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How to Effectively Manage a Digital Marketing Team in 2019
This is a guest post from Bojana Djordjevic at Workpuls.
If you’re leading a digital marketing team, chances are you have a lot of employees taking care of different tasks. Your organization probably consists of a written content team, ad team, visual team, etc. Depending on the number of clients and projects you’re currently working on, managing them all can get really hectic.
Managing your digital marketing team is crucial for your company’s success and growth—thus, you don’t have much room to make poor choices and mistakes. In other words, you have to find an approach that can boost productivity and happiness. In this article, we’ll look into a few tips and tools that can help you manage your digital team more effectively.
Tools
Tools and apps were made to make our jobs and lives easier, so why not use them? In this segment, we’ll present our four favorite tools that can help you manage your digital marketing team more efficiently.
Buffer
Buffer makes social media management easier. It also simplifies the approval process for social posts. If social posts are going through an approval process before being posted, using Buffer is the best way to do it.
This tool allows social scheduling for a lot of different sites, and all users are able to access them. It’s much easier to log into a platform and see what your team planned, rather than going back and forth through emails or Slack trying to get something approved.
Besides posting, your team can use Buffer to respond to the comments and messages you’re receiving from your social media followers. And what makes this tool even better is that you can see performance analytics for all social posts. You can use these to improve your strategies, but also to create reports for your clients.
Workpuls
Workpuls is an employee monitoring software that helps you measure employee productivity. Additionally, it allows you to see what apps your team is using the most, so you might establish that you’re paying licenses for apps and websites no one’s using, or that you need to update some outdated tools.
If your company is getting paid by billable hours, you can use data accumulated through Workpuls to get paid correctly. The screenshots and analytics dashboard is great for providing proof of work to any of your clients.
You can also use the analytics to improve employee productivity, establish new training plans, etc.
Slack
Good communication is essential for a fully functional team. Slack helps you stay in contact with everyone on your team, even if they’re working remotely. It also has a mobile app, so you can access your messages from anywhere.
The good thing is, you can create channels with different teams and use them as a group chat. What’s more, it integrates with many team management and project management tools, such as Asana and Jira. You can also integrate it with the other essential marketing tools you’re using. Check out our list of Campaign Monitor integrations here.
Trello
Trello is essentially an online, modern version of the old-fashioned to-do list. It allows you to create boards for different projects, assign tasks, and create checklists for each of them. The boards can either be collaborative or private, so you can use it with the team or only for yourself.
You can use color labels to distinguish different types or people who should be in charge of a certain task. You can also set due dates, add various attachments, etc.
Source: Giphy
Just like Slack, it integrates with many other tools (they even integrate with each other) to make it simpler for you to manage a digital marketing team.
Google Collaboration Tools
These don’t really need an extensive introduction. Google collaboration tools include Docs, Sheets, and Presentations, and they’re designed so that everyone can access the files and edit them at the same time. Additionally, all files are stored in the cloud, so you don’t have to worry about losing them or not having access.
All tools are also available on mobile, making collaboration easy on the go. Since most companies have remote employees now, mobile collaboration tools are essential for nomadic teams.
Tips
Sure, tools can help you organize your team differently, but you also need to implement some organizational changes to make sure you’re running a smooth operation. So let’s explore what you can do to effectively manage your digital marketing team.
Establish clear processes.
Explicit procedures allow your team to work in a uniformed and more efficient way. Take the time to create a set of protocols that will clearly describe everyone’s tasks. Define creation and approval processes to speed up content production.
With clear work, manual team members won’t be wasting time trying to figure out their next step. Furthermore, when new team members join your digital team, they’ll be able to catch up much more quickly, since everything is organized.
Processes will make collaboration easier, as everyone involved will be aware of their duties.
Feel free to involve the entire team in process creation. After all, they’ll be following those procedures, so they should have a say.
Create micro goals to support the main goal.
Every company has a SMART goal, and is diligently working towards that goal. As it’s impossible to just shoot for the stars and reach the finish line right away, teams usually have their own goals that are complimenting the main goal.
Take your digital team’s goal and separate it into smaller chunks. By doing this, you’ll set up a clear pathway to the main goal. Depending on the projects your team is working on right now, these can be daily, weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly goals. If you set up micro goals, make sure to meet with your team frequently, even for a few minutes, to discuss the progress.
Promote open communication and collaboration.
Honesty, transparency, and cooperation go a long way in any team. Lead by example, and make sure you’re always transparent with your digital team. Additionally, show them how to work with each other and how teamwork can improve their productivity.
When your team achieves set goals, give them praise and make sure they feel valued for their work. If something goes wrong on the project, don’t just point fingers. Instead, have an open conversation with the team, discussing what caused the issue and how can you prevent it next time.
All teams within your digital department need to work together in order to achieve results. A blog post your writers created is nothing without visuals from your design team, and you can’t expect good visits without the social media team. Everyone’s connected, and to keep it that way, you should focus on team building activities.
Focus on improvement and learning.
Given how quickly the world of digital marketing is changing, you always have to observe, listen, and adapt to the changes technology is bringing. Both you and your team need to keep up with the advancements.
This is why improvement and learning should be always on your mind. It’s important your team attends courses, seminars, and industry gatherings. Besides new knowledge, these events can spark fresh ideas that could transform your strategies.
This brings us to the next point: Improvement shouldn’t be only focused on your team members. Your strategies might need to be freshened up as well. Make sure everyone is aware that the strategy is alive, that it can and should adapt to new findings.
The same goes for your internal processes. As your team grows and changes, those processes we mentioned in the beginning will need to improve as well.
Delegate and encourage others to do the same.
As a team manager, you’re aware of everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. Use this knowledge to properly delegate tasks to each team member. We perform better when we’re given projects we’re most comfortable with. Delegate projects accordingly to bump productivity and happiness among employees.
Additionally, teach others how to delegate. Your senior employees also have knowledge about people on their teams: Make sure they use it the right way.
Plus, if you don’t delegate, you’ll find yourself swamped with unnecessary assignments that can take up too much of your time. There’s no need for you to perform mundane, simple things when there’s a whole team of people getting paid to do exactly that.
Wrap up
Managing a digital marketing team can be tough if you’re not equipped with the necessary knowledge and tools. However, the software can only take you so far. You need people skills to make everything work.
In the end, we all need to remember that communication and collaboration go a long way, especially if combined with goals and continuous learning. It’s important to remember that you must practice what you preach to lead a smooth-running operation.
Have you tried any of our tips and tools? Which ones are making it easier for you to manage your digital marketing team? Share them in the comments below.
Bojana Djordjevic is a Content Writer at Workpuls, with a background in marketing and journalism. She enjoys writing about productivity, remote work, and marketing.
