In today’s changing technology, leading an effective digital marketing team can be challenging. You are faced with the need for efficient and versatile technology, right skills, viable marketing processes, among other challenges. The challenges increase as the business grows. How you handle these concerns determines whether you will end up with an efficient team that can meet your business’s online marketing goals.
Digital Marketing Team Challenges and How to Meet Them
- Harnessing Enough Budget
One of the challenges marketing leaders have is getting enough funds allocated for their activities. It becomes more difficult when such leaders cannot prove value or ROI commensurate to the amount spend on digital marketing. Often, marketers are forced to operate on a low budget, yet they are required to meet the set expectations of the business.
What can you do? Begin by calculating your ROI. You need to have systems in place that can track your marketing activities and sales results related to each. Use these to demonstrate how each of your activity has performed for a specific period. This acts as a proof that your marketing efforts are actually bearing fruits for the business. Make sure you have a digital marketing strategy that you are confident it can drive positive ROI. Tangible success in your strategy is sure to attract more funding without resistance.
- Identifying Suitable Technology and Keeping Abreast With Change
Technology is changing very fast. To many, these changes are disruptive. What’s more, some marketing leaders may feel not prepared to handle such changes. From the marketing platforms and best practices on these platforms to the management tools; all these keep the marketers on their toes as they strive to stay relevant.
Besides, it is also important to have the right technology to manage the teams and run campaigns effectively. Unfortunately, digital marketing leaders may find it difficult to identify technology tools that match their business needs. Most available tools have hardly gathered enough reviews that can help such a leader determine if the system is what their business needs.
To help you deal with this challenge, here are some of the important features of any efficient project management tool team leaders should look for:
- Task Management – For team leaders who are managing several projects, you will find it easier to work with a management tool that can organize and filter different tasks of each project either by due date, people, or so. With such a tool, you won’t need a different device or software for each project. It should also be able to support sharing of files, project updates, and other information concerning each project real-time.
- Team Collaboration – Any effective digital team should communicate effectively in order to work together cohesively. When considering a project management tool, find out if it has inbuilt features such as chats, instant messages, emails, video conferencing, and others to facilitate constant communication during work to keep all members on the same page.
- Time Tracking – With this feature, you will rest assured you can always monitor if your team members are spending their time on set tasks. You won’t worry about losing time or paying for an hour that is not worked for.
- Invoicing – This works together with the time app to make sure contracts are billed for the time each team member spends on a project. It comes with screenshots to show what exactly a member was working on for every hour billed. Speeding up specific recurring tasks, like for example creating an invoice under a minute, can significantly increase productivity and cut down the time spent on project administration.
- Finding and Hiring Suitable Talent
Sourcing, recruiting, and retaining the right staff is also another challenge many digital marketing leaders are facing today. For once, with the changing technology, it creates a demand for marketers who are creative and well-versed with technology. Many marketers do not step in swiftly to acquire the technical skills that will place them in a position to fill in the growing gap.
Also, if one is to find the desired skill set, the budget issue mentioned earlier becomes another limitation. As the demand rises for talented marketers, they are likely to charge higher. Any business with a limited budget might find hiring and retaining such individuals very expensive.
If you are to solve this problem effectively, begin by identifying the kind of person you need for your marketing team. If they need to take care of your SEO, social media marketing or content marketing, make sure they have all these skills.
Today, you do not have to keep such a staff within your premise. You can hire a virtual professional; a move that will cut down your operational costs. Once you have identified what you expect the professional to do or achieve, write a detailed, clear job description and post on forums where digital marketers are found.
For instance, inbound.org, LinkedIn, and CareerBuilder.com have proven good platforms to net excellent talent from anywhere in the globe. You can interview several candidates and choose one that demonstrates the ability to meet the requirements of your job description.
- Training teams
Because of the evolving technology and growing businesses, training teams to keep abreast with these changes will pose a challenge to many digital marketing leaders. It can also be expensive in terms of time and money. Since you want your team to perform effectively, these tips can help alleviate the burden;
- Assess individual performance of each team member. Each one has some strengths which you can tap into when delegating tasks to get the best out of them. During the assessment, point out their weak areas that may need coaching and see how you can organize for that.
- Find out where your team stands in terms of expertise. Are there online courses you can recommend for them to continue sharpening their skills? In fact, there are many online resources marketing teams can use for free.
Ultimately, you will still need a solid training plan for new team members. As you introduce them to their new duties and your business, you get to outline the specific goals of the position and invite them to demonstrate their ability to achieve such.
With all this being said, we may conclude that leading a team in digital marketing projects is exposed to big challenges today more than ever. The future doesn’t bring any trend to lower this pressure down.
We all need to experiment with our limits and give our best to collaborate in teams. Even the projects that look easy on the first sight, can get complex fast. Organizing tasks, team members, external contributors and clients in a seamless way is a real challenge.
But connecting people is not the end of the story. In order to lead a project with a perfect flow, you need an intuitive way for sharing new ideas, collaboration through workflow, reporting, and much more.
All this brings us to the conclusion that creating a balance on the project isn't always easy for leaders. If you are running a marketing agency, leading a team of designers or developers, or if you just found a startup with few friends – if you’re not using a project management tool, it could be a big mistake.
Your time is valuable. Focus on what you do best and on what can't be done by a piece of software. Let the software do what it can but at the same time, be aware that there is no such tool which will do all the work for you. Most tools are still just that – tools. Depending on the way of using them, they can become a competitive advantage or a waste of time. It's up to you to get the potential out of them.
