The benefit of boosting departmental Productivity needs very little explaining. When teams are more productive, they get more done in less time, freeing up time to focus on other revenue-generating or business improvement tasks. Marketing teams can actively leverage ProofHub for increasing intra-team collaboration, which leads to better productivity.
When applied correctly, better productivity should result in more profit.
Most businesses focus primarily on improving productivity levels when it comes to the departments which deliver their core product or service. After all, it is clear and obvious how producing more as a business results in allowing the business to sell more. For example, if a cleaning business can increase the volume of cleaning it can do in an hour, it can charge more for that hour than before.
Yet most businesses fail to identify the importance of improving the productivity of departments that are less obvious in how they contribute to profitability such as finance, operations, admin and marketing.
This failure produces an opportunity to find simple ways to improve overall business productivity. In this guide, we deliver 9 smart methods for improving the overall productivity of your Marketing Department.
1. Create a Routine
A solid departmental routine will make it easier for team members to organize their time and improve their productivity.
Ad Hoc, last-minute meetings may be helpful in getting the ball rolling on new tasks, but they can also massively disrupt workflow. Unplanned meetings and discussions can lead to a considerable amount of time being spent on getting back into the flow of things.
Instead, set daily and weekly routines which your marketing department can work to. This routine should include any repetitive team tasks such as checking in on each other’s progress and opportunities to bring up concerns and challenges such as weekly or daily team meetings.
Once a routine is in place, it is important to stick to it. Having set times for team commitments will help team members plan their other workloads around these times, limiting disruption and ultimately boosting productivity.
Encouraging your team to create their own routines can also be a smart move. Not only does this help them to always know what they are doing and when, but it can help the wider team understand what is being worked on at any one time, giving them a greater insight into when tasks will be complete and where support may be required.
2. Establish Set Processes
Most marketing departments follow set processes, whether they are documented or not. For example, when posting social media content you may follow a process that goes a little like this:
- Note down what needs to be posted next month
- Create image or video content to match the post needs
- Write captions for those images or videos
- Proofread and edit posts
- Use a platform such as HubSpot or Hootsuite to schedule posts
Other processes your marketing department may follow include:
- Project management
- Marketing email creation
- Video production
- Event planning
- Online content Writing
- Budgeting
- Team development
Noting down the processes you follow can help in two ways. Firstly, it makes it easy and quick for anyone new to the team or anyone covering absent colleagues to understand exactly what needs to be done when executing any given task. It also makes it simple to identify areas of the process which can be improved to increase productivity. Given the social media example above, you may work to identify the following improvements at each stage:
- Rather than starting from scratch, have your sales team note down common questions they are being asked and create content around those topics
- Create a bank of pre-approved images and videos for use on social media
- Have a bank of hashtags ready to use in captions
- Use tools like Grammarly to limit errors and speed up the proofreading process
- Assess different social media tools and find the best fit for your needs
Established processes can further be used to boost productivity by allowing you to identify tasks that could be outsourced such as content writing or video creation and tasks which could be automated such as posting on social media and email marketing.
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3. Maintain Clear Boundaries
Many marketers will develop their skill set across the full marketing mix. This leads to marketing teams being made up of a mix of individuals who have the ability to deliver on many of the required marketing tasks.
Although this can be beneficial, especially in smaller marketing teams, it can ultimately lead to low levels of productivity as each team member is unable to fully focus on their primary task. For example, if you have a copywriter in your team who also occasionally does image or video editing, it would be hard for them to fully focus on producing the best-written content they can.
Of course, different teams work in different ways, but maintaining clear boundaries and setting responsibilities can help teams stay laser-focused on the task at hand. These boundaries can also speed up the process of allocating work to the right individuals and make it clear when new specialist skills need to be brought in-house or outsourced.
4. Set Clear Lines of Communication
Good communication is your secret weapon in improving marketing department productivity.
When team members cannot access the information or knowledge they need to do their job it can drastically slow down how quickly things are done. By improving the speed and regularity of communication within your marketing department you can facilitate the removal of information blockages and help it flow freely.
With more businesses now having their teams working from home, it is now more important than ever to create clear lines of communication by introducing communication tools such as Slack, Asana or Microsoft Teams to facilitate the flow of information.
