A strong marketing strategy always starts with your marketing team. For poorly run businesses, that’s where thinking about marketing stops. For businesses that want to grow, alignment is vital, and every single person in your company has a very real effect on your marketing efforts. That’s because marketing is more than just the visible appearance of a business. It continues when they get their product home, and it’s part and parcel of every single interaction that they have with someone from your company. That means that every single member of your in-house team makes daily contributions to your marketing efforts. To do so effectively requires alignment. You need to ensure that everyone on your team is aware of your marketing goals, your USPs, and your most vital marketing priorities.
Stronger Collaboration
Teams often work with a silo mentality, and that can make collaboration very challenging. That’s why you need to ensure that your teams operate as a single, large unity. That will mean a shift to a more open and transparent marketing effectiveness. Your teams will be unable to align if they have roadblocks to collaboration. Make sure that your various departments have regularly scheduled meetings together, with your marketing team, sales managers, and customer-facing staff all present. Use technologies like Slack, Skype, or Discord to interact regularly with remote workers. This will help to make a more collaborative workspace, as opposed to an ‘us vs them’ environment that will only ever be detrimental.
Understanding Team Needs
The more that you know what your teams require and consider to be essential, the more they will be able to perform in their role effectively. All workplaces can be improved, and the people that know what needs changing are usually the people on the ground floor. Never underestimate the value of an employee engagement questionnaire that can help improve workflow, maximize marketing impact, and boost in-house collaborative integration. This is a potent method for gauging and identifying the roadblocks that are hindering the marketing efforts of your team. Establish regular meetings with both individuals and teams, so that goals are highlighted and prioritized.
Real-Time Funnel Visibility
With collaboration and the right tools in place, aligning your marketing will be significantly easier. Then it becomes a matter of tracking your marketing efforts together. Use tools like a dashboard that allows for real-time tracking of results and analytics, so that you can continue to make decisions based on facts and data rather than guesswork. Your teams will be able to make more informed and productive decisions together if they have access to the stats that come from both the marketing and sales departments. This will also allow you to identify where and when misalignment in the sales funnel begins to happen. The more transparency you can develop in terms of your marketing, sales, and customer-facing teams, the easier it will be to ensure alignment.
The people in your company are a team that needs to be able to work together. Working with a silo mentality is bad for business and can have a very negative impact on future growth and goals. Ensure that collaboration is fluid, and use every tool available in order to get maximum alignment and more potent marketing impact.