Marketing has become so convoluted that it is becoming much harder to lead a high-performance team. There are expectations, processes, competitors, customers, returns, and much more to think about. Above all this, marketing team leaders have to ensure their teams are hitting set objectives, meeting expectations and staying focused to keep hitting their targets. Everything does not have to be bleak though because there are still a few things team leaders can do to lead their teams to better results and marketing success.
Switch from Being a Manager to Being a Leader
There is a huge difference between being a manager and being a leader. A manager gets people to work for them without encouraging them to buy into the vision and the reason why they are doing what they are doing. Leaders, on the other hand, attract followers who buy into the vision and will do anything they can to ensure they meet goals, objectives, and expectations.
Managers rarely inspire people to think outside the box, which is a necessity in marketing, and instead focus on getting things done. Leaders inspire, set the direction everyone will follow, take risks, encourage those who work under them and try to provide positive criticism when one makes a mistake.
Because of their mindset, leaders create an environment that encourages, inspires, and even requires everyone to thrive. They work alongside their teams and have their backs so the team members trust them, making it easier to buy into their leader’s vision. Becoming a leader who orders the team around without doing the actual work creates tension and breaks trust, eventually leading to a loss of effectiveness.
Focus on the Right Metrics
A common cause of loss of effectiveness and productivity in marketing teams is never-ending debates. Meetings that devolve into such debates have no place in teams that are supposed to be producing great results. A much better way of doing things is setting goals, tracking key performance metrics, and focusing on the right metrics.
Without such a structure, the team will never know which targets they will need to hit, and the goal line will always be moving. There will be no harmony within the team and productivity and results will suffer.
Documenting as you go, making adjustments, following a plan, and checking regularly to ensure everything is on plan and not being too rigid can all help your team achieve better results.
The right metrics to keep an eye on and track will depend on your business and its goals, e.g., some track conversions, sales qualified leads, sales customer value, or even acquisition costs.
Outline Basic Processes That Make Things Work
Doing this is about creating predictable patterns that can be tracked and outlining an understanding of how things will get done. As long as the work is being done and the results are trending in the right direction, your team members should be given some independence to do their best work.
Additionally, your processes should be flexible enough to accommodate change. For example, you should be flexible enough to accommodate free marketing tools that get the job done while maintaining quality.
Create Clear Lines of Communication
Communication is the key to high-functioning and highly effective marketing teams. Communication might not be a challenge for teams that work in the same building, but it is for hybrid and remote teams. Poor communication within teams leads to confusion, missed deadlines, and broken processes. There are lots of tools teams can use to eliminate communication challenges while avoiding new challenges such as increased chatter.
Aligning a marketing team to get better results will take time, but implementing the idea discussed above should help you and your team grow together and get better as you iterate, improve, and implement even more ideas to ensure your team keeps getting great results.