How to Build an Incredibly Effective Marketing Team
12 Valuable Tips and Methods that Can Transform Your Company!
You have big dreams. Big goals. Big ideas for your company. Yet are you struggling to find a strong marketing team to help execute your company’s marketing plan? If you’re having a hard time aligning your vision with winning execution, you are not alone.
Imagine a high-performing marketing team that is custom-built and tailored for your exact needs. How much could you achieve if not only your values and goals were perfectly aligned, but also your team's strengths and skill sets were perfectly balanced?
If you find yourself desperately asking yourself this question, read on to discover 12 life-saving tips on how to build a successful marketing team.
1. Understand Your Needs
The marketing world is continually changing and intensifying, and it’s hard to find the right team to keep up sometimes. To successfully build an effective marketing team, you first need to analyze your situation. Take a look at where you are now and where you want to be. What do you need in between to see your goals executed?
Maybe you’re building your marketing team from scratch. Or maybe you already have a decent marketing team, but they just aren’t getting the job done like you need. A good way to understand your needs is to understand your gaps. Is there a creativity gap? Or an execution gap? A communication gap? To fix the issue, you first need to identify it. Find out exactly what your needs are for a stronger marketing team, and build from there.
2. Head of Marketing: Who Is Leading Your Mission?
One of the most important decisions you can make is who is leading your marketing mission. Your CMO leader, or marketing manager, plays the most important part in your marketing operation. While you may have the overall vision for your marketing, your CMO leader is the one who will carry it out. This comes with a lot of trust, so you’ll want to make sure your CMO is very capable.
The marketing manager is someone who will require a lot of important skill sets. They will be responsible for managing people (your marketing team), overall vision, and execution. While the marketing team supports this, the CMO oversees everything. If you find the importance of finding the perfect marketing manager for your company overwhelming, don’t worry. I’m going to show you how Apex can help turn this process into something highly effective yet stress-free for you.
3. Align Goals
Misaligned goals are detrimental enemies that will suck the life out of your journey. While your team may not purposefully have misaligned goals, this can naturally stem from a lack of clear, strong, and effective communication.
To build a successful marketing team, it’s important to set clear expectations for the marketing plan as a whole and also for each individual team member. Effective communication that drives high-quality work will make your marketing team unstoppable. Make sure your team is on the same page with the same values, goals, and plans.
4. Evaluate Your Company’s Vision
In addition to aligning goals, it’s important to stop and evaluate overall goals and vision. What are your goals? Are they something your marketing team can get behind and work passionately to deliver? Effectively conveying importance and passion can spark the same feelings in your marketing team.
People who are passionate about what they do are known to work much harder than those who aren’t invested at all. Choose goals and visions that are worthy of being passionate about.
5. Routinely Audit Processes
What processes are you implementing in your marketing efforts? It’s effective to routinely analyze and audit your marketing processes—are you spending good amounts of time and energy on channels and processes that yield little results? Look at your process as a whole and see if you can successfully eliminate some time or money-consuming steps. Then, see how you can optimize your remaining steps. Your steps should grow, not hinder, your journey to the end goal.
You may also want to look into an efficient marketing automation system or integrative tools to help track and improve your steps. Automation can be a simple yet impactful way to optimize your time and processes.
6. Analyze Data and Results
Having members on your team that understand your audience, trends, platforms, language, and lead nurturing is crucial to building a strong marketing team.
Track and analyze your data so, at the end of your project, you can learn from it and apply that knowledge to future marketing campaigns. Understanding what works and what doesn’t work for your company is how you will grow.
7. The Perfect Balance: Diversify, Diversify, Diversify
A team made up of solely creative people will most likely get you nowhere. A high-performing marketing team made up of individuals who have a variety of diverse strengths and skill sets will be incredibly valuable for your company. Finding that perfectly balanced blend of doers and dreamers, creators and executors, is what will drive your company to meet its marketing goals.
Your marketing team is the building block of your brand; you owe it to yourself to build a quality team. You may have the world’s best marketing strategy, but you still need a passionate, qualified, and strong marketing team to execute it. Placing your company's future in the hands of someone unknown and potentially unqualified may intimidate you, and that’s totally understandable. Just remember to make sure to always look for individuals who are focused and have a growth mindset.
8. Understand Your Target Audience
In order to successfully reach your target audience, you have to know who they are, right? That’s why having a deep understanding of who you are trying to reach is so important.
But understanding your current customers is even more important. Remember, it’s marginally cheaper to keep current customers than to find new ones. Having a winning marketing team that understands how to keep your current customers satisfied, happy, and impressed is key to building a prosperous business.
9. Secrets to a Successful Marketing Team
A successful marketing team with the right chemistry and focus may sound impossible to find, and while the perfect team doesn’t exist, a functional and productive team does. I know what you’re thinking: a team like that is easier said than done—or found. I don't blame you if the thought of finding this balanced team completely overwhelms you. But fortunately, it doesn’t have to completely overwhelm you or deplete your time or resources. There should be an easier way to find strong marketing team members that flourish and complement each other, and that’s why Apex CMO Search was born. You’re already busy and working hard in your zone of genius; let Apex do the hard work of finding the perfect marketing match for your company!
10. Have an Open Mind
The best and most effective marketing processes probably haven’t even been created yet. That’s why it’s important to keep an open mind when exploring new marketing strategies. Marketing is ever-changing, evolving, and growing. Just think about how much marketing tactics have changed over the past ten years! It’s definitely hard to keep up sometimes. Being adaptable and willing to grow and learn will take you far in achieving your marketing goals.
11. Focused Roles
Whether your marketing team is made up of two members or 20 members, it’s important that they know the exact role they play in the process. This is where communication, diversity, and motivated individuals will utilize and optimize their unique strengths while driving an effective marketing team. Marketing team members should complement one another’s strengths, not compete!
12. The Heartbeat of a Successful Marketing Team
The heartbeat of a strong marketing team is its marketing plan. This is the roadmap for your marketing efforts. Making sure you have a strong, clear, and concise plan will lead your company to the future you envision. But remember, your marketing plan is only as strong and effective as your team members. Make sure you hire members with the skills, knowledge, and expertise to execute your marketing plan.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are a lot of components that make up an effective marketing team. But what it really comes down to is: is your marketing team the right fit for your company to make it a success? Each company needs a marketing team tailored to its specific needs and goals.
Building a marketing team can be incredibly overwhelming and challenging, but it doesn’t have to be. That’s why Apex CMO Search is here for you to ensure this crucial process is as effortless and stress-free as possible for you. Our team of recruiting experts can find top-tailored talent faster for your company.
APEX CMO Search consists of executive search specialists focused on delivering exceptional Marketing executives for people like you who are seeking growth and transformation. We find and attract better passive talent, scientifically confirm profiles and fit, and guarantee to deliver global Client CMO Search needs across the U.S. and Canada. Marketing is changing rapidly, start the process today to find marketing leaders perfect for your needs. Contact us to discuss your hiring needs at ApexCMOSearch!