Have you ever wondered whether your team understands your marketing strategy? By ‘team’ I mean everyone in your enterprise.
Does it matter if they are kept informed? Surely marketing should be left to the professionals?
1. If you do a lot of marketing, your colleagues are going to get asked about it, aren’t they? Can they articulate your key messages and why your enterprise, products and services stand out from the crowd? Who knows who they are talking to and who they are connected with, via social media?
2. Some great ideas come from people who don’t do marketing. If you work within an established company, the list could include engineers, IT people, sales professionals and back office staff who have served the company for many years. If you work alone or in a small enterprise, ask your mentor, a family member or a supplier. Let them know what you are doing and ask for ideas and feedback. Not everyone will participate, but some of the ideas may well surprise you.
3. If you work in a larger enterprise, at least once a quarter provide a marketing update session. Within startups and SMEs this should be at least monthly, as marketing, brand recognition and new sales enquiries need to be top of the agenda.
Keep people up to speed with your marketing campaigns, social media posts, advertisements, direct mail shots, email campaigns and PR coverage. An easy way to do this is within a monthly e-newsletter, in that you can link to relevant pages and posts within your website. Within MailChimp for example, it is easy to include a PDF within a campaign.
When you need your colleagues’ help, i.e for case studies, company videos, ideas for blog posts or some written content, they will be much more likely to help you.
If your team understands what your objectives are, if they can see that you have a structured approach to marketing, if you let them know about media coverage, website visits, email open and click through rates, advertising coverage and the number of sales leads that you are generating, they are more likely to be supportive and on your side, during the ups and downs of the marketing journey.
Written by Marketing Consultant Nigel Temple.
