Are There Too Many Cooks in Your Marketing Kitchen?
Having too many people involved in any aspect of your business can cause all sorts of issues. Similarly, Harvard Business Review’s book Running Meetings talks about only having the right people in the room for a meeting to be useful. The same applies to your marketing strategy. If you have too many people involved, which can happen for a number of reasons, it can be hard to accomplish your marketing goals because there are too many perspectives and too many channels to track.
A few issues you can run into are:
Inconsistent messaging and tone of voice: If you decide you need to hire three different agencies to handle your social media, public relations, and copy-writing, it can be hard to ensure that everyone stays on the same page when it comes to controlling how your audience sees your brand. Having multiple people create content for your means that you will likely have different styles of writing and design. It becomes challenging to ensure there is a flow across all platforms.
Project management confusion: If you are a sole proprietor or an internal marketing team of one, you have enough to worry about rather than holding hands to make sure everyone is running at the same pace. Sure, you can use project management software, but not all programs are created equal, and what happens when one person forgets to log in one day or meet a deadline? Someone has to find them.
Bottle-necking at the approvals process: If you are working with multiple people it could easily happen where you have multiple documents come in for approval in one day, slowing down the process to get things finalized. Not only that, more pressure is put on you to get things done and your other tasks might suffer.
The problem is that you should hire people either internally or as third party consultants to help you grow your business. Here are five tips on how to put together a marketing team for your business that will put you on the path to success:
Write down a list of your business goals and needs. Knowing where you want to be and how you will get there is the first step in finding a team to support you on the journey. You want to make sure you have the right people to get the job done.
Write down a list of your personal strengths and weaknesses. This can be kind of cathartic, but it is really meant to shape the direction you go when it comes to hiring. You need to find people whose skill sets compliment your own – work your strengths and hire your weaknesses.
Have an involved interview and on-boarding process. Whether you are hiring a team to work internally or you are looking to work with a third party, make sure you do your due diligence. Just because someone says they are awesome and flashes a confident smile doesn’t mean they are awesome. And it sure doesn’t mean they are right for the job!
Determine your project management process. Will you be acting as the hub for all activity? If that is the case, make sure you understand all of the nitty gritty details and that you have time to stay on top of the team. It is almost worthwhile to have someone manage all of that for you if you can so it opens you up to running your business as a whole. Regardless of who is managing your marketing team, make sure you clearly establish a chain of command and approvals process so that everyone involved knows how it will work.
Set up regular team meetings/check-ins. This doesn’t mean you should have a two-hour meeting every week. That will only stall your progress. Set up short and efficient meetings at a regularly scheduled time, whether it is weekly, bi-weekly, etc. Decide what will work best for your team and strategy. Use your meeting time wisely by creating an agenda a few days ahead of time so everyone can come prepared.
Working with a team to create and execute your marketing strategy can be rewarding both for your business and for you personally. However, you want to make sure you do it right so it doesn’t have the opposite effect.