A recent survey by CoSchedule observed that organized marketers are 674% more likely to report success. But marketers can only be organized when efficient processes are in place for all marketing functions.
As global organizations struggle to get back on track with business goals post the pandemic, the pressure on marketers to outperform their goals is very high in 2022.
We have designed five winning strategies that are easily applicable to every organization, big or small. Use these strategies to improve the performance of your marketing processes and marketing teams.
5 Winning Strategies to Improve Your Marketing Processes
SMART Goal for EVERY marketing process
Yes, SMART goals are one of the most tried and tested strategies. It is one of the most recommended changes leaders bring to the table when it comes to planning and strategy.
SMART goals have some compelling advantages, such as measurable progress from every angle - time, relevance, details. They help track the team and individual performances and the integrity of the business strategy.
Applying the SMART goals strategy to every process in your marketing function will be a game-changer.
Let's take your email marketing automation process as an example. Here are some examples of SMART goals you can apply to your email marketing process:
- growing your email subscriber list by 1500 on Hubspot in 6 the next months
- achieve 5000 visitors to the website through email campaigns in the next 4 months (trackable through analytics tools)
- create and run 5 specific automation workflows to continue nurturing your audience
When you set specific goals for your email marketing or any other marketing process, you can easily track your processes' progress and performance with transparency and accountability. Improve the clarity and effectiveness of your marketing processes using SMART goals.
Create Process Handoff agreements
A process handoff is an activity of transferring a person, responsibility, or information from one person to another, one system to another, or one department to another. The successful transfer of this information is critical to running smooth business processes.
Marketing processes are complex and detailed. When the output of a marketing process is needed to transfer to another team, department, or function, it is important to ensure no data loss.
This affects the efficiency and productivity of the process and impacts the team or activity that uses the process output.
For example, your marketing lead generation process produces 20 MQLs in a month. When transferring these MQLs to the sales team, the details of touchpoints are not included.
In this case, this missing data affects the sales team's performance and questions the effectiveness of the lead generation process.
To avoid such errors, you must create process handoff agreements. Process handoff agreements are service level agreements between two parties that agree to the terms of service and delivery.
To make your handoffs effective, make your agreements as specific as possible. Use checklists, delivery timelines, assigned roles, SOPs (standard operating procedures), and feedback deadlines.
Process handoff agreements are an excellent way to make your marketing processes effective, productive, and transparent.
Templatize your marketing process assets
Whether social media, email marketing, website, or SEO, every marketing process requires your team to build assets of various forms.
Building these assets takes up most of your teams' time. To improve your processes' productivity and efficiency, you must find a way to make it easier to build assets.
And we have the most straightforward solution possible to do that - templates!
Templates are a great way to expedite your processes and make them efficient. I know you might think that templates lead to duplication. But if you use them smartly, you can use templates as your base and make changes to them creatively to avoid duplication.
You can build templates for:
- Social media graphics
- Blog content
- Ebooks and white-papers
- Sales enablement documents
- Marketing automation workflows
- Webpages
- Forms
- Email layouts
To start using templates:
- Identify the assets in every process of your marketing function that is frequently built.
- Create effective templates that are flexible and easily customizable.
- Assign them to respective teams and ensure that they use the templates to speed up your process time.
Document every minor detail of your marketing process
Marketing processes are very complex. Let's take your social media marketing process as an example:
- You start by identifying a trend on social media, whether design, video, text, or keywords
- Based on this trend, your design and content team creates social media content for different channels such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn
- Your social media manager publishes this content on your social channels and engages with the audience
- Your weekly or monthly engagement rates and other metrics are tracked through social media reports
- Using the insights from the reports, you make changes to your social media strategy and try to improve the process
Now imagine training a new employee on your team for this process and explaining every minor detail of your process without any training material, or rectifying a mistake in your procedure without documentation of accountability.
When you don't document the details of your process, you run the risk of losing the most efficient form of your process. Process documentation helps you find answers to questions such as:
- Who is involved in the process?
- What is the most efficient workflow for the process?
- What do you need to execute the process?
- What is the required outcome of the process?
- Who is responsible for each activity in the process?
Given their complex and detailed nature, marketing processes need documentation for every redundant process to function efficiently. Enhance the performance of your marketing processes using process documentation.
Only automate efficient marketing process workflows
Automating marketing processes is a great way to make your team more efficient. But if the process you automate itself is not efficient, the automation will not produce any positive outcomes but will only create chaos.
To avoid such unfortunate results, you must audit your current marketing process workflow and identify opportunities for improvement. Use these opportunities to fill the gaps and build a workflow that is most effective for your team and your business.
Once you have identified the most efficient workflow, only then does it make sense to automate it. Efficient automation workflows will only yield positive outcomes that contribute to your overall marketing processes.
Let's take your email marketing automation workflows, for example. Your current process workflow looks something like this:
- You send an automated welcome email to new subscribers
- You send another automated email with resources to the same subscribers
- You schedule weekly emails to these subscribers with more content and call-to-actions
While this workflow does sound full-proof, there might be a possibility of high unsubscription rates due to constant spamming.
To make this workflow more effective, add steps to identify the engagement of your subscribers and send emails accordingly, so they do not look like spam.
After optimizing the workflow, add automation steps with the new process and improve the performance of your automated marketing process.
Conclusion
Use these five winning strategies to supercharge your marketing processes and surpass your marketing goals for 2022. If you need help implementing these strategies, talk to our expert Processologists today.