Over the past several years, marketing has become more competitive than ever. As a result, marketing teams have been stepping up their efforts. Making sure that your team gets along with each other is vital to the success of any business. Unity among employees is easier said than done.
Office quarrels, unequal pay and compensation, and an overall lack of communication can lead to distrust in the workplace. If this is currently happening to your team, make sure to keep reading to learn how to get your team back on track.
Effective marketing team structure
Making sure that every team member knows and understands what the company is trying to achieve is very important. Clearly laying out the role and eventual goal of each team member cuts down on confusion and prevents team members from going off into random tangents.
Lead your team to success by breaking your customer experience goals into milestones that are achievable.https://t.co/F3flAAVjBF #marketing #sales pic.twitter.com/5vptAFLXvr
— TonyBodoh (@TonyBodoh) November 10, 2019
Lead your team to success by breaking your customer experience goals into milestones that are achievable. – Tony Bodoh, Customer Experience Strategist
Letting your team know what the goal is can be as simple as meeting with them. When meeting with your marketing team, make sure to have everyone’s marketing roles defined from start to finish. Let your team know what the ultimate goal is for not only the project, but the company in general. Also, here’s a list of marketing team roles:
- Head of Marketing – leading the marketing operations, strategy, setting up goals and deadlines
- Content Creator – stay on top of the industry, share and publish content, create marketing collateral
- Community Manager – engage in conversations with your audience, build relationships with other brands, manage brand mentions
- Marketing Advertiser – managing the paid ads and sponsored opportunities
- Analyst – stay on top of industry trends, provide reports, analyze marketing efforts
- Marketing Designer – create visual materials (images, videos, quotes, testimonials, reports, etc.)
- Influencer Manager – in charge of influencers, organic partnerships, and brand ambassadors
- SEO Specialist – content optimization, keywords tracking, and organic growth
- Email Marketing Strategist – head of email marketing, newsletters, and cross-promotions
- Social Media Manager – content creation on social, community management, brand monitoring
These are some of the most important marketing team positions. Again, when meeting with your team, make sure to have everyone’s job assigned to them. Layout exactly what they’re supposed to do. The point of having everyone work as a team is to spread roles among several different people. Without clearly defined roles, team members can end up doing too much or too little, which can affect productivity and eventually lead to missed deadlines and other problems.
Make sure to periodically check up on your team overtime to make sure everything is running smoothly and what marketing tools they’re using so that they’re most efficient. You can see or are warned about any inconsistencies. Make sure to remind them about what is supposed to be achieved by the end of the project. Checking in on your team not only helps with clarification but builds trust among team members. Also, our co-founder Vlad described this process at Impact BND’s podcast.
Marketing team incentives
A follow-up point:
As a manager, it’s important to keep your incentives aligned for team success. Sustained success happens not because a star engineer does something on their own, it comes when a team works together to unlock each other’s best work. Reward grit over glam.— Nick Sullivan (@grittygrease) November 9, 2019
As a manager, it’s important to keep your incentives aligned for team success. Sustained success happens not because a star engineer does something on their own, it comes when a team works together to unlock each other’s best work. Reward grit over glam. – Nick Sullivan, Head of Research at Cloudflare, Inc.
Just as the company has an end goal they look forward to, your employees should have the same. Make sure your marketing team has some incentive to look forward to when the job is finished. Having your team look forward to something other than the company’s bottom line is a great way to boost productivity.
Rewarding your team members can vary from a variety of options depending on the size and structure of your company. It can range from cash compensation, shares in the company, pay raises, and more.
With that being said, incentives and compensation can go both ways when it comes to team morale. Rewarding one person more than another can lead to jealousy in the workplace. Also, this can lead to isolation within the team, as offering individual rewards will more than likely lead employees to focus more on themselves than the rest of the team. When rewarding your team, try to make the rewards-based around the team’s overall performance instead of individual accomplishments. Also, make sure that all bonuses are distributed evenly (or as evenly as possible). By doing this, your team feels equally appreciated, and when your team is satisfied, productivity will surge.
Communication & trust of marketing teams
I’m sure you’ve heard of the phrase “Communication is key”. Well, this phrase definitely applies to the workplace, especially in your marketing team. Making sure your team stays connected with each other is vital to being able to any team being able to get along.
Being able to effectively communicate nowadays is more important than ever in marketing spaces, and will only continue to grow in the future. Lack of communication plays a significant reason as to why work teams tend to fail. Many companies tend to take these skills for granted, failing to train employees on how to be effective collaborators. At the same time, even if employees can effectively communicate, it is hard to communicate with team members when you know nothing about them.
