Whether it’s building up a social media presence across multiple channels, cracking the code on user acquisition, or creating a print campaign, most marketers have a ton on their plate.
If you’ve noticed that your plate has started to overflow, don’t worry – you’re not alone. Adobe recently surveyed 1000 marketers and revealed that 40% feel their marketing efforts are ineffective because of how overwhelmed they are in terms of their workload.
So what’s shifting our marketers into overdrive? We’ve narrowed it down to three barriers that are contributing to this marketing overload:
Barrier 1: Lack of team collaboration and communication
Solution: Facilitating better communication through shared workspaces
What happens when teams operate and run separately from one another? Departments stop communicating and collaborating which ends up wreaking havoc on productivity. According to the Harvard Business Review, organizations with low employee engagement and communication scores experienced 18% lower productivity overall.
Both communication and collaboration are vital to any successful marketing team – as they power effective teamwork, keep everyone aligned, and ensure everyone is working towards a common goal. But beyond the walls of marketing, marketers need to ensure that there’s a functional working relationship between themselves and the rest of the office; this includes sales teams, customer support, engineering, and even with leadership at the C-level.
For instance, at monday.com, we need to keep our product and marketing teams aligned, which can be challenging as these two departments often work on opposite sides of the bigger picture.
How do we do this?
Well, when our product team has a new product update in store, they add it to the ‘R&D Captain’s Log’ – where they can visualize and keep track of all product updates in one digital workspace. In this board, you can find the owner of that specific product update, the business benefits of the enhancement, use cases, and the date for when the update will go live.
Although R&D references this board for managing their own sprints, our marketing team checks this board daily to stay in sync, as well as streamline communication and collaboration with R&D. This eliminates time and effort wasted on frequent sync meetings, helps with the creation of timely marketing content and sales enablement collateral, and feeds the brainstorming of our marketing campaigns for new product updates. This is how our new Captain’s Log blog series was born; it highlights cool new feature updates to our customers on a regular weekly beat.
This series (which is now a huge hit) would have not happened if it wasn’t for the seamless collaboration this board created. The sales team then also got in on all the action, referring to the board in order to keep their clients up to date on new updates and to push forward potential deals.
This one board facilitated effective communication across all teams, and as a result these teams were able to produce a cohesive end product.
Barrier 2: Lack of resources
Solution: Promoting team autonomy and the use of templates
Today, marketers are struggling to find the right resources to keep up with the pace of their extensive workload. This shortage of resources can be attributed to three areas:
- Content, content, content – marketers have an ever-growing need to produce original, quality content – from eBooks, to blogs, to videos and social media posts- across channels
- The need for speed – the requirement to increase efficiency, speed, and agility in delivery
- Sky-high expectations – the constant pressure to meet and exceed mounting business goals.
A resource that can easily (and significantly) help teams overcome these three daunting obstacles is giving them autonomy over their work. Team autonomy means that a team will unify around a specific goal, and will take ownership and accountability to figure out the best way to get the work done while working in full transparency. Autonomy also allows for effective decision making- enabling teams to easily pivot their strategy without losing momentum, in order to make the biggest impact possible.
Another resource all marketers should consider is using various templates to manage all their content needs. At monday.com, we’ve created some pretty cool content management templates including a content calendar, blog planning template, and more. For example, the content calendar helps teams to construct a content plan, and develop a clear and visual method of ideas, so teams can focus on creating valuable content.
With this template, teams can insert all tasks directly to the board and plan, track, and organize all their content needs. Teams can use different colors and labels to customize it according to the content type, clients, topics, assigned writer, and more. By using templates, teams are much more efficient, can promote team autonomy, and have a better chance exceeding business goals.
Barrier 3: Lack of process
Solution: Implementing a Work OS
Marketers are finding a lot of their time ends up wasted due to the lack of a clear workflow and overall structure in their day-to-day activities. As the working world continues to shift remotely, a trend that’s accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, teams are becoming decentralized.
As Gartner reports, more and more marketing teams will become decentralized in the coming years. If this is the path we’re heading down, teams must define their processes for effective workflows. Defining a clear process is also crucial due to the fact that marketing work is increasingly shifting internally. Companies want to maintain greater control of what teams are producing, and build the necessary skills in house – only seeking external agency support when very niche expertise is required.
So what’s the answer? Well that would be effective work management. To this end, many companies have chosen to implement a range of different point solutions for different aspects of their marketing workflows. For example, separate tools for content management, asset management, project management, planning and executing social media campaigns, creative optimization and more. This has proved problematic as it creates too much friction and confusion in processes. Marketers need seamless integration between these platforms, processes, and teams, which can be achieved through a Work OS.
Looking forward
Now that we know what is standing in the way of marketers getting their work done, it’s time for teams to overcome these barriers. By promoting effective communication and collaboration, finding unexpected resources within your team, and some help from a Work OS, teams can go from a marketing overload to effective work management in no time.
Ready to learn how monday.com can help your marketing team boost collaboration and drive lasting impact? Get in touch with one of our team experts.