4 Simple Organization Tips for Marketing Teams

The days of showing up to the office, tossing around a few ideas, and then seeing what sticks are gone. Experimentation has been replaced by discipline and intentionality, and the teams who show up with an organized plan of attack are succeeding at far higher rates than those who are not.

According to a recent study of marketing professionals, top marketers are organized. In fact, those who are more organized are 397% more likely to report success than those who are not. Other interesting findings from the study include:

• Goal-setting marketers are 376% more likely to report success.
• Marketers who document their strategies are 313% more likely to report success.
• Marketers who proactively plan out their projects are 356% more likely to succeed.

In other words, systematic organization drives marketing success more than almost anything else. Not only does it provide a clear way forward, but it’s also shown to reduce stress and confusion, free up mental energy, enhance focus, and bolster interpersonal connections between team members.

There’s no such thing as a magic bullet, but if you want to improve your team’s efficiency and results, it starts with discipline and intentionality. In other words, you have to get organized!

4 organization tips for marketing teams

No two businesses are the same. However, the following tips have helped countless marketing teams break through confusion, increase efficiency, and drive output.

1. Use a file storage system

More than 40% of employees say they waste at least one-quarter of their time on repetitive tasks like data entry. This is underscored by the fact that the average employee spends one hour each day just looking for things. And nearly 70% of workers say automation could reduce wasted time and allow them to be more productive.

We could unpack a lot from these data points, but there’s one clear takeaway for marketing teams: get organized! And in a virtual environment, one of the best ways to do this is through a file storage system.

A secure cloud storage solution allows you to store and share any type of file without being tied to a specific device or server. You can easily access files, regardless of whether you’re sitting in your office or flying at 30,000 feet in an airplane cabin. This sort of flexibility ensures everyone is on the same page at all times.

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2. Improve your file naming process

This tip goes hand in hand with the previous one. To maximize your cloud storage solution’s value, you need to get serious about developing/refining your file naming process. More specifically, you need a precise system that allows any file to be located within the system with just a few keystrokes.

You’ll have to gather your team to figure out a naming convention that works, but you should think about it in terms of how you would search for a file if you needed to locate it. Common elements include client name, project name, date, and file number.

It’s less important what naming convention you go with and more important that you follow it. This ensures nothing slips through the cracks.

3. Establish communication protocols

Excellent communication is the key to efficiency and productivity on a team. And as much as you may wish that it would, good communication doesn’t just happen on its own. No matter how intentional you’ve been about hiring good communicators, you need to guide them by creating standardized protocols.

Each person on your team must know what they are responsible for, whom they are responsible to, and who is responsible to them. If every marketing team member is clear about these three areas, there’s nothing to hold communication back.

4. Create workflows

Standardized workflows are necessary for everything. Whether it’s creating social media content and sharing it to your platforms, or tracking, organizing, and reporting on analytics for a marketing campaign, workflows and standard operating procedures (SOPs) ensure everyone is on the same page. More important, they allow for seamless transitions when there’s turnover. With workflows and SOPs, you’re no longer dependent on one person to run the entire machine. People become, for lack of a better phrase, “plug and play.”

Systematic organization is key

There’s no single hack or trick that’s going to revolutionize your business, but following these organization tips for marketing teams can contribute to the success of your marketing strategy. It comes down to shifting your team’s way of thinking. This is done by recreating your approach to prioritize systematic organization at the core.

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