Make a Small Marketing Team More Efficient With These 3 Tips

Having a small marketing team (or even a non-existent one) doesn't mean that you cannot be successful with marketing. With proper planning and implementation, small to medium enterprises (SMEs) can destroy their competition, especially online. When trying to make your small marketing team efficient and EFFECTIVE, start with these 3 tips.

Utilize Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is exactly what the name says...it automates your marketing. There's no better way than automation to make your team more efficient. No, marketing automation doesn't do everything for you...you'll still need humans. What it can do is allow someone to create their marketing content at the most convenient time and have it deploy automatically over time.

Website - Any good online marketing will take advantage of the power of blogging. You can create multiple blog posts on a Monday morning and schedule them to go out throughout the week.

Social Media - Use a tool like Hootsuite to efficiently schedule social media activity over a set period of time. Not only will your social media activity become more consistent and spread out over time, but it won't require your team to visit the social media sites so frequently, thus allowing them to focus on their other work.

You'll still have to be available for responding and time sensitive social media posts, but automating what can be automated will increase efficiency tremendously.

Email Marketing - If you aren't already using marketing automation in your email marketing, you are missing out. Email marketing automation will be a key factor in nurturing leads through a sale and improve ongoing communication with prospects and current clients.

A contact, prospect, lead, or customer can be entered into an email marketing workflow based on a variety of triggers, once the workflow is triggered, they will be sent emails automatically based on the content you've written and in the intervals you set. The chances of this actually happening when relying on a human to remember are minimal at best, not to mention inefficient.

Use a Content Calendar

Your marketing team's efficiency will improve significantly if they already know when content is due and what the nature of that content is. This will take planning in advance, but it will keep your marketing team on track, allow them have a consistent focus, and they won't be wasting time before every piece of content contemplating their topic.

Training & Tools

There's nothing that kills efficiency as much as a lack of training. Obviously your team needs to be able to use the technology that they have available for marketing. If they have to re-learn it every time they go to use it, not only is it a time-kill, but it's also stressful. Also in regards to technology, it's important to supply the proper tools. If they have to force a tool to do something it's not really built to do, the deployment will be flawed and it will likely take 3 times as long to complete.

Aside from the technology, your entire marketing team must be trained on the "why" factor. You cannot throw someone the task of writing blog posts without explaining to them why they are writing, who they are writing it for, and the ultimate goal of the marketing objectives. If they make assumptions on this and just "take a stab at it" you'll either have them rewriting it or just releasing crummy marketing. Nobody wants that.

Use these 3 tips and make your team of none perform like a team of 50!