Marketing management – How to get most out of your marketing team

1. Define your budget and goals

Most important thing is to have the direction of marketing clear. And the second most important thing is to know how much resources do we have to go towards that direction.

With budgets and goals clear to everyone, we are well on our way. Theoretically, not everyone involved needs to be on the map for these things, but work rarely makes much sense to employee unless the big picture is outlined. So understanding big picture is great way to motivate the employees.

Marketing project management is the most crucial part of a successful marketing campaign, so it’s recommended to have a professional marketing project manager in the team.

2. Create a clear path to your goals and define milestones that show that you are going to the right direction

Once the goals and resources are clear, you should start painting the path towards the goal. It is especially important to create checkpoints along the way that indicate the correct direction.

For example, if your goal is to make sales through marketing, you need to get leads before you can make sales, and before leads people on your website. In order to get people to your website, you have to do things x, y, z and so on.

Painting a path through milestones towards a goal will provide a clear basis for prioritizing tasks.

3. Manage marketing in sprints

One of the best ways to prioritize tasks is to use SCRUM tools or similar framework in marketing to maintain focus.

Two weeks is often an appropriate duration for a sprint. At the start of the sprint, the tasks and goals of the sprint are clearly defined. These tasks will then be completed within two weeks. If new ideas come up during the sprint, they will be transferred to the backlog. From the backlog, they are prioritized for the next sprint if they are relevant.

Utilizing sprints keeps the focus on the essentials. Without sprints the focus easily escapes to irrelevant tasks, such as individual campaigns that do not produce any results in the big picture.

4. Create a deeper meaning for your marketing

Of course, making a profit is a priority so that the business stays in business. However, in order to get the most out of your marketing, it is also good to have a deeper sense of meaning in marketing.

This is often crystallized in a company’s mission, vision, or something similar. In content marketing, the “deeper” purpose can often just be to help customers. For example, if you are selling heat pumps, it is quite relevant to write texts about energy saving more generally and offer different tips. By doing this, you are helping customers to save money and save the environment through marketing. Of course, it is still in the interest to sell the heat pumps also.

Similarly, when writing about marketing, it may be in the interest of helping US companies do better marketing and thereby grow more efficiently, thus bringing prosperity and well-being to USA.

5. Create a safe atmosphere to try new things, fail and succeed

Failure comes in the dictionary before success. As well as in marketing. What matters is not so much that people get big rewards for successes, but that the marketing team feels that they are in a safe environment that they dare to fail and make the decisions they think are best, even tough they might fail.

If marketing team is frightened by the setbacks, marketing very often starts to just follow orders from management and doesn’t think for themselves, because they don’t want to make mistakes. Some companies go so far as to celebrate failures. It’s not necessary, but failures are in any case a part of marketing.

However, it should be remembered that the fact that failures are part of marketing does not mean that it is a good idea to pull the entire marketing budget down the toilet. If marketing is not successful, the marketing team is not competent. However, small failures are necessary for large-scale success.

Our bones need stressors, but cannot withstand disproportionate stressors. Similarly, in marketing you should look for the scale on which failure is worthwhile in order to get valuable feedback on what works and what doesn’t.

If my logic was unclear, it’s different to jump a hundred times from a height of one meter than once from a hundred meters height.

Summary of marketing management

Marketing management is management just like any other form of management. As with management in general, it is important to keep the focus on the right things and the direction of marketing clear. 

Marketing is not rocket science, but it is easy to make it look like one.