In many ways, your marketing team is the backbone of your company. If you’re not properly promoting your products or services, it can be impossible to attract and generate high-quality leads. Marketing success begins with the team you develop, and without motivated employees, your company simply can’t succeed.
Keeping your marketing team encouraged, creative, and inspired can be difficult. However, ensuring they’re sufficiently challenged with the work they’re doing means more success for both your team members and your company as a whole. When you invest in the development of your marketing employees, you’ll be able to get closer to achieving your business goals.
So what are the most effective ways to motivate your marketing team? Let’s take a look at three methods you can employ to encourage them!
A team functions best when each member is doing something they’re good at. If you don’t take the time to recognize each team member’s unique strengths, you may struggle to see great results from your marketing team. When your employees are in the wrong role, your campaigns are sure to suffer.
Finding the unique strengths of each individual on your marketing team can improve their job satisfaction and help you create stronger campaigns. When everyone is excited about the work they’re doing and eager to improve, your marketing will be more effective and attract higher-quality customers and clients. Team members can refine and enhance the skills they are interested in and excel at, giving your promotional campaigns a boost.
Talk to your marketing team to find out what they enjoy doing, what they’d like to learn how to do, and which areas they believe they excel in. Use feedback and evaluations from managers and supervisors to unearth new strengths in your employees and encourage them to take on roles that allow them to showcase those attributes.
Marketing techniques and strategies are always changing. In order to keep your team up to date on the latest trends in marketing and online promotion, you need to provide them with the appropriate training. Whether they take online classes or attend workshops, it’s important to offer them the opportunity to learn new skills. The Inbound Marketing Certification from HubSpot is just one example of the many easily accessible and inexpensive courses available.
Having a highly-trained team can also make your marketing department more competitive. When you invest in keeping them educated on the latest advancements, technologies, and processes, you’re able to implement new marketing strategies before your competition. This gives you the ability to attract new customers while your competitors are still trying to keep up.
Because marketers know how quickly strategies can change, they’ll likely jump at the opportunity for company-sponsored training programs. However, you can also incentivize this training in whatever way you see fit. This may include offering bonuses, promotions, or other rewards for completing certain courses or programs.
You might even ask your team to help you find new training opportunities they would be interested in. Find out what courses they think would help them carry out their job more effectively. When you include your employees in the training development process, they’ll be more excited about going through the programs.
Marketing is creative work. It involves bouncing ideas off one another, collaborating, and trying new strategies or techniques to see what sticks and what doesn’t. However, many business owners fear creativity because it doesn’t always translate directly into profit. Of course, failing to foster an innovative environment means stifling your team’s talents. This would likely result in generic, safe, and boring marketing campaigns.
Creative marketing, such as the “Building Together” campaign for John Deere, attracts more attention. If you’re not fostering the right environment for your employees to engage with one another, you’re hurting more than just their imagination—you’re also damaging your bottom line.
To foster a more creative environment for your marketing team, schedule time for brainstorming sessions or open conversation. Encourage employees to throw out ideas, no matter how far-fetched they may seem. If you enable employees to freely discuss their ideas, team members don’t need to worry about being embarrassed or scolded for putting out a “bad” idea. This free flow of conversation can get everyone’s creative juices going and allow for some really awesome campaigns.
Mentorship programs are great for employees just starting out in the marketing world, but they can also be beneficial to those who have been in the workforce for many years. By creating a mentorship program within your company, both old and new employees can learn skills, techniques, and ideas to apply to their daily tasks. This keeps them motivated and producing high-quality content.
For new employees, a mentor can teach them the ropes of the company and the marketing world in general. By helping them make new connections, learn new skills, and adapt to the stresses of a full-time career, mentors can assist new hires in becoming the best professional versions of themselves.
However, mentorship programs can go both ways in the marketing world. Because new marketing strategies rely heavily on ever-changing technology, younger employees can help their mentors better understand how to use things like new apps, software programs, and social media platforms.
Pairing your mentors and mentees can be a bit of a challenge, depending on the number of people on your marketing team. You could do it based on common goals, preferred marketing strategies, or areas of expertise. It’s also important to keep in mind that mentorship programs are not set in stone. Feel free to change pairings around, or even try out group mentorship programs.
An uninspired marketing team can make it more difficult for you to create interesting, engaging, and attention-grabbing campaigns. In order to attract your target audience, you need to make sure your marketing team is able to work to the best of its ability.
Let’s recap the four ways you can motivate your marketing team members, and get them excited about their roles:
Which of these tips do you think you’ll implement first? Let us know in the comments section below!
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