Doing More Marketing With a Smaller Team

There's been a lot of change in how organizations approach marketing in recent years, which has led to marketing teams being cut in order to save on expenses. The problem is that the scope of work expected by organizations hasn't diminished in any way, and as a result, individual marketers are expected to do more with less in order to meet the same or higher levels of production, all while attempting to maintain their health and the quality of their work.

I guess what I was trying to say is that if you have a small marketing team, you need to alter your approach to how you attempt to achieve your goals and focus on high-impact activities rather than spreading yourself too thinly and trying to keep up with all of the different ways that you can market your business. Also, it would be helpful to utilize certain tools that can aid in your workflow to make your life easier!

Reevaluating Priorities and Strategy

Limited capacity means that there is simply not enough time to do everything. The first step of doing more with less is stopping things that don't add value.

Don't keep doing stuff just because you've always done it. Auditing current efforts to see what's driving revenue and what's just taking up space is crucial when working with limited capacity. High-value activities need to take precedence over less impactful endeavors.

By narrowing the scope of marketing channels, a smaller marketing team can increase the quality of their work. Rather than mindlessly churning out the same amount of mediocre content across multiple channels, concentrate on a handful of the most relevant. Instead of updating a hundred Twitter accounts a day, be a rockstar on a single platform and reap the lion's share of its rewards.

This is why you want to design your long-form content to have the maximum lifespan. A single pillar asset such as a guide or an industry report can be split up into smaller pieces of content such as email newsletters, social media posts, and even videos. That is why you write a single thorough article and split it up into all of these different types of content.

Leveraging Technology and Smart Automation

Technology is another factor by which a small team can be magnified. By implementing tools for automation of tasks, which would otherwise be spent on repetitive, dull, and time-consuming work, your team can gain many more hours to devote to creative tasks and planning of strategy. Automated marketing tools, for example, can control and manage emails, send them in a drip campaign and for scoring of leads as well as scheduling of messages to be published on social media for reporting statistics and more.

Automation technology can also help manage much of the repetitive work typically associated with building out and running marketing programs. Beyond running email drip sequences and updating social media accounts, a team can use marketing automation software to handle reporting too. motimatic.com automates targeted marketing messages to individuals and groups across the customer journey, letting a smaller team cover more ground without adding headcount.

After campaign automation, using internal project management tools is also very powerful. Having clear task assignment, a shared content calendar, and means of communication for a team prevents a lot of meetings and keeps administrative work to a minimum. It saves a lot of sanity too. Truly.

Building Agile and Flexible Content Workflows

In contrast, a smaller team's ability to operate at speed is a huge advantage over larger organizations that are slow to make a decision and then are stuck in "process" for an extended period of time. So, to continue to do more with less, the lean marketing team must establish and operate in an agile manner to facilitate the team's ability to make decisions quickly and put said decisions into action even more quickly.

To operate within your means, establish these basic elements to support a smooth-running pipeline of content:

• Creating batches of content to minimize the context switching that occurs when switching between very different tasks throughout the week.

• Developing standardized templates for graphics, reports, and emails.

• Create an approval process for content to be used for marketing.

• Reuse top-performing content from the past to get the maximum value out of it.

The processes within your company should be standardized so everyone knows what is expected of them. Using templates for things like graphics, reports, and email newsletters is one of the easiest ways to manage your content and complete routine tasks efficiently. And the time saved by not having to design and write from a blank page every time is huge.

The Strategic Use of External Support

It's also important to remember that just because you have a small team, it doesn't mean you have to complete every aspect of your marketing internally.

But as all smart entrepreneurs realize, you can't do it all. That is where the strategic outsourcing of the tasks that make up your marketing to external experts comes in. This will allow you to turn on or off different parts of your operation as you need to.

It is most effective to consider outsourcing to complete distinct, repeatable tasks or to gain access to highly specialized skills such as those required for very specific design, web development, or heavy copywriting. What tasks are best to have your core team focus on? Those that enable your team to concentrate on strategy and alignment with your brand and your company's business objectives.

Focusing on High Value Metrics

Measuring even the right things for a small team to work with is hard. Basic metrics such as likes and views of your pages don't give you any value. Your reports must contain figures that show the increase in sales, the number of new customers, and the customer base. Only then can you work effectively with your data.

Looking only at the highest-value metrics to measure the success of your marketing means that you are focused on the activities that directly impact the growth of your business and increase your bottom line. Measuring conversion rates, the velocity of your pipeline, and the average Customer Lifetime Value is the most important thing to track to be able to understand quickly the impact that your different marketing actions are having on your company's growth.

Sustaining Momentum for the Long Term

Managing a smaller marketing team is not a short-term effort. As the team evolves, they need to continuously fine-tune processes, establish realistic goals, and be willing to say no to initiatives that are not aligned with the core business goals of the organization in order to maintain creativity, energy, and performance in the long run.

So, go take a step back and reflect on where you and your team are spending time today and tomorrow morning over your first cup of coffee of the day, and start to focus on the higher-value work.

By focusing on the highest impact activities, using tools to automate routine tasks, and implementing effective workflows to support their work, lean marketing teams can deliver amazing results even when under-resourced.