Marketing efficiency helps companies improve their return on investment by as much as 100%, putting them on the fast track to business growth. Your marketing team’s efficiency should be your top priority.
But today’s in-house marketers are especially busy—managing frequent distractions and multiple campaigns—which prevents them from on time.
So, how can your team get more work done in less time?
In this article, we’ll share some exclusive productivity tips to improve your marketing team’s performance and keep productivity high across the board.
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Why Do Marketing Teams Need To Maximize Productivity?
Productivity means the team gets more work done in less time. This ultimately frees time to focus on more revenue-generating activities or making business improvements.
Productivity also results in better profit, considering time-to-market is everything today. If you take too long to maximize the productivity of your marketing team, your marketing results will suffer, leading to lower profitability.
However, before reaping the rewards, you need to overcome certain obstacles.
Common Challenges To Increasing Productivity
Maximizing productivity is quite a challenging task for leaders, and they need to use multiple tactics to keep the productivity rolling high!
In-house markers perform the marketing functions that are typically outsourced to external agencies. But while working in-house, they’re faced with productivity challenges like:
1. Inefficient Workflows
Imagine you have a deadline to meet, but your progress is on hold because you have to wait for someone’s approval or response to go ahead. This lack of efficiency can lead to errors, slow output, and even cost the organization money.
2. Too Many Meetings
While meetings are necessary for creativity, collaboration, and collective input, the truth remains that too many meetings hamper productivity. So it’s critical to strike a balance between collective input and personal creativity, which is needed for marketing productivity.
3. Lack of the Right Tools and Technology
Without the right technology to run and manage marketing operations, in-house marketers waste time and resources when executing tasks.
For instance, marketing teams often work with digital assets like images, videos, and documents. If your organization lacks efficient digital asset management tools to properly store and organize files, looking for the right digital asset for campaigns can quickly become chaotic, inevitably hampering productivity.
Top 14 Productivity Tips To Enhance Bottom-Line Results
It is important to play smart to achieve better productivity. There are many hacks that are followed by organizations to keep employees motivated and ensure they deliver to the best of their ability.
Getting the most out of your in-house marketers in the digital world should be the top priority of any business. The following marketing productivity tips will help you achieve just that and gain an instant competitive advantage.
1. Enhance Data Visibility
When you make data visible to all, your team can see how their work affects the entire company and gain real-time insights into multiple business functions. Knowing this information will help them understand if:
- The risky marketing tactic was worth it
- Their efforts align with the current market trends
- The team performance is improving or dipping
When you make data visible to your team, you help them improve their work efficiency.
2. Cut Down on Unnecessary Meetings
Meetings generally take up big chunks of time, eating into marketing team members’ time in full creativity mode. Meetings have the potential to slow them down and kill their productivity. Hence, it’s important to hold meetings only when necessary—and get the most out of them.
Apply the following productivity hacks to your meetings to boost the productivity of your marketing team:
- Have a clear goal that the meeting should accomplish.
- Gather the resources and personnel you need to achieve that goal.
- Invite only the necessary people. Don’t tie up team members’ time if they’re not crucial to the meeting.
- Have an agenda for your meeting and set a strict time limit.
- Distribute the agenda so attendees can prepare questions and remarks ahead of time.
- Consider having meetings during lunchtime or later hours of the day to leverage downtime.
- After the meeting, ensure the meeting minutes and action items are distributed to all participants to encourage follow-up.
Meetings that are efficient become shorter, allowing everyone to return to work quickly.
3. Increase Cross-Function Team Management
Before you can effectively increase your marketing teams’ productivity, you must know if a “team” exists or if they’re just individual employees working together. Productivity in a marketing team is a by-product of collective effort.
In-house marketers usually work in cross-functional teams for revenue operations. Content writers work with social media managers to create engaging content that matches the pulse of their followers; demand generation marketers work closely with the sales team for marketing attribution, and so on.
When there’s a bond across the team, everyone is able and willing to contribute, and you’ll have a productive team to work with. Some tips to help you manage and enhance team bonding include:
- Creating an open atmosphere and encouraging team members to share their ideas
- Having a non-judgmental stance toward suggestions
- Understanding everyone’s priorities
- Communicating carefully and respectfully
4. Track Team Performance
In a team, not all members perform equally. Some do very well, while others struggle to meet deadlines.
Managing productivity in a team starts by understanding the performance engagement levels. Utilize productivity apps to track your team’s daily activities and gain insights into how each employee works and how efficiently they accomplish set goals.
To measure and track employee productivity, ensure the work is distributed fairly and equally among all team members—no one should be overburdened. Follow up on this by identifying the right performance metric for each individual based on their workload and tasks.
5. Follow the Principle – Eat the Frog
“Eat the frog” is a classic time management principle for boosting your daily productivity. It simply means finishing the hardest task first.
In Mark Twain’s words, “If you have to eat a frog, the best thing to do is eat it first thing in the morning. If you have to eat two frogs, the best thing is to eat the biggest one first.”
