The marketing team is responsible for the image of your company. How they promote your business can directly affect your sales and performance. That’s why it’s important to create a reliable and competent team that can function on all levels. It requires a lot of strategic planning and work before you can set yourself up for success.
If you are thinking of reinventing your team or just starting out with a new marketing team, there are some suggestions that you can follow:
Look beyond the degree
Contrary to what most people think, having a degree doesn’t necessarily equate to being a better employee. If you really want to find the best people for your team, you have to learn to look past that bias right now.
Every time a company tries to search and hire a new employee, a lot of money is spent on the process. There’s time spent interviewing and evaluating them and time spent on training them. Unfortunately, there are some hires who seem qualified at first but are actually not that good in practice. It ends up with them being let go and repeating the entire process again.
To avoid this, companies should try to assess their practical skills as early as the interview process. Data shows that the number of job postings that mention work experience is almost twice the number of those that mention the need for a degree. And those that do ask for a degree almost always mention experience. That says a lot about what companies are prioritizing these days.
If you want to boost your business’ performance with a strong team, then look out for those with good portfolios and real experience behind them. Those are the people who actually know what it’s like to deliver results and have applied their skills. That doesn’t mean that you completely ignore education, though. At the very least, you need someone with a high school diploma to ensure that they have the basic math and language skills needed in everyday life.
Make sure that proper training is done
You can have a team of the best people, but without proper training and instruction, it would end up being a disorganized mess. Even if the person has a lot of skills, they will still need to be properly transitioned into their new position.
A 2019 LinkedIn survey found that 94 percent of employees would stay longer if companies invested in helping them learn. As a new hire, it is a huge red flag for them if they are not trained in the first few weeks. Part of the onboarding process includes informing them of all their tasks to help them adjust. If you just throw them into the fire and leave them confused, you will end up losing a lot of good employees.
A proper onboarding process also shows them that you are an organized company that is worth their time. You should be just as motivated to impress them just like how hard they have worked to impress you. If you have tools and systems that you regularly use, they must be trained in that as well to avoid mistakes and delays in tasks.
Create clear assignments and processes
Before you even consider hiring someone new, make sure that you’ve established the specifics of their job descriptions. In fact, you should have a clear idea of the tasks of every person on the team. This way, you can identify who does what to avoid duplicating tasks.
When the assignments of each position are not clearly defined, it can get confusing later on because your team won’t know whom to turn to for certain processes. Aside from that, you might also end up having too much or too little for a specific task. The last thing an employee wants is to be unloaded with a lot of tasks that they didn’t sign up for.
Create smaller teams if possible
If you deal with a large team or a ton of projects, you can break them down into smaller, specialized groups. For instance, your design team can have its division or a separate team for the social media marketers.
With this strategy, you have the team members focusing on individual tasks instead of looking at the big project as a whole. This will help them focus and get more work done. A team who handles everything can become chaotic, and it can overwhelm the team members with tasks that don’t directly relate to their positions. This can result in missed deadlines for everyone.
What you can do is to assign heads or point persons for these individual teams to help coordinate all the tasks needed. A point person will be aware of the workload of their team to help them properly delegate tasks. Without a person spearheading delegation, the team members would just give tasks to the first person they get into contact with.
Even with all this planning, you might not get a perfect team right away. But that’s okay. It would require a lot of trial and error before you can establish a good team. What you can do is to help them out to streamline the process of recruitment and keep an open mind to changes.
