Developing And Sustaining A High-Performance Marketing Team
Today’s marketing teams—like in every business—need to be autonomous, adaptable, disciplined, productive, and continually improve the way they deliver results. At the same time, a successful marketing team must also be knowledgeable and connected to the work of other teams within the organization. Not to mention that CMOs need to align business goals with their marketing efforts.
This raises the question: which conditions can we consider essential to enable team effectiveness within the business? Which course of action do the marketing leaders of today follow?
Read on to find out as we explore how you can effectively build and scale a strong marketing team. All the tips and insights you'll find here are based on what we've followed to make our own marketing team excel.
Characteristics Of High-Performing Teams In Marketing
I get it, it’s challenging to create and sustain a high-performing marketing team. We've all struggled at first. For sure, marketing is changing rapidly. That alone makes it hard to keep up. Due to today’s digital transformation, plenty of obstacles are endemic.
Yet, building a disciplined and efficient marketing team is still feasible.
Operational effectiveness is vital time and time again. The effects are transformational, especially on business results and employee satisfaction. Above all, you need to foster a culture of excellence to make it work.
Knowing the team traits that help drive performance and satisfaction is key for marketing leaders. So, which are the common characteristics of high-performing teams? Let's find out.
Psychological Safety
Team members won't easily take risks if they feel insecure or embarrassed. By fostering a safe environment and psychological support, you can see your peers bloom.
Dependability
It's not just about feeling safe. Counting on each other to do high-quality work on time is also essential. When this is true, there's no goal you can't accomplish.
Structure And Clarity
I cannot highlight enough the importance of having clear roles, goals, and execution plans in your team. Using MS Teams integrations can help delegate roles and tasks accordingly.
The Work Needs To Have Meaning
Sure, you can assign a few dozen tasks to each team member, but have you thought how much more effective the delivery would be if your marketing team worked on something that is personally important to each one of them?
Impact Of Work
When your team fundamentally believes that the work they’re doing matters, you'll see things turning around for the better. Consider giving each staff member ownership of some projects and always make sure to show them how they impact the bottom line with their actions.
Building An Effective Marketing Team From Scratch
Growth Mindset
The best thing about leading a marketing team is that almost everyone is eager to learn, develop, and grow. To my knowledge, the highest-performing marketers never stop learning. They constantly push themselves to master new skills and learn interesting tools and strategies. By offering your team constant sources to learn and adapt, you'll manage to create a marketing powerhouse that has no limits.
Ability To Drive Revenue
With customer behavior shifting to online mediums and omnichannel sales growing, one can safely say that marketing has conquered the revenue throne. The more you can showcase the revenue impact of your marketing campaigns, the more inspiration and drive your team will have. This can be a constant challenge to improve performance month by month as you and your team can get good ROI from every budget.
Operational Excellence
Marketing operations is one of the fastest-growing fields lately. It's a go-to solution if you're aiming for continuous improvement that is measurable, actionable, and far-reaching. By embracing operational excellence, you'll be able to identify and implement consistent processes with your organization's strategy and goals. And you know what that means, right? More revenue and more business growth. Collaboration, tight planning, and visibility are critical for successful integrated marketing. Marketing leaders that focus on processes and workflow can yield tremendous results.
Customer-Centric Approach
Last but not least, you need customer feedback if you want to drive effective campaigns and communications. What's more, interacting with customers helps team members feel energized and have a sense of higher purpose. The closer each marketing member is to your customers, the higher your team will perform. Plus, you'll see that solving customer problems will improve as well.
Steps Marketing Leaders Should Follow Going Forward
So, now that you've read my tips on building a high-performing marketing team, there are some steps you should follow onwards. Here it goes.
Encourage Your Team To Try New Things
By promoting learning and development, you'll help your team implement systems and processes. Also, making professional growth the core of your hiring and management practices will drive members to continuous improvement right from the start. When it comes to marketing, innovation is rampant. And there are multiple opportunities to try different ways to engage or connect with prospects and customers. By making learning and insights a vital part of your culture, you'll see all fellow marketers taking the initiative—not to mention trying new marketing strategies.
Use The Right Marketing Tools
For example, you might want to accurately track marketing ROI. Why not invest in performance marketing software? Such data are crucial, so it's best to build a marketing operations team whose primary goal is to find the connection between marketing spend and revenue outcomes across channels. This strategy will help you evaluate and prioritize the channels with the best potential to drive revenue. Also, make sure to A/B test key customer journey moments. For instance, the ones with the largest impact on revenue or trials.
Focus On KPIs And Track Performance
All CMOs must ensure every team member is responsible for at least one to three KPIs. To track down the results towards your goals, you can conduct quarterly evaluations. By identifying objectives and results, you can optimize campaigns or maybe reassign tasks, etc. Using project management tools and creating dashboards where your team can see the results of their work is critical. It will help everyone commit to specific deliverables and allow managers to keep better track of resource capacities . Plus, it'll make measuring success easier. Maybe adopting a collaborative work management tool could be another option.
Conclusion
Creating strategic and innovative campaigns that stand out is one of the hardest challenges marketers face today. The other one is managing to move fast enough and keeping up with market changes and competitors. To be ahead of your competition, you should always stand for continuous improvement; both for your team's skills and your deliverables. Don't forget to get feedback and see what each team member has learned at the end of every project.
Also, communication and client feedback are equally essential. How about creating an online community where your customer can interact directly with your team? You can use forum-like tools (Zendesk, Influitive, Jive) if you want to collect feedback. Or you can keep communication simple and just contact your clients via a tool like Asana. You might also like to leverage a Net Promoter Scoring system and get more customer reviews.
By measuring satisfaction and collecting qualitative feedback from customers, you will have more insights into what you need to fix or optimize. Asking your best customers to share their success stories and pain points throughout the organization will prove fruitful.
All the above steps will lead to your marketing team becoming better and better over time.
