Whether you’re running a large marketing department with many employees pulling together for your latest campaign or you’re sole individual marketing on your own, knowing how to streamline your processes means everything. It’ll save you time, money, and effort, which will mean higher productivity and a more profitable approach to marketing. This guide will take a look over the various areas that you may be able to improve to make your marketing efforts first-class and as efficient as possible in the future.
Skills
A marketing team is only as effective as the personnel involved in that marketing. If your team lacks the critical skills required to run and manage a campaign, you shouldn’t be surprised that your marketing budget isn’t returning much to the investment you’re making in your team. In order to improve the skills in your team, you have two key options: hire experienced talent, or begin training up your current employees.
Most firms opt for both: bringing in some knowledgeable mentors for their younger team members and spending a little time each week to get less-experienced workers up to speed and firing on all cylinders. If you’re marketing in a smaller team or even on your own, take online courses outside of work hours in order to improve your approach to marketing.
Optimal Content
Often, marketers will use a strategy that deploys various forms of marketing and content in what some call a “spray from the hip” mentality to see what sticks with online consumers. While this approach isn’t necessarily a bad idea if it is your first marketing campaign, experienced marketers know that the highest return on their investment will come through targeted, specific forms of marketing that [pair well with the brand they’re marketing.
For instance, a brand that’s not necessarily engaged in youth culture may be wasting its money by spending on Instagram marketing, which tends to feature a younger demographic than the likes of Facebook and Google. Meanwhile, youth-focused brands should look to younger platforms rather than advertising to the world at large. Optimizing your content and where you share it is a key component of savvy marketing in 2022.
Marketing Database
Across a marketing team, you’ll have hundreds of files of brand icons, marketing materials, style guides, and everything else you’ve ever designed to show off to consumers and customers. These files might be splattered across a Google Drive or saved on hard drives on your computers – and you may waste a good deal of time simply sending emails to your team asking them where certain files reside.
It’s far simpler to place all of your marketing material in an easy-to-access database, where anyone working in your team can easily search to find the relevant marketing materials that they’re looking for. You can find DAM assistance online, provided by companies that know how to streamline the process of finding the right digital asset at the right time, saving your staff a lot of time in the process.
Measure KPIs
A key performance indicator is easy to set at the outset of a digital marketing campaign. You’ll be looking at the increase in traffic to your website and how much of this traffic was generated by the marketing materials that you’ve put out there. Setting KPIs is an important way to learn from each campaign, measuring which strategy is most effective going forwards. You’ll also be able to access granular data when you advertise through the likes of Facebook and Google.
This data will help your team to understand where you might be going wrong with your current campaign and what you could improve in order to sell more during your next bout of marketing. Be prepared to be humble, accepting your mistakes in order to grow as a marketing team and become more effective in getting your brand, products, and services seen and admired across the web.
Hybrid Working
In the wake of the pandemic, there are hundreds of workers who are seriously questioning whether the 9-5 office life is for them. Some would like to remain working from home indefinitely, while others would prefer to head into the office for a handful of days a month – especially for those all-important brainstorming sessions, which just aren’t the same over video conference calls.
Whatever your team feels is best for them should be your priority. You’ll still be able to see who’s exceeding expectations and who needs motivating within your team, and this ability to understand who’s working hard and who might be slacking means that you’ll always be able to manage a team working partly remotely. Do save office days in the calendar for those important sessions that you’d prefer everyone to be present for.
Do More With Less
The key to effective marketing is to achieve great things with smaller and smaller budgets. You’re looking to run watertight campaigns that return quality page views and customers. You don’t want to be one of those teams that spend excessively in order to secure a handful of scattered clicks – you want to hone your approach, target your specific audiences, and see a huge uptick in the traffic your website gets every time you set out on a marketing campaign.
All of this means constantly looking to improve the return you’re generating from your marketing budget. Your budget isn’t a black slate to spend as you wish: it’s something you need to ration out for a variety of campaigns, effectively budgeting so that you’re achieving as much as possible from as little as possible. The ups above will help you get to this level of marketing prowess, but your north star in this process has to be efficiency and financial responsibility. Well-send marketing budgets always lead to praise for a marketing team – and often larger budgets for the future.
Marketing is a tricky, experimental, and constantly changing field. If you get it might, streamlining your approach, you’ll generate a good deal of praise within your firm. So these tips are vital for getting you and your team the recognition they deserve.
