Tips To Keep Your Marketing Team Sane

Every company is involved in a race to the top. This means that there are many requests that are coming in everyday that the team leaders try and distribute among their team members. Sometimes this inflow of requests can get too much in number and the team cannot handle it all. There is already a lot of pending work and the team can get confused whether to complete the tasks that are already in hand or accommodate the new requests that are pouring in. Despite your best intentions to set your marketing team’s priorities and tasks, your team is always being asked to do more. And all of these requests are also urgent. Some of the most effective marketing leaders use systematic ways to manage their team’s workload and still accommodate a reasonable number of unforseen requests.

Constantly overwhelming your team with a seemingly endless pile of tasks does more than just lower morale. It can increase the stress levels among the team members. High levels of stress send your team’s productivity levels into a nosedive. According to an aggregated Health Advocate report, stress results in up to $300 billion in lost productivity. So overwhelming and overworking your marketing team is something you and your company can’t afford. More often than not, missing pieces of information is the core reason of stress. There is a gap in the communication which causes this confusion. There is also another factor which can increase the stress levels in the team, the trouble of prioritizing tasks.

Fortunately, as a leader, you can take steps to ensure a realistic workload for your employees with those last-minute requests from other departments. Here are five different tips to put into practice today:

1. Calculate Bandwidth

You need to first ensure the working capacity of your team. You just can’t overload your team with work and then expect them to provide you with quality results. Don’t forget to involve your team in your calculations. They’ll have much greater insight into how long those routine to-dos actually take. Create a cheat sheet of common tasks and the time it took to complete them. This allows you to estimate how much time an incoming request will require. You’ll be able to quickly know whether it’s something your team could realistically accommodate within a specific timeframe.

2. Keep Strategy Top of Mind

Keep one eye on the strategy so your team doesn’t stray too far off course. Use it as your benchmark to decide whether a request actually merits your team’s immediate commitment. It’s easy to lose sight of what’s important and what’s not when there’s a deluge of tasks. A focus on strategy will help you combat that and ensure your team works on what matters most.

3. Maintain Separate Workflows

You can use another trick by creating separate workflows for planned strategic work and ad-hoc production requests. Keeping the workstreams separate is a simple way to make sure the biggest things needed to move the marketing needle actually get done while keeping other stakeholders happy and satisfied with your output on day-to-day requests. Utilizing different labels or folders within your project management software allows your marketers to know which category specific tasks fall into.

4. Create a Marketing Brief

Creating a marketing brief is a great way to keep the workload streamlined while also saving time. The marketing brief should contain comprehensive details of their request including what it is, why it is important, who the desired target audience is, how success will be measured, budget, and timeline. Creating that template marketing brief will only require a little time upfront. But it will save plenty of hours and headaches for your team.

5. Learn To Say No

As your team’s leader, you will have to accommodate requests from other departments but you will have to learn to deny some requests. This will prevent you from accepting more work than you can handle. If and when you do turn down a request or adjust the timeline, it’s important to provide context on what is a higher priority so you can clarify the real constraints placed on the business.1