Here’s How to Empower Your Marketing Team for Better Results

Across industries, it is widely acknowledged that for companies to generate results, they must find ways to maintain high employee engagement. This is especially the case when it comes to your marketing team. After all, these are the people who craft your brand story, maintain your website, put together your tradeshow collateral, manage your social media platforms, conjure up (hopefully riveting) digital advertising campaigns, champion your public relations efforts, and more. Unfortunately, we often hear from fresh produce marketers that they do not feel seen, valued, or empowered by the other departments in the business. As the veritable mouthpiece of your company, your marketing team does so much more than simply book hotels or order brochures.

Consider that according to Zenger Folkman research, while a mere 4% of so-called “low-empowerment” employees demonstrated the desire to invest in their company by exerting extra effort, that figure jumped to 67% for employees who felt empowered and seen in the workplace. So if you want to elevate your marketing team—and by extension, your brand—commit to empowering your people, and do so as soon as possible.

4 Ways to Empower Your Marketing Team

Cut Approval Processes Down to Size

A Boston Consulting Group study found that over the past 15 years, the number of procedures, vertical layers, and required approvals has increased by up to 350%. Precisely because of marketers’ power, autonomy, and responsibility in the digital age, companies increasingly maintain lengthy and rigid approval processes. While it is important to ensure that content aligns with your brand voice and standards, if you have as many as four (or even ten) people approving simple projects prior to release, you are drastically decreasing productivity, creative freedom, innovation, thought leadership, and overall morale.

Instead of pushing every decision through the entire senior leadership team, prevent potential missteps by 1.) hiring people you trust to make important calls, 2.) effectively mentoring your marketers, and 3.) trusting them with increasingly significant problems to solve. When they fall short (because hey, everyone does at some point!) leverage those situations as teaching opportunities. In addition to saving time, this is how we train the next group of leaders—after all, everyone suffers if no one is growing or innovating.

Understand that While Measurement is an Important Thing, It is Not the Only Thing

In one survey of marketing decision-makers, a whopping 72% of respondents stated that measurement culture is “killing creativity.” Yikes. Furthermore, 64% felt that an unyielding focus on measurement reflected senior management’s unwillingness to work on building the brand. The solution? Go with a happy medium. Do measure what you can (and by all means, use your analytics!), but also understand that none of your successful campaigns could be measured until they were actually launched. If you refuse to experiment because you can’t reliably predict the results (yet), you have effectively sentenced your brand to stagnancy.

Stay Away from Micromanagement At All Costs

Let’s face it: no one likes a micromanager (in fact, even micromanagers despise being micromanaged). Furthermore, superfluous oversight wastes time, resources, and energy while drastically increasing turnover rates. If your senior leadership is laser-focused on controlling small tasks assigned to your entry-level and middle-management positions, who then is doing the job of the senior leadership…?

Align Sales and Marketing to Create Better Results

We hear it all the time from the fresh produce marketers that we work with: “my sales team thinks all I do is book their travel and play around on social media.” This is so unfortunate and can lead to marketers feeling discounted very quickly within their teams. Encouraging your sales and marketing teams to keep the lines of communication open and work together to solve problems will not only empower your marketing team to become an invaluable resource to your sales team, but it will also generate better sales results for your company and brand. Here’s a little more insight into how you can bring your marketing a sales teams together in a powerful way.

Bottom line: the most important thing you can do to empower your marketers is to simply trust them to do their job. (Trust is, of course, a two-way street. However, if you’ve done your due diligence during the hiring and training processes, it stands to reason that your team is well-equipped to thrive). Rather than dictating every step of how to achieve desired results, support your people as they work to identify and refine their individual abilities, provide the necessary autonomy to innovate and experiment, and ultimately…give them the space to walk beside you on the shared journey to transform your company from the inside-out.

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