Marketing requires executing strategies in a way that raises awareness to increase business, and while you know this, your marketing team may not always have this at the forefront of their mind. It’s your job to communicate every aspect of your strategy to your team so they understand what their objectives are – not just how they need to achieve them.
If your marketing team is frustrated by your marketing strategy, here are 4 things to look at that will help you clarify misunderstandings, and get things moving:
Does your marketing team know what their objectives are?
One of the biggest sources of frustration on a marketing team is not having clearly defined objectives. These are not daily tasks like crafting emails, posting to social media, responding to Facebook messages, and running scheduled webinars.
The objectives your team needs are overall objectives like increasing sales by a certain amount during the quarter or obtaining a specific number of new subscribers. These objectives become the parameters that help them define their daily tasks and goals. If they don’t have a clear target, a lot of arrows are just going to fly into the forest.
Your marketing team needs to be able to shift priorities
Regardless of their assigned roles, all marketers need the basic ability to shift their priorities in order to reach their metrics. They also need to be able to ditch ineffective aspects of the overall strategy when it’s not working. This means your marketing strategy needs to account for the possibility that something, at some point, may not work.
Look at results objectively
If you’re insisting that your marketing team pursue an aspect of your marketing strategy that they see isn’t working, and you’re not willing to look at it objectively, you’re more than likely frustrating your team. For example, if your marketing isn’t collecting the leads you need to continue growing your business, it’s not working.
No matter how amazing an aspect of your strategy might be, if it’s not working, then it needs to be eliminated or reworked. And the longer you make your marketing team beat a dead horse, the more frustrated they’ll be.
Are you outsourcing part of your strategy without informing your team?
You might be giving direction to your marketing managers to outsource some aspects of your strategy; for example, link building services are commonly hired to take care of one of the most impactful yet difficult factors of Google’s ranking algorithm. And while that’s resourceful, if you’re not informing your marketing team about what other people are doing, there’s a chance it could impact their work, or worse, create holes and inconsistencies in your overall marketing campaign.
For any marketing strategy to work, you want all of your gears moving in the same direction. And all of those gears need to know what the other gears are doing.
Are you stifling your team’s creativity?
Your marketing team comes with a lot of background and experience. They know when something’s working and when it can be improved; plus, they probably have at least ten different ideas on how to do it.
Yes, there are marketing standards and best practices that need to be followed and you may know them inside and out. You might belong to the Genius Network and rub elbows with people like Ryan Deiss and Perry Marshall. But that doesn’t mean you need to follow all of their rules all of the time.
Give your marketing team the ability to be creative within your overall strategy. For example, Beyoncé launched a surprise self-titled album in 2013 that basically broke the internet. She made the entire album available on iTunes with bonus video content and in a time when record sales were at an all-time low, her strategy sold more copies in the first week than her two biggest rivals combined. And she did it on her own – without a marketing team.
Your team is eager to please you
Your team just wants to do a really great job without the frustration attached. If you’re frustrating your marketing team with your strategy, all it takes is a simple conversation to find out what’s going on. If your team is frustrated, they may not understand your strategy, or they might feel suppressed.
Your team is probably hungry for the freedom to be creative. It’s a good idea to loosen up the reins a bit and see what they’ve got. And allowing them to be creative is a fast way to eliminate their frustration.
Using the above-mentioned tips, your marketing team will be well on their way to achieve even greater success and higher conversions with your next marketing campaign!