Another year is nearly over, and with December just around the corner it’s a good time to consider what your marketing did and didn’t accomplish over the year.
Common wisdom tells us that achieving your strategic marketing goals requires an actionable plan that considers the people required to bring the plan to fruition. It sounds simple enough – yet, in practice both the plan and your employees involved have intricacies and uncertainties that must be carefully managed.
Let’s look at six ways to add accountability to your 2019 marketing plan to make sure you hit your goals.
1. Clear task assignments with a brief
For a team member to have the confidence to do the work, there must be a clear responsibility and a clear brief. Make sure each task ties into your marketing plan. If there is no plan, read more on how to create a marketing plan.
2. Deadlines
For accountability to exist, the team working on the plan must understand what is to be accomplished and within what timeframe. If there are no clear boundaries, the task may never be considered to be complete as the project rolls on without any clear direction, or the team may not dedicate sufficient time for the task to be completed adequately.
3. Project Management
Projects managed transparently allow every task of the project to be visible. The benefit is that everyone can see the status of each part of the project. Transparency acts as a great motivator as it promotes responsibility by making it clear to the team what needs to be accomplished and by whom.
4. Reporting & Progress Updates
Maintaining regular updates on progress allows the project to run more efficiently as any problems can be addressed before they become an issue. If everything is left to the last minute, there may not be time to deal with any issues that have arisen, or they may not be solved adequately.
5. Empower people to make decisions
Most tasks get stuck, somewhere along the way. This is the common killer for hitting deadlines. Empower people to take the initiative to move things forward by identifying what is causing the delay and drive collaboration with others to get things done. However, for empowerment to be effective, you must define the boundaries for decision making. Employees need to know what decisions they can and cannot make on their own, having this area defined will then encourage them to take more decisions. Often, the approval process can slow things down. If something is waiting to be checked by the boss, make sure the boss is aware of the deadline. The consequence of missing the deadline is a detrimental delay in your marketing being pushed out.
6. Rewards
Reward hard work and the behaviours that you want to encourage. Be responsive to consistency of effort, activity and deadlines met. Staff incentive, understanding, and value to the execution of the plan are far more important than specific expertise. Employees that understand what is being done, why it is being done, when it is being done, and how they can contribute, become empowered team players.
By taking these six steps your marketing will be heading in the right direction in 2019. By putting the focus on your employees, you’ll be on the way to forming an achievable, actionable marketing plan. Clearly assigning tasks, creating deadlines and transparency with regular updates, will keep your team on board, and they will be encouraged when given responsibility to make decisions and when they are rewarded for good work and positive attitudes.
If you need help to bring your marketing plan to fruition, please get in touch. We’re happy to help.