How to develop an effective marketing team?
Spending time with each other makes team members tend to care for and respect each other more in the long run. Team building exercises are a great way to build trust among your team members. Activities that require them to work together. Team building not only builds respect and improves communication, but increases productivity in the long run.
While team building starts at work, this doesn’t mean that they can’t meet up outside of work as well. After work, meet-ups, company get-togethers, and other events can improve the relationship between team members.
Just as team members need to get along with each other, they also need to get along with other higher-ups as well. Team members and leaders need to be able to communicate with higher-ups when critical issues arise. For example, if something big came up and your team needed to contact someone in management that they have no relationship with, they might be hesitant to contact them and go off their own judgment when solving the problem.
How to set up your marketing processes?
How do you collaborate well in a remote team?
Process + tools are the first things to figure out. I wrote a brand new piece on best practices for both, based on our remote work survey data + insights from 1,000+ managers in https://t.co/26JPmxyjVa…https://t.co/JC5K0kDd1m
— Claire Lew (@clairejlew) August 22, 2019
How do you nail collaborative working in a remote team? Process + tools are the first things to figure out. – Claire Lew, CEO at Know Your Team.
As you can see, it takes a lot to make sure your team gets along. All of the above doesn’t happen overnight. It takes plenty of time, patience, and lots of investment in your team to get the results you want. It’s all part of a long process.
Educational Psychologist Bruce Tuckman came up with a 5-stage team development process that many companies use to form better marketing teams, such as:
1. Forming stage
Even hiring the members of your team in the first place is part of a process. I’m sure whoever in your organization hired the people on your team for a reason. Just as they felt that these people could get the job done, you have to put trust in that they can do the same.
When the team members applied for the job, I’m sure they did research on the company and learned about their core values. The fact that they applied for the position should show that they feel at least somewhat strongly about what this company does.
2. Storming stage
After the team is formed, marketing team members have to get accustomed to each other. This can prove difficult, as different backgrounds, cultures, and personalities come into play. Just remember the above tactics to help get team members to cooperate with each other.
Again, team-building exercises can help with this transition. Team building exercises can help employees work towards a common goal, regardless of their differences. Over time, these exercises help build respect among team members.
3. Norming stage
As team members slowly begin to bond and unify, less conflict arises as a result. Potential leaders and roles, if not already assigned, are looked at. Overall team performance increases due to the team getting along better.
With that being said, conflict still is common at this stage and can affect your team if not addressed quickly. Remember, communication is key. If you see a problem between any of your team members, make sure to talk to them and fix them as quickly as possible. Don’t let the question linger in the air and continue to affect the morale of your team.
4. Performing stage
This stage involves a lot of work. Teams have reached a point where there is little to no conflict amongst each other and can regularly communicate with each other. Marketing team members focus on the task at hand.
5. Adjourning stage
At this point, the majority of the project is finished. Members at this point f0cus on final tasks and tying up loose ends. From there, the team will disband or start a whole new task to complete in the future.
Some team members might get lazy when the project is almost complete. If this is the case, don’t forget about incentives. Giving your team members incentives to look forward to can ensure that your team members stay focused from start to finish.
Summary
Getting your team members to cooperate with each other is easier said than done. There are several variables to work with, and those aren’t always easy to control.
Letting your team know what to do and educating them about the company’s ultimate goal is an excellent place to start, though. Employees, in general, need direction and guidance on what they need to be doing.
Team building exercises are another great way to break the ice between team members. This helps facilitate understanding and promotes cooperation, which happens to be pretty important before taking on a big project. Don’t forget that team building happens in and out of the workplace, as well. Building trust between team members inside and out of the office can lead to increased productivity in the long run.
After building trust between marketing teammates, they will be able to communicate comfortably with each other when needed. The purpose of working together in a team is to collaborate and make use of each member’s talents, so being able to connect with one another will enable a smoother and more effective process.
Keep in mind that not every solution is perfect in every scenario. Each team is different and struggles with its own set of challenges. This draws attention to the importance of taking proper advice from outside sources. But it’s also about being aware and recognizing what your office needs. If the structure of your team needs to be reorganized, reorganize it. If an employee is toxic to the environment and needs to be let go, let him or her go. Take the initiative. Reap the benefits.
Just remember that establishing unity is a process. Time, patience, and grit will ultimately get you the results your team needs.