Your “frog” is the most crucial task of the day, which we recommend you do first. Once you deal with it, your remaining tasks will feel easy in comparison, making you focus effectively throughout the rest of the day without lingering dread.
6. Reduce Distractions
An environment that boosts productivity is void of distractions. But trying not to get distracted is tricky, especially when notifications alert you to new messages across numerous apps and channels.
Especially these work from home productivity tips are helpful for your in-house marketers to reduce distractions:
- Keeping the music volume down
- Taking out time for breaks
- Having relaxation and recreation areas separate from work
- Pausing online notifications to improve focus time
7. Prioritize Employee Well-being
With a clear mind comes sharper focus and productivity. Some things, such as stress or a toxic work environment, can prevent mental clarity and make your team unproductive. While prioritizing well-being, remember to give your team adequate breaks, provide healthy snacks, make work hours flexible, and create a calm environment for them to function efficiently.
8. Follow Marketing Automation
Today’s marketing involves applying different processes and tools to boost productivity and orchestrate campaigns. With the help of marketing automation, your in-house marketers can expedite tasks, minimize errors, reduce the complexity of marketing functions, and manage activities across multiple marketing campaigns.
For example, there are tools for scheduling social media posts and managing interactions across all social platforms. This enables mass scheduling of posts rather than spending time and effort posting individually every time.
Other use cases for automation include:
- Marketing reports
- Topic alerts
- Meeting scheduling
- Email campaigns
- SEO performance alerts
With various free productivity tools for marketers, your team can relieve the constant pressure of completing routine tasks.
9. Ultilize Collaborative Communication Software
Investing in whatever tool or software makes your marketing teams’ job easier and more productive is always a good idea. Communication software is one such tool.
Collaboration apps like Slack keep all your communication together. This gives you the benefits of real-time messaging, downloading and searching for files, and calling people, among several others. You can also set Slack to “do-not-disturb” if you need to reduce distractions in the workplace.
Apart from Slack, you can explore many other communication software tools for your marketing team’s internal and communication needs. Some popular ones are Zoom, Loom, Microsoft Teams, and Jira.
Rather than sending emails back and forth or shouting across the office, switch to a collaboration tool to drive productivity.
10. Invest in Research Tools
To maintain team productivity, you need the right tools that can minimize research efforts.
In this age of artificial intelligence and IoT, manually doing keyword and backlink research is a recipe for low productivity. Consider investing in the best tools for B2B marketers, such as SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner, to improve your advertising and campaign strategies without extra hassle.
Social media helps you connect with your audience where they are. It allows you to build a robust online presence, bringing success to your brand. Invest in social media management tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to maximize productivity with social media. This way, you can schedule and organize your social media content in advance, streamlining your marketing efforts.
12. Practice Time Blocking
One of the many killers of team productivity is poor time management.
In this era of connectivity, people mistakenly believe that a lack of constant communication means tasks are not getting done. This isn’t true, of course—dedicated focus time improves productivity. That’s why planning your day with time management strategies such as time blocking is essential.
Time blocking helps boost productivity by dividing your day into blocks of time. Each block represents the time dedicated to specific tasks. By blocking out some hours to prioritize daily tasks, you protect your time and focus, thereby keeping your schedule on track.
13. Proper Calendar Management
Alongside managing meetings, calendars are also great for time management. Google Calendar, for instance, allows you to schedule your days, weeks, or months in advance with actual tasks instead of just meetings.
This way, in-house marketers can become more productive. In addition, you can also integrate your team’s Google Calendar with third-party project management software like Trello and Evernote to save time, where teammates won’t have to flick through different applications to manage tasks.
14. Implement Daily and Weekly Routines
Making daily and weekly routines allow your in-house marketing team to organize their time and increase productivity.
This routine typically includes any repetitive team tasks like checking in on one another’s progress and having opportunities to bring up any challenges or concerns. It’s critical to stick to any routine you put in place, so team members can organize their workload around these times and limit disruption. You can use tools designed to boost productivity to maintain your routines.
Expert Advice:
"Organizations need to maximize productivity by following the right tips and investing in appropriate tools. Make sure to motivate your team to keep productivity at an all-time high by following tried and tested productivity tips to increase bottom-line performance and gain a headstart in your business domain!"
Wrapping up
Being productive isn’t about working hard and long hours but applying techniques that help you work smarter. Since your brand image and reputation depend on your marketing efforts significantly, it’s critical you help your in-house marketing team stay productive.
Start by implementing the productivity tips we shared, and your team will be on their way to becoming high performers, thereby steering them toward sustainable growth. If you’re evaluating software to automate marketing functions, visit our website to explore the best options in the market.
Paras Kela is a highly skilled SaaS content writer with over 7 years of experience in the IT field. His expertise lies in simplifying complex technical concepts for easy comprehension. With a portfolio of over 100 high-quality blogs covering various SaaS topics, Paras’s writing style is engaging, informative, and SEO-friendly, ensuring maximum effectiveness. He continuously updates his skills and knowledge to stay current with industry trends, making his writing relevant and reliable.
