- Published: Jun 24, 2024
- 5 min. read
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Maria CarpenaEmerging Trends & Research Writer
- Maria is an experienced marketing professional in both B2C and B2B spaces. She’s earned certifications in inbound marketing, content marketing, Google Analytics, and PR. Her favorite topics include digital marketing, social media, and AI. When she’s not immersed in digital marketing and writing, she’s running, swimming, biking, or playing with her dogs.
Having an understaffed marketing team poses problems for businesses.
For one, important action items may fall through the cracks. Second, having an understaffed team results in overwork, which is the leading cause of work-related stress in the U.S.
This blog post discusses tips to support your marketing team during a time of human resources shortage. Keep reading to learn more!
P.S. Looking for a simple solution to help your understaffed marketing team? Consider partnering with WebFX! With over 500 digital marketing experts, we act as an extension of your marketing team. Contact us today to learn how we can help!
Discover: How to Structure a Marketing Team
Managing your understaffed marketing team
Despite the hurdle of being short-staffed, marketing managers can strategically improve their team’s productivity to get things done and streamline their processes as they increase their headcount.
Businesses can consider expanding their marketing teams or outsourcing other efforts they don’t have the bandwidth or expertise for. Here are some tips on managing your marketing team:
6 ways to support your understaffed marketing team
Let’s dive into each one:
1. Identify the issues
Begin by looking for areas with low productivity levels. It could be data entry, content creation, lead generation, or anything else.
What is your team struggling with the most? Once you’ve identified your team’s pain points, start brainstorming ideas to solve them.
Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, ask specific questions:
- Can you provide training to your staff?
- Can you hire a new team member?
- How can you fix time or project management issues?
2. Find ways to incorporate automation
When a marketing team is understaffed, incorporating marketing automation is one of the most cost-effective solutions to maximizing output. Daily tasks and activities that don’t require much attention can benefit from automation.
For example, if you have been writing welcome emails from scratch every time, there are solutions to help your employees cut that out of their workday. You can use software to set up email triggers, such as a person signing up for an account on your website.
3. Integrate marketing tools
Aside from automation tools, you can use several other marketing tools to get the most out of your team. You can use:
- Customer relationship management (CRM) tools
- Social media tools
- Video editing tools
- Lead generation tools
- Competitor analysis tools
- Search engine optimization (SEO) tools
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising tools
- Website analytics tools
- Content creation tools
- Artificial intelligence (AI) productivity tools
- Meeting scheduling tools
Investing in marketing tools can help trim down time spent on tasks like scheduling and monitoring. Not to mention, some tools, like MarketingCloudFX, offer dozens of features that enable you automate, track, and create with just one tool.
Explore: MarketingCloudFX: Techology for Smarter Marketing
4. Hire and train for diverse skill sets
Does everyone on your marketing staff do the same tasks? Are they all trained copywriters with some experience in social media marketing?
It may be time to consider hiring someone with new skills or supporting existing employees’ training and growth. Find your team’s strengths and use them to your advantage.
If a team member enjoys doing social media marketing and is good at it, make it their primary focus. Meanwhile, the person who enjoys data analysis has that as their main job.
Having a diverse team — even if understaffed — helps you cover multiple marketing areas. Everyone can maximize productivity by doing what they are best at, rather than everyone tackling similar tasks.
5. Set SMART goals
Goal-setting is an essential way to motivate your marketing team. Setting goals is a typical conversation topic whenever people talk about productivity and getting the most out of your staff.
Defining a marketing project goal can help your team stay on track and feel accomplished once they check it off. One way to ensure you get the most out of goal setting is to set SMART goals — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
6. Consider outsourcing
Outsourcing is another excellent way to get the most from your understaffed marketing team. It can help alleviate the weight on your marketing team without putting more people on the payroll.
How do you know when outsourcing is the right choice? Consider the following:
- Is your team struggling with the workload, even after trying all of the above productivity strategies?
- Is your current marketing strategy giving you your desired results?
- Can you keep up with current trends and changes in online marketing?
- Does your team have the experience and resources to convey your brand’s message effectively?
Once you’ve thought about these questions, you’ll likely see areas where your understaffed marketing team needs help. Luckily, outsourcing some marketing tasks to freelancers or a digital marketing agency can be a cost-effective solution.
You want your employees to perform their best to grow your business and reach your goals. Outsource some of your marketing issues, and your in-house marketing team will see vast improvements.
Your people can focus on doing their jobs well, while a marketing agency or freelancer can pick up the extra work.
The benefits of outsourcing your marketing
Hiring a marketing firm provides numerous benefits for your business. Working with the best digital marketing agencies can help you:
- Focus on other critical aspects of running your business
- Alleviate some of the weight from your marketing team
- Have modern marketing strategies as soon as they become available
- Access more resources
- Experience cost-savings
- Stay updated on the latest marketing trends
A marketing agency also has expertise in multiple digital marketing strategies, such as SEO, PPC, social media, and email marketing. In addition, they have advanced marketing and analytics tools that they can use to inform your strategies.
Let WebFX help your marketing team
As your digital marketing partner, WebFX will always have your best interests at the core of everything we do. Our team of 500+ experts will be glad to learn about your business, goals, and pain points.
Then, we’ll craft strategies that will help you reach your goals and grow your bottom line. You’ll even get access to our client-exclusive proprietary growth platform, MarketingCloudFX, which measures your campaigns’ success and helps you find opportunities for big wins.
By partnering with WebFX, you’ll have an extended marketing team that will provide the support your understaffed team needs.
Contact us online or call us at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about how our digital marketing services can help you!
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Maria is an experienced marketing professional in both B2C and B2B spaces. She’s earned certifications in inbound marketing, content marketing, Google Analytics, and PR. Her favorite topics include digital marketing, social media, and AI. When she’s not immersed in digital marketing and writing, she’s running, swimming, biking, or playing with her dogs.
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