4 Signs Your Marketing Team Needs Help and What to do About It
It’s not always easy to tell when your marketing team needs help. As far as you can tell, you’ve given them everything they need to drive your business’s growth, so what should you look out for to tell if that’s not the case?
There are four big warning signs you should look out for when monitoring your marketing team. If any of these ring a bell, you need to act quickly to correct these problems before they damage your business’s growth.
The four warning signs of a struggling marketing team
1) Missed deadlines
If your marketing team is consistently working down to the wire or missing deadlines altogether, you won’t be publishing content regularly enough to drive a good amount of traffic to your website.
Quick fixes:
Review the frequency of your publishing. Publishing regularly and often is best, but don’t set yourself an unreasonable goal – publishing one to three times a week is a realistic schedule for most small businesses. In any case, consistency is the most important aspect; your leads know when to check in and search engines give higher preference to regularly updated websites.
Schedule ahead of time. You can eliminate the stress of last minute writing and editing by scheduling content two to three weeks ahead of time. That way, if a piece of content ever needs unexpected changes, your readers will still have new content to read while your marketing team scramble to make edits.
Re-purpose old content. Rather than trying to constantly create new posts, re-use the ones you’ve already written. Done right, this won’t annoy the people that have already read that content and it will provide the same information to a whole new audience.
2) Poor communication
When your marketing team is failing to report to other areas of the business and is out of sync with the sales team, the whole marketing operation falls apart.
Quick fixes:
Measure the right metrics. Ensure that your marketing team is measuring the metrics that matter. Website traffic doesn’t cut it. With the right metrics, your marketing team can provide valuable insights into the health of their marketing strategy and see where they need to make improvements.
Align sales and marketing. You might have separate sales and marketing teams, but they won’t drive business results if they don’t work towards the same goal. Get sales and marketing working well together and they’ll produce far better results.
3) Content isn’t attracting leads
What if you’ve got the content going out, but it’s just not doing it’s job? If your content is failing to attract traffic and leads, something’s wrong.
Quick fixes:
Raise the quality of your content. There are two main philosophies in content marketing: quality and quantity. The fact is, small businesses just don’t have the resources to effectively follow the latter strategy. You’re unlikely to be able to match the 1,200 posts per day that the Washington Post publishes to drive their successful quantity strategy. If your content isn’t driving leads, it’s far more affordable in the short term for your marketers to spend more time on each piece of content and make it higher quality than it is to hire enough writers to match those high numbers.
Update your buyer personas. When did you last update your buyer personas? How much has changed about your business and the people you want to target since then? If your marketers are working from personas that don’t reflect your actual customer base, your marketing will always be missing the mark.
Improve your CTAs and landing pages. Run A/B tests on your CTAs and landing pages and you’ll be able to up their conversion rates one improvement at a time.
4) Leads aren’t becoming customers
Maybe you’re attracting a good number of leads but you’re not converting them into customers.
Quick fixes:
Establish a clear hand-off between marketing and sales. Again, ensure that your marketing and sales teams are playing well together. There needs to be a clear hand-off process to establish when a lead is sales-ready.
Guide your leads through the funnel. After your website visitors have filled in a form on your site and become leads, you need to make sure you’re nurturing them towards the goal of becoming customers. You can do this by creating TOFU (top of funnel), MOFU (middle) and BOFU (bottom) offers and encouraging your leads to move between each stage with CTAs, promotion emails and workflows. Read our Complete guide to website marketing if that sounds like a lot of nonsense.
What next?
If you’ve tried these quick fixes and you’re still running into problems, your marketing team is in need of longer term support.
Hiring. Sometimes it’s just a case of hiring some new talent to plug a skills gap. If you don’t have the resources to take on someone full time, consider hiring freelancers with the specialisms you need to create the campaigns and content you want.
Outsourcing. What if you just can’t take anyone else on, or can’t devote any more time internally to marketing? Try outsourcing some of the work to a marketing agency. You might outsource a specific sort of content to the agency – say, blog writing, infographics, video – if you lack the skills internally, or outsource entire campaigns/channels.
Marketing automation. Marketing automation software, like HubSpot, integrates your website with your blog, social media, search engine and email marketing and uses landing pages and CTAs to more effectively nurture leads and convert them into customers. What’s more, integrated analytics allow you to accurately measure the success and ROI of your marketing campaigns and tweak them to improve conversions. This also allows sales and marketing to work together more closely, setting and assessing goals based on hard data. If you’re stumped as to what technology you should use, head to Growthverse. It asks what marketing problem you’re trying to solve and then shows you which technologies best address your need.
So if the going gets tough for marketing, don’t give up on your team. Identify what the problems are and start working on the short term and long term solutions.
