It goes without saying that every successful company is buoyed with a crackerjack marketing team, but I’m going to talk about it anyway. How can you tell if your marketing team is making optimal use of their promotional time? Your company may offer the best product ever, but that won’t matter if nobody knows about it. The truth is the potential of your product or service becoming a household name rests on your marketing team’s ability to maximize the company’s impact through advertising, public relations, promotions, and sales, among other things. 

At Simplus, our marketing team refines their work strategy, sets up clear goals with plans to execute, uses automated tools, and regularly checks on competition to effectively tackle the challenge. To ensure your team is just as ready, make sure they are doing these four things.

1. Refine the work strategy.

Much like a lagging gaming system will plague a game of Rocket League with missed scoring opportunities and random placement on the screen (a move that is sure to lead to an embarrassing loss), delays in the reporting or approval process, for example, can sludge up daily operations. A strong marketing team should know the reporting process, deadlines, project managers, team assignments, campaign strategies, and budget. Each person should also understand the ultimate goals of the team.

At Simplus, we refine our strategy by allocating our marketing budget by task category and time, so we can effectively calculate marketing ROI. We also streamline meetings (15 minutes is plenty) and use collaborative tools like Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce campaigns and activities, and Salesforce Lightning for Gmail to integrate. We can help other companies get this streamlined business process set up.

Related: Have you been putting off your Lightning migration?

2. Have a clear goal in mind and a plan to execute it.

It’s not enough to know what the team plans to do; it’s also important to understand why. What does the team hope to achieve? Moreover, how will they do it? “As a marketer, you’re likely juggling tons of tasks, assignments, and projects at any given time,” says Jayson DeMers. “You might be in the planning phase for one, the execution phase for another, and the wrap-up phase for still another.” He says that the best way to keep track of daily priorities and goals is to have a clear plan.

Simplus marketing members meet every day to go over their goals, tasks, and the resources needed to accomplish projects. V2MOMs are regularly updated and reviewed by the whole staff to make sure alignment with the company vision is always top priority. Maintaining clarity about goals and methods is key to Simplus marketing success.

3. Find an automated marketing tool.

When time literally means money, a marketing team can’t afford to waste time duplicating efforts, tracking down hard copy information to distribute to the team, or searching for missing files. “Complete and total visibility should be the default for marketing project management software,” says marketing expert and writer Joel York. “Privacy is for consumers.”

Fortunately, Simplus offers an innovative marketing management tool called Pardot, the Salesforce B2B Marketing Automation Solution. Built on a cloud platform, marketers can now organize and centralize documents, schedules, team correspondence, campaign tracking profiles and prospects, lead management, budget figures — anything that can streamline the collaborative process. If your team doesn’t have a work management tool, get one! Your company will not be able to compete without it.

4. Check out the competition

To stay ahead in the game, you need to know who’s playing. “Your competition won’t broadcast it when they plan to launch a new product or try a new marketing strategy,” says DeMers. “Skilled and experienced marketers make it a daily (or near-daily) ritual to check up on their competition — see what they’re publishing, notice if anything’s changed, and take note of any competitive opportunities you could snatch for your own business.”

An effective marketing strategy must have a competitor analysis, including Google Alerts of your competitors. At Simplus, we also utilize adwords campaigns that targets competitors so we can see who is searching for our competitors online.

You put a mountain of faith in your marketing team. Why not give them the tools to ensure success? By encouraging your marketing team to refine their work strategy, make plans for clear and achievable goals, adopt a management tool that organizes and centralizes essential marketing information, and stay in tune with the competition, your marketing team will be on the right track for success, and your company will be heading toward exciting growth.

At Simplus, we understand the positive impact of a solid marketing team. Check out 3 reasons why you need Salesforce Sales Cloud. Then let us help you find the best strategies and management tools to ignite your next marketing and sales campaign.