As if it weren’t already competitive enough, the marketing industry has grown tougher than ever in recent years. The pressure is increasing for marketing firms as well as in-house marketing departments. Teams are looking for ways to differentiate themselves in the rapidly-changing worlds of mobile marketing and social media, while simultaneously trying to cut expenses and turn out quality work on very short timeframes. If you’re looking for ways to improve your marketing team efficiency, these strategies are a great place to start.
Set Realistic Goals
Whether you’re a marketing project manager, a new team member or a managing partner, it’s important to set yourself and your team up for success by setting reasonable objectives. Marketing teams should have regular meetings to discuss not only what they hope to accomplish, but how they want to accomplish it.
As every project manager knows, there’s danger in both directions. If your goals are too demanding, you’ll create a sense of hopelessness on your team, and if you ask too little, you’ll miss opportunities and leave your team members feeling restless. The more realistic you are about strategic goals, budget constraints and time commitments, the more likely it is that your projects will be successful.
Choose a Strict Methodology?
Project management methodology may not be as hot a topic in marketing as it is in manufacturing or software development, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. You can make dramatic improvements in your marketing team efficiency by defining the processes that the team should use to analyze requirements, assign tasks and complete deliverables.
While in other industries an agile approach to project management is increasingly popular, in the marketing world teams may struggle using this approach because there are often many unconnected deadline-driven tasks that cannot easily be rolled up into a main project or launch. Marketing teams need to juggle many requests and need to incorporate change requests and feedback on the fly without disrupting other concurrent projects, timelines or budgets. It’s more important to choose a work management system that is flexible and can adapt to how your team actually works, instead of the reverse.
Have a Plan for Prioritization
Successful marketing is a combination of long-term campaign strategy and short-term responses to current events and industry developments. In order to make it all work, a marketing team needs a way to set priorities and plan their work from day to day. Efficient marketing teams use a structured process to evaluate their assignments, requests, and ideas and determine which ones should take the highest priority.
Use Collaboration Tools
Whether your marketing team has six people or six hundred, you need a way to keep team members engaged with each other throughout the day. Online collaboration tools have become an essential part of the marketing landscape, because they allow teams to share ideas, edit documents and exchange task updates without the need for constant meetings or phone conferences. With Planview AdaptiveWork’s industry-leading project management software, marketing teams can collaborate and communicate ‘in context’ to the work that’s at hand. It lets you incorporate IM chats, email exchanges, shared documents and project task information in a single location that’s always up-to-date.
Organizations of all sizes, across 79 countries already rely on Planview AdaptiveWork to help engage their people and move their business forward. Find out how Planview AdaptiveWork can help your marketing team become more efficient and more effective today.
