How to improve the efficiency of your marketing team in 2023?

Marketing is a never-ending process. No matter how efficient your marketing team is today, there will always be room for improvement.  In order to improve the overall efficiency of your teams, it is important to think about the future and what can you do to prepare for the years to come. This may include things, such as revamping your marketing strategy, upgrading to the latest tech tools, or training your marketing team to adapt. Remote work has been a boon for every company since the ongoing pandemic. But, it is also not without problems, such as legal, cultural, communication and management issues. Maintaining marketing efficiency at optimum levels must be your top priority. 

There are many ways that you can go about improving the efficiency of your marketing team. In this article, we will point out some common steps that you can perform to yield better marketing results. Let’s start with some basics, shall we?

Why does having an effective strategy matter?

According to CoSchedule, marketing professionals who document their strategy have 313% higher success rates. From the statistics, you can infer that an effective strategy directly impacts the success of your marketing efforts. Moreover, the first step towards improving your team’s efficiency must be giving them a goal. A well-organized marketing strategy enables you to set practical business goals for your marketing. 

Apart from that, there are a few other reasons why you need an effective plan to list how several marketing activities contribute to the end result. Let us list some of them below:

1. You get to understand your target group on a more personal level. 

2. You can find how you can make your product stand out from the others. 

3. You display consistent efforts in conveying your message and brand values. 

4. You frame a standard plan that everyone in the team follows. 

5. You can easily identify success metrics and set ways to measure them effectively. 

6. You display professionalism in all your marketing efforts. 

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Moreover, your decision-making process becomes easier. With an effective marketing strategy by your side, you’ll have alternative paths to every step. Hence, the process becomes quicker and naturally more efficient.

How to frame an effective marketing strategy?

Your marketing strategy must revolve around the value you provide to your customers(i.e., be customer-centric). It should not just be talking about your product. It should also be about imparting the necessary knowledge to the customer before they make the buying decision. Let’s take a look at how marketing process optimization takes place. To do that, you have to make sure that you include the following components.

1. Vision and Mission:

As said earlier, a strategy helps you inform your marketing teams about the marketing goals. By defining the visions and missions, the employees become more aware of what their actions get oriented towards. This helps your marketing team function more efficiently. Always be sure to make your vision and mission relevant to the term. For 2022, if you want your lead acquisition rates to go high, make sure you mention it in the goal statement.

2. SWOT analysis:

You know what your products offer. But, so should your marketers who are going to create content that engages with your target audiences. Hence, always include a SWOT analysis in your campaign. The results of past SWOT analysis will help the team identify the strengths and weaknesses of the product/service. While the ongoing SWOT analysis will keep the data relevant and find the potential threats and opportunities in the process.

Check out 20+ templates and best practices on how to conduct SWOT analysis.

3. Competitor analysis:

To frame an effective strategy, you need information on your niche. Take a look at your competitors. See how they excel and identify the areas they fail at. This research will help you find innovative ideas to promote your product. They can also help you identify what you shouldn’t do while marketing your products/services. 

11 Strong Tips on How to Research Competitors [+Template]

4. Techniques:

An effective strategy also comprises information as to how one should put it into action. In 2022, there are many marketing trends that are going to progress. According to those trends, you should pick suitable software and tools for executing your marketing plans. 

5. KPI:

Key Performance Indicators are a must-have in your strategy. Your KPIs should match your strategic goals and let you make the right measurements of success. While setting KPIs, make sure that it is realistic and achievable within the allotted time frame. 

6. Budget:

Determine the budget of all your marketing activities planned for the next year. Almost every decision you make revolves around the budget. But, be a little bit less stingy when it comes to promoting your products on social platforms. Because, in 2022, social media will still play a huge role in the digital marketing sector. 

Common tools that will improve your marketing efficiency in 2021

By identifying the right tools for your marketing, you can significantly maximize efficiency. According to Adobe Workfront's State of Work Report, 32% left their job due to  performance-limiting software they were given to work with. As you can infer, having the wrong tech can directly affect your business. Worry not. We have compiled a list of tools that you will need to up the performance of your marketing team in 2022.

1. Ad management tool:

Managing your ads is a huge part of your marketing team’s job. If you do not have an Ad management tool to help your team, you must consider including it for the 2022 marketing term. Your ad management tool can help you upload content to various channels and choose the right target audience for the campaign. Furthermore, it will let you optimize your marketing campaigns through advanced reporting tools. Eg: Google Campaign Manager 360.

2. Marketing automation tool:

Automation is already at the forefront of digital marketing. In 2022, you need to employ marketing automation software packages to enable faster marketing. It will help you stay not ahead but in league with your competition. Simply because almost every business has already adapted to it. The tool you choose should have features like lead scoring, marketing analytics, and testing so that you can implement your content marketing strategy and others without any struggles. Eg: Marketo.

3. Analytics tools:

Analyzing your data is the most important part of marketing. To do that more effectively, you need tools that are good at interpreting it. With modern tools, you will be able to ride the topics that are currently buzzing among your target market. These tools help you find insights about your own niche that lets you address real-time problems. Eg: BuzzSumo.

Learn more about marketing analytics tools that will help you to succeed in 2022.

4. SEO tools:

The next year is going to be all about long-tail keywords. To ace that game, you need to find SEO tools that help you find the right keywords that can boost your visibility. After some recent changes to the Google SEO algorithm, marketers need to find more reliable ways to perform SEO. For e.g, SEMrush is a popular tool to research and produce relevant content for your audience. 

Learn more about the most popular SEO tools.

