Every business benefits from its marketing strategy, but if you aren’t using the right management approach, you are not getting the absolute most out of your marketing team. You need great ideas backed by an analytical approach. You need a team that can work together seamlessly while also pushing each other to do better and think outside of the box. There is a time and a place for formulaic marketing and a time for innovative campaigns. To get the most out of your team, you need a better management approach and to use these effective tools:
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Improve the Diversity of Your Team
The diversity of your team is going to play a massive role when it comes to sourcing new and exciting ideas. After all, the ideas that you come up with will inevitably be tied with your experience and background. A degree and formal training can absolutely help expand your knowledge and the ideas you come up with, of course, but it cannot account for everything.
Having a diverse team means having both a culturally diverse team and also an academically diverse team. Marketing today is a combination of psychology, design, and tech. Having a variety of backgrounds, both personally and professionally, means drawing from a larger inspiration pool.
Don’t just rely on your team, either. Market and demographic research will also play a huge role when it comes to designing great and exciting new campaigns. Get new products in front of diverse groups of customers and see what they think, what they would use them for, and what price they think would be fair based on the information you have included.
This sort of research will help bring in new ideas and ensure that your marketing message lands. There is no more room for tone-deaf marketing campaigns. Drawing from diverse ideas means being more respectful, and more importantly, it means connecting with your audience in ways you never could before.
Bring in Guests for Brainstorming
Another great way to bring in new ideas is to bring in specialists from different departments. If you want to create an innovative digital brand campaign, for example, spitballing ideas with an IT specialist and web designer is a great way to do that. You don’t have a good understanding of what is possible and, more importantly, what is easy and what isn’t. Working with the teams that will help bring your campaign to life is how you can and will create really exciting new projects and campaigns.
Invest in Further Training
A lifelong approach to learning is imperative for any professional and for every team. Though you cannot sponsor every employee to earn a master’s, there are plenty of free and budget-friendly workshops to help improve your team and give back in the same breadth. As a leader, however, it is imperative that you go further than simple training and workshops. You need to have a greater understanding of marketing and analytics in order to delegate effectively, and if you do not have that experience or find that your existing experience is letting you down in this new digital world, then achieving an online masters marketing analytics degree can give you the leg up that you need.
Further training for your team, however, needs to come from multiple approaches. Use what you learn directly, and also have them achieve and update their information on key marketing tools like Google Analytics. Google and other tool providers often offer free courses to help professionals learn how to get the most out of their tools. This is just one example, though there are many, and it will depend on what your budget is overall. Regardless, further training is always going to be how you get the most out of your marketing team in this ever-changing digital atmosphere.
Improve Meetings
It can be difficult to manage and get the most out of meetings. After all, they aren’t traditionally very exciting and, more importantly, often end up being led by a few while the rest stay quiet. To avoid this issue, you need to change up how you have meetings as a whole.
To start, acknowledge that some of the best ideas are not going to come from the most vocal people. Some just don’t feel comfortable taking the spotlight, so to avoid that have everyone pitch three ideas, for example. To do this, you will need to create a shared document that goes over what the meeting will be about. Have everyone add their own notes to this before the meeting.
This way, you can go and see every idea, thought, or concern that your team has without pulling teeth or making things awkward during your meeting. You aren’t the only one who should read up on all the notes beforehand, either – require everyone to catch up beforehand so that you can have a much more productive meeting every time.
Stay Creative
Marketing teams are creative, but when you put so much emphasis on analytics and results, creativity can die. To stay creative, hold fun events and team-building exercises the same way drama groups and even writer groups do to get everyone thinking of new ideas.
You want the dumb ideas. You want the silly ones. You want your team to have fun during the brainstorming phase because it’s only by getting these dumb ideas out of the way that you can find the gems. Sure, you will need to hammer out these ideas until they are polished, but finding those diamonds in the rough means staying creative and getting the team excited about the dumb ideas.
Staying creative like this can really help a marketing team stand out, but, more importantly, it can be great for team building and bonding. You want ideas shared no matter what.
If you find it difficult to get everyone out there and energized, then find the right team-building programs for your team. You want them to know how to communicate and how to critique ideas so that everyone stays motivated without feeling personally attacked. It’s a fine line, but it, along with the rest of the great ideas in this list, will help you get more out of your marketing team.
