Our team has helped our clients streamline their marketing campaigns and processes, which has produced great results. In doing so, we’ve worked with and collected proven methods of evaluating a company’s internal marketing team.
This article will give you some practical steps on how to efficiently evaluate your marketing team.
High Level Evaluation
This category consists of elements that you should look for within individual team members. Knowing what to look for will help you build a better team and it will show you the areas where they need more support.
Time Management – This is always a big part of any team trying to accomplish growth. Time management is critical for taking a big visionary goal and breaking it into business objectives and then into tasks that individual people own on the team.
Efficiency – This naturally ties into time management. Efficiency can be implemented in different ways, but there are three essential components that are necessary to consider: meeting deadlines, reporting numbers that matter and considering the right roles and ownership.
Meeting Deadlines – This aspect is critical in the creative process because it can help to streamline your communication with team members on a project at important stages. If you have good creative people on the team, you’ll more quickly get to the cohesive, brand centric content that will get attention and engagement. If you have team members who take longer to get to the final product, you’ll have to adjust your expectation of getting the work done in what time.
Reporting Numbers That Matter – To do this, you must first know what numbers need to be reported, and which metrics you are measuring. We won’t get into it here, but you can find the metrics you should measure based on your business objectives (generating X number of leads each month). Your business objectives are based on your overall goals for marketing (increasing deposits by X annually).
Once that is established, it’s imperative to ensure that your team members have the proper tools to report on those numbers, as well as the skillset to be able to utilize those tools. Proper communication is important as well, because without it they may lack a complete understanding of their objective or the metrics that need to be measured. Inside those metrics, understanding how the team needs to record data and how they’ll report what they find will enable you to be informed by that data.
There are many moving parts to consider in reporting. But as with anything else, start small and keep it simple. Expand from there as needed.
The Right Roles and Ownership – If you want to maximize the efficiency of your team, having the right person in each position is critical. You’ll know that you’ve accomplished this when each person thinks outside of the scope of work they are given. Do they get their work done efficiently and with excellence while bringing you questions and ideas? If so, it’s the right person for that role. If not, they are either a really bad fit and it will be obvious or they are just filling the seat until they leave or you get rid of them.
If you are evaluating your team and you realize that one of these areas isn’t up to par, then that might be a good place to start for improvement. A healthy team is very important to the success of any marketing effort.
Let’s analyze an example of what this might look like:
Let’s take a social media manager on the team. Their goal is to publish content and to monitor the activity and engagement of that content. This person is not easily put off by negativity, handles difficult conversations well and can easily spark new conversations online. They find new trends as they do their day to day job and they make note of it to bring up at the next meeting.
They want to proactively discuss whether it’s something the team should look into. If the topic is positive feedback on a product, they will try to understand why this is occurring and look at possible ways to leverage that for even more positive growth. If the topic is negative feedback, then they will try to understand what isn’t working and offer up possible ways to fix it.
They are well suited for the position and continuously strive to optimize the campaign by offering new ideas.
Each person on your internal marketing team should be individually owning a share of the work to be done, which collectively pushes everyone towards meeting the overall marketing objectives.
A question to help with evaluation:
Is your team consistently bringing you new ideas to optimize your campaigns or just barely delivering on their work?
A Practical Approach to Evaluating Progress
Evaluating Progress is about consistency and having a rhythm to the team’s work. If the High Level Evaluation steps are met, then you will establish a team oriented rhythm because everyone will want to meet back frequently and talk about things that are impeding or progressing their goal. They will all have a vested interest in achieving the end goal together.
Better yet, mutual respect will be established because of their holistic concern for the end goal, which will make for a healthy work environment.
How do you achieve that? You can get there by following the following framework.
Roadblock Meetings – The more frequent your meetings are, be it weekly or biweekly, the quicker you’ll be able to address problems that arise, which will allow your team to reach their goals faster. Often, roadblocks consist primarily of personal issues or technical difficulties, both of which should be addressed as soon as possible.
These meetings will allow you to manage any host of personal or professional problems that would serve as a barrier to success. They aren’t meant to be very long, though the duration will vary depending on the size of your team. Sometimes these are called stand up meetings where everyone reports answering a series of 3 questions and moves to the next person.
For daily productive chatter between team members, we recommend slack.com. This mobile tool is great for collaborative efforts and day to day conversations and it frees up a lot of space in your email’s inbox. It’s very streamlined, saves the history of conversations and allows you to share files easily. This tool, if used productively, can save you time in long unproductive meetings.
Monthly Reporting Meetings – These will allow you to sit with your team for a longer period of time and go over all the work that’s been completed. Here, you can monitor your monthly goals, individual productivity and the effectiveness of your campaigns. Consistent reports on the metrics that you’re measuring should be given, in addition to insights on the causes of that data and projections for the future. This is when new ideas should be discussed.
These kinds of meetings are also to bring the entire team together to continue building internal culture, trust and respect among one another.
Quarterly Strategy and Planning Meetings – This is going to be a longer, more involved meeting that sets the course for the ones that follow. You should have four of these a year.
Here you can really look at tactics that you’re going to use for the next three months. Whoever is leading the marketing team should discuss their responsibilities for the next year and should break those goals down into campaigns, generation efforts, branding efforts and social media engagement that the team can work towards on a daily basis.
These meetings should set the tone for the quarter and clearly communicate what is expected of each team member as they all work together to achieve their goals.
This meeting should recap where you came from and address where you envision going in the next three months. It’s also a great place to distribute tasks amongst team members that will help achieve new marketing goals over the next three months.
If you are not currently addressing your marketing team with a rhythmic approach, then you’re using more energy and time than is necessary.
And if you are not evaluating your team on an individual skill-set, commitment to the team and team fit, then you’re really adding extra work to your team’s plate.
A question to help with evaluation:
What metrics are you using to measure success among your team and how are you getting the data? Keep in mind this information could be qualitative for some and quantitative for others.
There is no perfect model for how to manage a marketing team, but these methods will point you in the right direction for improvement.
Do you want to discuss ways to implement these or other tactics in your business? Follow me on Linkedin or reach out through our website. Let’s start a conversation.