Law Technology Today From the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center
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The marketing profession has really come into its own over the last decade. Marketers have worked hard to earn their place at the table, proving that creative content and targeted communications really do result in more leads and greater brand awareness.
Now it’s time to focus on process and productivity.
Why? Because we live and work in a world characterized by unexpected competition and ongoing digital disruption. It’s a tough environment, and in order to survive without pricing themselves out of the market, firms must find ways to protect their profit margins. The only sustainable way to do this is to reduce costs—by increasing internal productivity.
Every department must play its part, including marketing. Here are eight tips for increasing marketing team productivity.
1. Train Strategically
Productivity can be increased by ensuring that the people in your team have the right skills to focus on what you have deemed to be areas of strategic importance. The more skilled someone is, the better their output will be, and the more efficient they’ll become. For example, if email marketing is a priority for your business, consider sending the employees responsible for it on a training course. They’ll come back with all sorts of new skills, including how to increase open and click rates, how to create better calls to action etc.
2. Make Sure Your Team Feels The Love
Morale has a huge influence on productivity. Employees who feel listened to, trusted and valued are more likely to work harder and take more care in their work. Take the time to understand each employee’s goals, and then help them build the skills and experience they need to meet these goals.
3. Work At Communicating Clearly
One of the biggest threats to productivity is unclear communication. Make sure that everyone understands exactly what you expect of them at all times, and that each project or campaign has a clear owner. If in doubt, spend ten minutes at someone’s desk to make sure everyone is on the same page.
4. Be Disciplined In Meetings
Unproductive meetings can be detrimental. Always send out an agenda in advance of a meeting, try to keep it to 15 or 30 minutes, park things that aren’t relevant to all attendees, and finish by creating an action list. If you can make the meeting a stand-up, even better. You may find that a daily 15-minute stand-up is better than a weekly hour-long meeting.
5. Set Aside A “No Meetings” Day
Encourage to team to commit to one day a week without meetings or calls. This day should be set aside for “heavy” production or strategy tasks. This works even better if you have a flexible working policy.
6. Teach Your Team The Principles Of Effective Time Management
In her book “168 Hours: You Have More Time than You Think,” Laura Vanderkam explains how most people who believe they don’t have enough time, actually just aren’t at good at prioritizing their time and then using that time efficiently.
7. Create Repeatable Processes
It will take a bit of time upfront, but it is well worth creating and saving a set of reusable templates and processes. For example, you can accelerate your content creation process by creating templates that include sections for associated landing pages, and social and email copy.
8. Make Every Piece Of Content Work As Hard As Possible
You can save a lot of time and money by making sure you get the most out of every piece of content your team creates. Make sure every webpage is optimized, every subject line is better than the last, every content asset is repurposed into a series of blog posts, and every tweet drives action. Don’t allow your team to get lazy about content – push them, and you’ll see just how valuable evergreen content can be.
With law firm marketing teams under more pressure than ever before, it pays to work smart. I hope that these quick tips will help your team become more efficient and more effective.
