Be a World Class Marketing Team of One!

You may have a huge marketing team, a small marketing team, or maybe you’re a team of one just doing your best to keep up with the demands of your job. No matter the size of your marketing department, there are some ways you can execute your tasks and projects more productively and successfully. Try these 6 actionable tips to get started:

Use what you have

Learn to use the marketing tools at your disposal to their optimal capacity. Most marketing technologies offer free training or courses to help you understand the tools at an expert level. It’s not worth paying a subscription for services like HubSpot, Act-On, or Mailchimp if you don’t have a firm grasp on how to use them. It’s crucial to research marketing tools thoroughly before you purchase them, and do your due diligence when learning and using the software.

Plan your day

As mentioned in our previous Get Shit Done Blog, planning your day and activities gives you the ability to see when and where you have free time. This makes it easier to prioritize your day and allocate time to things that “aren’t necessarily part of the plan.”

Planning your day doesn’t mean you can’t change up your schedule or priorities (as a marketer, your schedule and priorities should change all the time). This just helps you make more informed decisions on what you have time for and how to use your free time. Planning your day is especially important if you’re a marketing team of one because you’re even more limited when it comes to time and resources.

Make the most of your website

Finding out how to get the most out of your website may mean partnering with a web development company (shameless plug!) who can do the hard stuff, but also train you on the easy stuff. Here at Bit-Wizards, we have developers that take care of the tasks that our marketers don’t want—nor have time—to learn.

If you have the skills and time to make sure your website is running as it should be, then great! You should not only be maintaining and protecting your website properly but looking for ways to improve it as well. If these are things that you either don’t feel comfortable doing or don’t have time for, you should consider outsourcing. As a marketer in this day and age, your website is crucial. Allocating the time or resources it takes to make it successful should be a top priority. If you’re a team of one, you likely don’t have the time needed to maintain your website properly.

Social scheduling is your friend

Many people rant against scheduling social media updates, but there is a space for it. If it takes a little extra help from social tools like Hootsuite and Sprout to get your content out, that’s okay! You can still post in real-time as needed, but this way, you don’t lose content due to time constraints or forgetfulness (again, if you’re a marketing team of one, this is likely to happen without some scheduling).

Of course, you should NEVER automate replies. Be genuine. Make sure you are always responding thoughtfully to questions and comments. Don’t let social suffer because of the "work" you have to get done each day. Social interaction is the true face of brands today.

Prioritize properly

Prioritization may be the most important tip in this article. There are things you won't get done in a single day. As a marketer, you need to be ready to choose what is most important. You can use the process below to help prioritize your tasks:

Time - determine what must be done because of a deadline or approaching necessary need. Always do that FIRST.
Ease of Completion - Ask yourself, “how easy is a particular task? Can I get it done in minutes or hours or days?” Once you answer these questions, slate the task in the time slot that makes the most sense for your schedule, timeline, and/or goals. This is second only to the number one “time” requirement above.
Need for Additional Resources - Think about whether you need someone's help, or information from someone else, to get a particular task or project completed. Are those people easy to work with? Are they quick to respond? It’s important to take these factors into consideration when prioritizing your tasks to minimize roadblocks.
Push the Quarter - There are always those tasks for which none of the above qualifiers are in play, a.k.a the "quarter pushing game." You know those games at the arcade that you have to feed money into, and they push the coins forward until some drop, and you finally win? Anyway, in this scenario, "pushing quarters" means that the task is just languishing out there on your list. It has no time requirement, it is not necessarily easy to complete, and it doesn’t require resources. However, you know it should get done at some point. This is when you push the quarter (task) forward and move onto something else until you have the bandwidth to give it the attention it deserves. Download the prioritization flowchart.

Measure Everything

You can't deliver results for something that you aren't measuring, and Marketing is all about results!

Much of what the small team marketing departments accomplish successfully is due in large part to knowing why and what they are executing and how to analyze what they have done to see if it is working. Results matter. Dig into Google Analytics - they offer free training and certifications. Moz also provides some crazy good insights in their tools for a reasonable price.
If your website has a Content Management System (CMS), it should offer some analytics. And even better, if you have a built-in Content Marketing Solution (like we do with Kentico EMS) you have many more insights that you can learn from and take action on.
Oh, and scheduling fits in again here. When you send a newsletter or publish a social schedule, part of your process should automatically include running or checking reports regarding opens and click-through rates or insights.