5. Social Media Marketing tools:

Social media will continue dominating the upcoming year. Moreover, there are many upgrades to platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The Metaverse is aiming at making marketing approaches of marketers more personal. So, you’d have to rely on social media marketing tools to reach customers efficiently. Through these tools, you can schedule and deploy your copies at the most opportune time. Eg: Hootsuite. 

The upcoming year is going to be the marketing term that recovers from the impacts of the pandemic. So, it is obvious that these tools will take part in that transformation. It is only logical for your marketing team/marketing teams to adopt these tools as soon as possible.

Trends your marketing team should be aware of in 2022

The next step in ensuring that every one of your marketing team member works efficiently is for them to stay well-informed. The following trends are a must-know for your employees:

1. Influencer marketing is going to become the norm. Almost every business will adopt influencer marketing to get better engagement from their audience. 

2. Short videos will dominate social platforms. From Instagram Reels to YouTube Shorts, every company will start creating short videos to promote their products.  

3. Many companies will prioritize displaying their social responsibility rather than just focusing on promoting their products/services.

4. Virtual events will dominate the marketing world. Since many customers prefer using online methods to interact with brands, there will be marketing strategies that address the same. 

5. Digital marketing will shift to using methods like AR and VR for a more enhanced experience with the brand. 

Learn about ad spend trends across the industries in 2021.

How to measure marketing team effectiveness?

As said earlier, you need the proper tech to effectively monitor your remote team’s marketing efficiency. Also, you need to establish certain metrics to successfully measure their performance. The following are some of the ways in which you can measure the performance of a remote marketing team. 

1. Measure website conversion rates:

If your website performs better, it means that your efficient marketing team is doing something right. The marketing team is responsible for creating a blog and running a marketing campaign that makes a user want to buy from you. Hence, monitoring that will let you effectively measure their performance.

Learn how to set up omnichannel analytics.

2. Count the new leads:

Has your pipeline been flowing with qualified leads? If so, you can use this metric to ascertain your marketing team’s performance. You must have an ideal number of leads you require per month for healthy sales. Hence, you can easily find whether you need to improve the efficiency of your team members or if your remote marketing teams are already performing well. 

Learn more about how to maintain a healthy pipeline.

3. Lead conversion rates:

Lead conversion can happen through any of the platforms you advertise on. The rate of conversion directly impacts your revenue. Therefore, it is a very useful metric that you can use to determine the marketing efficiency of your remote team as well as the efficiency of your marketing campaign. For example, if you have a social media marketer on your remote team, you can directly measure their performance based on the leads from channels like Instagram and Facebook. 

4. Customer Acquisition Cost:

CAC is an important metric in measuring the performance of your team. Customer Acquisition Cost is the amount of money spent in acquiring a customer. This metric describes the cost of convincing a person in your target group to buy. Thus, making it an effective metric to monitor cost as well as performance. 

5. Return On Marketing Investment:

Assume that you are running a Christmas campaign. If the revenue you gain from it is less than that you invested, you need to improve the efficiency of your team members. This metric doesn’t stop at measuring the money but also considers the time invested in running a campaign. Thus, this metric will help us determine productivity and how you can boost marketing efficiency.

6. Project management system:

Remote teams need a constant reminder of what they need to do. It is mainly because they are not in a work setting. They work from the comfort of their home which makes it easy to forget their duties and tasks. By employing a good cloud-based project management software solution, you can ensure that tasks get completed on time and ensure efficient tooling of agile marketing methods. It helps you track and measure each employee’s performance easily. Furthermore, it acts as one of the primary collaboration tools for your remote teams.

7. Time tracking:

If you charge on the hour or have implemented time tracking of remote workers, you might already have a time tracking solution in place. But, if you pay them a fixed monthly wage, it is important that you consider adding a method to track productive time efficiently. Constant time tracking will help employees stay focused and help you measure their contributions accurately.

Here are 34 examples for charts for you to visualise your KPIs in a marketing dashboard.

Example of Remote Teams doing it right

Groove is a customer service platform that helps improve the productivity of many businesses’ sales teams. They have an effective strategy to improve the efficiency of your team members. They only hire people who work well in remote working conditions and those who can quickly adapt to agile marketing methods. A great worker might not be so successful as a remote worker. They identified that difference and started hiring people for their team solely based on their ability to work remotely without much supervision. 

They started to ask basic questions like whether the employee does what’s best for the team or for themselves. Also, they refrained from hiring people who do not actively respond. Because, for a remote team to succeed, communication is the key element. Groove is popular for making it simple for sales employees to deliver better customer service. So, it is no surprise that they do good with leveraging software solutions as well. 

They use Skype to perform weekly calls, which greatly improved their coordination. Moreover, they wanted their employees to truly connect with others so they do not feel out of place in the remote working environment. They embrace the natural conversation that is out of context and not about work. They say it makes the employees feel more comfortable and in turn, makes them more productive. 

Another important quality that made them successful is that they set goals. Both quarterly and yearly goals. And they encourage their remote employees to be more accountable for their tasks. When the employees clearly understand what their roles are on the team and how it affects the end results, they tend to be more responsible and active. 

“On our weekly call, I make an effort to bring our team in on the state of the business; where it’s going, how we’re doing, how far we are from breakeven, things like that. I ask for feedback. And then I act on it.” -Alex Turnbull, Founder & CEO of Groove. 

He said this when talking about his journey as a lone founder. But, what you should note here is that he believes and practices a value that is critical for the success of a remote team. Communication on a regular basis helps keep everyone on the team in check. Essentially, what is more, important than employing the necessary tools is to have the right values and practice them religiously.

Conclusion

For your team to work more efficiently, you need to amp up your tools and tech. It is what will get you through 2022. Moreover, it is wise for the manager to set up training sessions before you incorporate any changes to your marketing strategy.