Lexington, KY - Ever wonder how big advertising firms create successful campaigns? One way is by creatively managing their teams, and you can, too. Your team can encompass your internal staff, your ad agency, marketing consultants - anyone involved in your marketing and advertising. Putting proper human factors in place is crucial to your success, so here are some steps you can take and a few priceless techniques I've found.
Meet regularly as a team to create. Start by creating solutions to current problems. One great way to boost creative thinking is by finding a room where you can put up at least 10 sheets from sticky-back easel pads on the walls. The whole room becomes your group's notebook, and everyone is part of it. Assign every person or team a marker color to see what they think about the issues.
Let's say you've got a shipping problem. Have all the teams diagram the whole process end-to-end across the sheets, and you'll see places to improve. Use small yellow "stickies" for notes or lists that change a lot. This also works well for new product creation, planning, spitballing ideas and so on.
State your main goals. A list of clear objectives affects everything teams do, and stating "goal number one" is crucial. If you say your main goal is to improve your return on advertising dollars, your teams make decisions based on that. Keep prime objective lists to three items or less; be concise, or risk confusion and a lack of focus. Evaluate your goals as a team at least quarterly to add, drop or refine things.
Here's a very effective development technique called "backcasting" that involves your team in learning how to achieve their goals while empowering and investing them. Pick a future time (say, three years), and your company's condition then (50 percent more customers, 20 percent higher net). Ask your team to work backward from there and figure out how it was done. Everyone can work with concrete goals, but ask, "Where will we be in three years?" and watch their eyes glaze over. Backcasting surprises people by going beyond expectations, especially in working as a team to solve problems.
Encourage cooperation. Lay out each team's functions so that groups of two to five people can perform them. List all the aspects of that function (like creating brochures and catalogs, or managing the company website) and, from each person's list of functions, give them a primary one (e.g., writing copy, scheduling). This way they depend on each other and keep each other on track, and you avoid redundancies. It also quickly identifies role mismatches or personality conflicts, allowing you to get ahead of problems.
Foster communication. Good communication is easy today. Chatting regularly face to face with your team via Skype video conferencing is ridiculously cheap. GoToMeeting makes low-cost webinars easy for everyone, and there are many other solutions.
Create a multi-tiered communication schedule based on the different business functions and then pick your tools. For instance, yours might be: a Monday video or phone conference call to cover the upcoming week; a Tuesday webinar to cover business updates; and on Thursdays, a five-minute vodcast (video podcast) or podcast created by you to cover updates on products, personnel, or other pressing issues. A communications plan lets folks prepare for each session, and it keeps them on track and keeps you in control.
Monitor and improve. Conduct regular evaluations based on the goals and measurements you created when you first started your marketing plan. To stay in control, help your team design simplified reports that give you key indicators on how well each function or team is performing. Keep the "big picture" in sight and fight hard against putting in every possible statistic and number (a.k.a., "data creep"). Treat it like an ER doctor: Monitor vital signs and compare them against the norms to avoid "analysis paralysis." For instance, if your team says the website gets lots of hits and sales are down, then there is a problem. Finally, prune the reports to bare essentials, consolidate them and send it to your teams.
Frank Goad is president of Frank Communications, a marketing, advertising and communications consulting firm.
He can be reached at (859)575-2294.