.

When you have so many people doing different jobs but nonetheless working on the same projects and need to be in sync, things can get hard to manage.

There are, however, a couple of things you can do in particular areas of team organization that could bring you a bit closer to easier and smoother management process. We’ll also show you how to make use of a time tracker for work and other tools to make this even more painless and effective.

Determining the Goal and Making a Plan

A marketing team isn’t that different from other professions when it comes to the first step of handling a project. Before you attempt to do anything at all, you need to define the ultimate goal of your project and plan the process in detail.

Defining the goal should be done in clear terms and it needs to be SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound). For example, saying that ‘attracting more customers’ is your ultimate goal won’t get your marketing team very far. You don’t know what you need to do and there’s no way for you to know whether you’ve even achieved your goal.

Instead, try something like this: Our goal is to increase visits to our website through search engines by 20% by the end of next month. When you have a specific and measurable objective like this, it’s easier to delegate tasks to different members which will get you closer to fulfilling your goal. Plus, the assignment has a final due date, so you have an opportunity to analyze your project and determine whether it was successful or not and what could have been improved.

With a properly set goal, it’s going to be much easier to break the project down into specific tasks and decide what each team member needs to do, as well as how to organize and plan the entire process.

Make Use of the Tools

Sure, the advances in technology created more complexity in the marketing industry, but this phenomenon also brought a ton of tools to make your job as a team manager a lot easier. So let’s take a look at some of the most useful digital tools that you should definitely keep at hand.

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And last but not least, you should get yourself a time tracker for work. This simple tool will enable you to oversee what everyone is doing and make adjustments so that you can increase your team’s productivity. It’s also going to complement your project management tool by adding accountability and data insights to the existing organization.

Build an Appropriate Culture

According to a survey, the majority of marketing leaders (52%) claim that they would like a more data-driven culture within their team, but the same number of them also pointed to more creative thinking. These seem like two completely opposite things, but in marketing more than anywhere else, they’re quite complementary.

A creative and explorative culture can be accomplished by being open-minded, giving everyone a voice, having frequent brainstorming sessions and generally encouraging everyone to contribute ideas and insights. Most advertising specialists are naturally creative, you just need to nurture this quality.

As for the data-driven side of the culture, a time tracker for work can help you a lot. Give your advertising agency time tracking software and you get a lot of hard data in return. You’ll know when your employees are productive, how long it takes for certain tasks, how much your team tends to use one software or another, etc. This will give you a chance to analyze your team’s performance and optimize your workload accordingly.

Timing is Everything

Because a marketing project has so many elements, everything needs to be timed to perfection. That’s why you can end up wasting a lot of time if your team isn’t organized properly. For instance, your PR has prepared everything for the outreach, but they’re waiting on the content to be finished. Or your social media specialist is ready for the next batch of posts, but they first need to wait for an analyst to provide them with the targets.

Again, this is something that a time tracker for work can help you a lot with. If you see that the content department is still using Word or Google Docs, while the PR has been browsing Amazon for the last two hours, maybe it’s time to give the PR another task or give the content writer some assistance.

Over time, when you get the hang of using an agency time tracking software, you’ll see that you’re going to be able to organize the whole project so that everyone is in perfect sync and very little time is wasted.

Conclusion

Managing a complex marketing team doesn’t have to be a struggle or an impossible task. If you approach each project with a goal-oriented and data-driven attitude, nothing will be difficult. And, of course, you can always use the tools such as time tracker for work to make your life even easier.

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