Marketing changes - Fast.
Many companies fall into the pattern of finding a marketing channel that works and never diversifying their content or ad spend to other channels.
While it's great to double down on something that is working, it's never smart to put all your eggs in one basket.
Ad and social platforms change overnight, not caring how it affects you. Many companies have gone under due to a Google or Facebook Google Algorithm update. It's not fair, but it's also not changing any time soon.
So, what should your team be doing to make sure this does not happen to you?
1. Always be learning
Invest heavily in allowing your team to learn about marketing. Reading books and blogs along with investing in sending teams to conferences. Learning about marketing can be overwhelming, so here are a few recommendations to do daily.
Blogs: Neilpatel.com, digitalmarketer.com, wordstream.com.
Educational tool: digitalmarketer.com - They have a paid membership, $49, $95, $295, all of which provide a ton of resources to help a marketing team learn and grow, applying different strategies that can be effective to diversifying your strategy.
Current book - Seth Godin This Is Marketing.
2. Invest In Tools
I hate seeing companies force their staff to run, optimize and create marketing strategies without the support of any third party tools. You don't need to go crazy, but the internet is filled with exceptional people creating software to make your marketing team, better. This can be anywhere from a tool like bannersnacks which helps your team create animated banners quickly or wordstream which helps your team optimize Google and Facebook Ads.
3. Get Your Team Certified
Certifications fall a bit into number 1, but they are so important they deserve their own number. Certs allow your team to learn about each individual platform along with getting certified in various areas of marketing. Digitalmarketer has 10 certifications ranging from a Content and paid traffic to a Google analytics certification. Google alone has several certs for video, analytics and AdWords.
You don't need to get everyone certified in everything. Have one person take several analytics certifications, another take a few paid traffic. Get your team specialized a bit to really help push new ideas.
4. Allow For Creativity
Creativity is the lifeblood of marketing, and also why a lot of people get into marketing.
Don't be afraid to push the limits. Make some creative ads, try different marketing channels. When you have a team that knows what they are doing, they will know if these new, creative ideas are working, giving you the comfort they will shut down bad campaigns and see the gold mine when it's there.
5. Be Patient
The absolute worse thing I see in marketing is someone turning on ads, a week later being upset they are not a millionaire off their $100 in ads.
You need to give marketing some time to breathe and time to optimize. A good team will continue to adjust a campaign to try and make it work more efficiently. And optimization takes time. It takes data to make good adjustments.
Give any campaign (that's not a trainwreck from the start) a solid 3 months. If it's not producing a positive ROI or the CPA you expected, now it might be time to shut it down.
Summary
Allowing your team to be creative along with giving them the tools to grow and make the best decisions is the key to a strong team and long term success.
Can't wait to see what your team does!