If your organization has lofty revenue goals it often means one thing for the marketing department — more work! From sales enablement collateral to website content to event materials, many marketers are spread thin trying to keep up with the demands of the business teams, sales teams and external partners while understaffed or on a tight budget.
We get it. We are busy marketers, too! Whether it’s not enough time to get it all done or too few hands on deck, here are some tactics our busy marketing agency uses to keep our team flying high and avoid a crash into the land of marketer burnout.
1. Prioritize and communicate
You can’t do it all. Step back, take a breath and start by identifying your top priorities.
- Do you need some serious marketing and sales team alignment to start the next quarter strong?
- Are you trying to launch a new solution that has absolutely no supporting collateral?
- Do you just need someone to swoop in and help you get it done?
Pro tip: Get the right project management tool. (We like Wrike!). Project management tools allow you to set up projects in a way that makes the most sense for your specific business. You can assign tasks to employees, view timelines and effort levels, and even track your time to see if specific projects are taking more resources than they are worth. Knowledge is power and knowing where you stand in each and every marketing project at any given point in time is worth its weight in gold to a busy marketer.
2. Automate and delegate
Marketers tend to be multi-talented and really great at multitasking. This serves us well when it comes to keeping up with the fast-changing world of marketing, but it also often drives us to take on projects and tasks that are better completed by others or even by bots. Identifying things that can or should be done by other people (or robots) will save busy marketers a ton of time.
These days, many marketing tasks can be automated with tools like HubSpot, which allows you to build, plan, execute and report on all of your marketing campaigns in a single place. Chances are, you use a diverse set of marketing tools that serve different functions, but consolidating them into a product like HubSpot can save so. much. time. And we all know time = money.
Pro tip: If admin tasks and entry-level work are a major time-suck for your team, consider hiring an intern who can help with the parts of the business that don’t need an experienced marketer. Interns can work across the team to contribute a significant amount of support at very little cost while they learn about how a marketing department operates. Who knows, you might even be training a really great next hire…
3. Outsource and collaborate
No marketer should have to go it alone. If your workload is high or your creative spirit is low, an outside partner can bring fresh perspective (and extra energy) to your marketing world. Consider what a good marketing agency can do for you, often for a fraction of the cost and far less commitment than hiring more internal marketers.
Whether you need strategic guidance, some serious assistance cranking out content, or just a partner that gets it, a good agency will integrate with your team and help execute projects as smoothly as if they happened in-house.
To learn more about why the most successful companies outsource at least some of their marketing services, check out our page “What to look for in a marketing agency,” and learn why outsourcing is the best-kept secret of high-performing marketing teams.
You too can make marketing magic without melting under the pressure of a marketing career
Whether you’re the fearless leader of a large marketing department or a team of one (or two, or three), you will eventually feel the pressure that comes along with working in marketing. But there is good news! With the right priorities, tools, tech, and agency support your marketing team can be more productive, even when budgets are tight and staff is in short supply. That’s when you can start to enjoy all the fun that working in marketing brings!