Every business wants their marketing team to be firing on all cylinders. However, this isn’t always the case. From having a lack of staff to setting unrealistic goals, marketing teams can fall short of performance standards for various reasons.
Is your team underperforming? If it is, don’t worry. This is a common issue that a lot of marketing leaders come across in their businesses. It doesn’t mean that you have the wrong staff in place for the job, it could be the framework of your department needs altering to suit your growing needs.
This post will discuss the typical reasons that your team could be underperforming and will offer solutions on how to improve your marketing department’s efficiency.
We’ll cover:
As businesses continue to grow and take on more client work, so should their workforce. But it doesn’t always work that seamlessly. Businesses tend to push a workforce to their full capacity and they’re ready to burst before they look to recruit more staff.
Whilst it’s good that staff are busy and have full workloads, it can be detrimental to their individual and team morale. It can also leave them seriously unmotivated if they have too much on their plates. If they feel like they’re getting nowhere in budging the workload, they’re not going to get the satisfaction of feeling like they’re doing their job well.
Not only this, the standard of work that they produce will no doubt take a hit if they’re rushing. So, to combat your workload outgrowing your team’s capacity, you should take a proactive approach rather than a reactive one. Don’t wait for your team to reach the point where they can’t cope before you start recruiting, that’s when problems will start.
Whether it’s front-end developing or content marketing, B2B marketing teams contain various job roles that require a certain level of experience and qualifications. If your team isn’t qualified enough, they won’t know the ins and outs of their particular role. So, they won’t be able to carry their job out as well as somebody who is.
You don’t want somebody in a position where they’re out of their depth, it could lead to disaster for your business. Whether it’s not achieving the results that you expect, or even losing your clients completely, you need a team full of specialists to perform at the highest level.
If your team isn’t qualified enough there’s a simple solution – train them up!
As an employer, if you’re seen to be investing in your workforce’s development, not only will it help you produce better results for your business and your clients but it’ll also motivate your employees more too. They’ll value the fact that you’re willing them to enhance their personal growth and will be more willing to work for that too.
A marketing team can’t perform at its most fruitful if everybody isn’t pulling their own weight. You don’t want to have passengers on your team. Not only will you be wasting money paying a wage that isn’t being rightfully earned, but if a member of your team isn’t putting 100 percent into their role then your results aren’t going to be as forecasted.
Varying individual performance doesn’t always mean that members of your team are slacking though. Once you’ve looked into it, you could find that a member of staff is massively overloaded where another might have plenty of capacity. On the surface it looks like the overloaded one is failing to meet deadlines due to slacking, however, there’s a good reason.
Monitoring performance levels is definitely linked directly with a well-performing marketing department. But everybody works differently, so finding the right performance metrics for each member of staff is definitely key. Whether it’s targets or deadlines, people respond differently to various metrics.
Alongside the metrics, simply making sure that work is always distributed equally and fairly is a good way of keeping everyone on the same page and ensuring that morale is always high. More often than not, a happy team is a successful team.
If goals are set too high then your team never stand a chance of reaching them. This can have a serious impact on your team, particularly their morale. As we’ve mentioned before, if your team has no chance of meeting their goals they’re going to be seriously unmotivated and may fall even shorter of their mammoth goals.
Poor goal setting doesn’t just mean too high either. Goals that are too small can leave your business falling short of their true maximum potential. After your team member has met their small target for the week or month, they’ll have no real incentive to carry on putting everything into their work.
The solution is to make sure that every goal you set is SMART. That way, you’ll never run the risk of setting a goal that is unattainable or too easy. Also, offer constant incentives so that your team is always motivated to work as hard as they can.
Communication is one of the main pillars of success. Without it, you’re not going to get very far. It’s thought that teams that have strong communication levels can increase a teams productivity by 25 percent.
Think about it, without communication how can a team achieve anything? It allows the opportunity for feedback which is massively important to team members. As long as it’s constructive and not too negative, employees will jump at any chance of feedback. Let them know what they’re doing well and what they could work more on, it will help shape their development.
Communication is imperative in every aspect of a B2B marketing team. You need all your team to be singing from the same hymn sheet and moving forwards towards one common goal. Not going in their own directions and ending up all over the place.
Working as part of a team, especially a successful one, isn’t easy if there’s a distinct lack of project management. Without the right management, your team could think that they’re on target and performing well. However, scratch below the surface and it might not be as rosy as it once seemed.
Project management tools are a great addition to any business. They give clarity, visibility and accountability of each team member’s contribution and responsibility. They also allow everybody to see the progress of each task and save time from digging around to find the relevant email chains.
Project management apps can also improve the wider efficiency of your team. They can show whether somebody has too much work on their schedule and can also indicate which team member has the capacity to offload it on. Plus, you can see the amount of time that your team are working on client work, therefore you’ll know how much to accurately bill them.
So, after seeing the main reasons why efficiency and standards slump in marketing teams it’s time for you to take a look at yours. If your team is underperforming, it could well be that the above reasons are already showing within your team. Luckily for you, you know how to improve a marketing team’s productivity levels for the better.
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