3 ways to help marketing teams feel less overworked and more in control.
Rethinking how you engage your business stakeholders and create alignment with your team may help to create a more proactive and positive team environment.
Have you ever heard ‘we need you to send an email now, it shouldn’t take you long’ or ‘get this social post up today’ and you’re thinking - why can’t people see that our Marketing department are too busy, too overworked? It’s no wonder that stress and anxiety in the workplace is on the increase (Medibank Better Health Index).
Having consulted with marketing departments for many years, there’s one thing they say they all have in common - there’s just too much work. Requests come from all over the business, and you’re only just staying afloat to receive the requests, let alone action them.
However research (ntegrity agency digital success report) shows that success is not based on how many people you have in your marketing department. I’ve led teams of 6 to 60, and it’s fair to say in this case - size doesn’t matter.
So what does? We all know what an overwhelmed marketing department feels like, but we don’t all know how to get on top of it. Here are 3 actions you can take - and it follows the familiar trope - ‘smarter not harder’.
1. You need a clear and simple plan.
When I ask many businesses to show me their marketing strategy, they find it hard to do so in a simple and succinct document.
There are many ways to cook an egg, and likewise there are many ways to build a strategy. However, there are some essential ‘artefacts’ (read: documents) you should have in place that drive huge benefits - aligning your team with what to focus on, and gaining proactive agreement with your business stakeholders on your focus - the first step to reducing ad hoc and last minute requests.
Firstly: Create a simple ‘plan on a page’ - you might have pre-written notes, and different team members working on different channel or product strategies. But when you create a simple plan on a page that outlines your direction, key themes, your vision, and importantly key goals to achieve this helps you to align your team and keep the attention of your time poor executives when you share your strategy.
Secondly: Make sure you build a roadmap or schedule of your activity, ideally (at a minimum!) for the ‘next 90 days’. It’s important you do this at the right level of detail for your team. The goal: to show enough detail to explain what your team is working on. This makes having trade-off discussions with other teams in the business like product, sales and executive teams easier to understand how to decide where new work does (or doesn’t) fit in.
2. Start having discussions based on outcomes.
Once you’re armed with your key strategy artefacts, you’re ready to go out into your busy day of meetings, along the way hearing many marketing requests, ideas and decisions often made by the non-marketers.
Now is when you need to be ready to talk to your key outcomes - what are the key results and markers of ‘what success looks like’ that you’re striving toward? Make sure you know what the ROI potential is of your planned work, so you’re armed for that ad hoc conversation or request.
For example: Say you’ve already got a plan to drive 50,000 new leads in the next three months, and today someone brings a new idea to you. Together you estimate it will only drive 100 leads and you clarify it would stop your team’s capacity to deliver the planned work for 50,000. Based on that - it’s a pretty clear decision to stick with your existing plan.
Being armed with outcomes gives you, and your stakeholders, more insight to trade off new ideas against existing plans for you all to better align.
Now, back to your team - if your team are aligned to thinking, planning and even just chatting in terms of outcomes it makes it easier for them to cope with change and last minute requests. Because as a group you are all seeing what’s best for the business, and not feeling precious about an existing plan or task - it’s easier to pivot tasks without the stress.
3. Change from service to subject matter expert.
Many marketing departments are stuck at the end of the production chain, or in other words they are downstream of other departments in the business, being looped in last. This leads to you getting demands from those departments like ‘do this now’, ‘this is the top priority’ and so on.
So what can you do? First - become top of mind at the start of another team's new business plan, and second - educate your business about marketing to demonstrate your expertise.
Start with: Understand your business’ process for a new product, service or plan, and then work with your stakeholders in those departments to consult with marketing at the start of the process, rather than the end as they traditionally do. Together, you could map out the process, and align with where best to involve marketing for input.
Then: So that they understand why they should do this, you really need to show them the value you can offer as a marketer, which you do by educating the business about marketing in key meetings, lunch-and-learns or staff meetings. Look for opportunities to present your team capabilities, your strategy, marketing trends, and marketing tactics that will help other teams see you as an ‘expert’ not just as a ‘service’. When you’re stuck as a ‘service’ to the business this is where the phrase ‘everyone thinks they’re a marketer’ might come in to your head; in reality everyone might act like a marketer because they’re not seeing and trusting the marketing team’s expertise.
I have directly modelled this myself, transforming a marketing team from ‘service’ to ‘expert’. Once a month I was expected to join the dry monthly staff meeting, where, standing at the front, looking across the company you see yawns abound as each team leader updates ‘Last month, this month, year to date, next month....zzzz’ - save it for a report not a 20 min presentation! At this staff meeting, I started to talk more to our strategy, and educate the business in areas that they weren’t strong that we wanted to move into. At the time - it was content marketing - so I educated the business on understanding the customer journey, and using content to drive awareness, interest and conversion - ultimately a strategy to build more preference for our brand over time.
When in doubt and feeling overwhelmed, there’s always a way out - but it’s rarely doing more work, or hiring more staff. Follow these tips and you’ll start to realise it’s more about how you engage with your business and key stakeholders to build an effective and stress-less marketing department together.