However, simply having clear lines of communication is not enough. These lines need to be used regularly to help team members better understand how to best communicate with each other in order to truly speed up processes and boost productivity.
5. Follow Clear Meeting Agendas
Marketing meetings can be the death of marketing department productivity. Most of us have been there. Hours sat in a meeting room talking over topics that are neither relevant nor useful in helping us complete our jobs to the full potential.
This has to stop.
If you want to boost the productivity of your marketing team, a new, radical approach needs to be taken when setting meetings. This approach includes:
- Questioning whether a meeting is essential, or whether a quick email or phone call would suffice
- Setting a clear agenda and sending it to all attendees so they can prepare ahead of time
- Sticking to the agenda and noting any follow up questions for a short period allocated at the end of the meeting
- For long meetings with multiple people, formatting the agenda so that those not involved with all topics can leave to focus on other work
6. Manage Workloads
There is a fine line that department managers need to find when managing workloads. This line is situated between overwhelming and stressing out team members with too much work and failing to engage or motivate them with too little work.
Unfortunately, finding this balance isn’t as simple as applying the same workload to all team members, but understanding each team member and how they work to their full potential.
For example, one team member may thrive from being allocated a large project and being left to get on with it, whereas another team member benefits from consistently being fed smaller tasks. Neither of these is better than the other, but both require a different approach.
Team managers should work to understand team members so they can find the most efficient way to allocate workload.
7. Develop a Happy-Team
Most of the tips we have included in this article focus on finding ways to cut distractions and speed up the processes followed by your marketing department. However, it is also important to remember that a happy team is a motivated team.
The importance of a happy team can often be forgotten when looking for ways to boost productivity. For example, in theory, removing a team’s ability to talk to each other about non-work-related topics would give them more time to focus on the task at hand. Yet in reality, removing quality human interaction between team members can be demoralizing and result in lower levels of motivation.
Businesses that facilitate employee happiness could see an increase in productivity, helping teams spend less time getting more done. For example, an experiment by Microsoft’s subsidiary in Japan found a 40% boost in productivity levels when they moved their teams onto a 4 day work week.
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8. Treat Individuals like Individuals
Finding smart ways to increase productivity isn’t a one-size-fits-all activity. Techniques that work for one team member may not necessarily work for another. Talking to your marketing department one by one will help you understand their individual working styles and how you can support them in boosting their productivity.
For example, some members of the team may thrive from being in a high-energy, busy, and bustling workspace such as an office. Whereas other team members may do their best work from home when they can get their head down and focus on the task at hand.
Of course, it can be tricky to cater to all individual needs at all times. After all, you can’t let some of the team permanently work from home whilst others have to work from the office. But understanding how each individual works will allow you to make arrangements to try and meet the needs of all members as best as possible such as creating hybrid office/homework weeks or hybrid office environments.
9. Invest in Smart Software
There is big money in helping businesses increase productivity. That is why there is a wealth of business software that can speed up processes and help you keep on top of your day-to-day operations.
For example, many marketing departments will invest in tools that help them schedule their social media posts and manage interactions across all social platforms. Doing this allows them to replicate effort when creating posts and focus energy on mass scheduling rather than having to post individually each time.
Similarly, marketing departments that run large projects can massively benefit from investing in quality project management software. This will help project managers ensure that tasks are being met in a timely manner and help them keep an eye on the overall progress of a project. Equally, it will improve team productivity by offering those involved with projects a central location for checking what is expected of them and when it is expected by.
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10. Increasing Marketing Department Productivity
Finding ways to improve department productivity is a task that requires constant monitoring and improvement. Although you may find some great ways to do this now, as the market and your business change over time there will inevitably be new opportunities to make further improvements.
Setting time aside on a regular basis to review productivity and seek new ways to boost it can result in huge increases in profit over time.
Author Bio:
Owain is a content writer, marketer, and agency owner. He is the founder of MAKE IT MANA marketing agency and Editor of Better Business Tools online magazine. When he isn’t supporting clients with their marketing needs he is writing content and contributing to industry thought leadership in the marketing space.
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