How Do You Effectively Organise A Marketing Team?

I’m slightly obsessed with organisation, structure and ‘having a plan’. Which can be a bad thing at times (you need to leave space at times). However, one thing that's true on a week-to-week basis is how I see teams not well organised or operating to any form of structure. Marketing teams can be particularly guilty of this which manifests itself in the treadmill of ‘lots of doing’ without much understanding of the broader outputs.

Yes, you may have OKR’s and ASANA but these are just one piece of the puzzle. You need to think end-to-end, more holistically.

Luckily, there is a simple structure to follow and here it is:

1. Strategic goals and big bets: Plan for 1-3 highly strategic outputs over a 6, 12 or 18 month time-frame. What vision are you building towards. All your tactics and plans should connect to this overall vision for your group.

2. Quarterly OKR’s or V2MOM: Use the OKR or V2MOM frameworks to break your strategic goals into quarterly outputs. Get the team involved in setting these for buy-in. Treat them as the core outputs of your group. Discuss these metrics in your weekly team meetings.

3. Set micro-milestones: Big goals can be hard to attach for motivation, in the same way that OKR goals can seem too ambitious. To solve this issue use micro-milestones each quarter. Defined as: A tangible milestone that can be hit in the next 2-3 months, given the reality of where you are today.

4. Bi-weekly Sprints: Focus and prioritisation is ALWAYS a huge issue at the execution layer. Help structure the team around sprints which happen in 2 week cycles. Help your team to focus on the core outputs in the period. Stress that this is not a ‘to do list’ but an outcomes list.

5. Daily focus on leading indicator habits: Run daily team huddles. Please don’t use this session as a ‘to do list’ read out. Use the session to share learning, openly discuss productivity challenges and foster coaching around ‘daily habits’ that are leading indicators i.e. If your OKR goal is 10,000 blog views, the daily action you need to encourage in your content lead is 500 words per day, as an example.

It’s fairly simple to be organised. People don’t often sit down to reflect on the governance that works for everyone in the team. Organisation helps set the foundations for high-performance.