Who’s Minding the House?  Managing your marketer.

We just received our first winter snow. When you drive through the neighborhood, it’s easy to see who is home and who isn’t.  When the snow in the driveway is fresh and untouched, when there are no tracks in or out of the dwelling, there’s no one minding the house. In our part of the world, it’s like a security measure to shovel and make a home look ‘lived in’.

It’s almost the end of the year and you might be doing year-end accounting, production forecasts, performance reviews – keeping your house in order. It’s easy to see when a production team meets their mark because your product is made on time and rework is measured. If your business offers services, the service is either completed or it’s not so it’s easy to judge performance. When you employ a marketer, the measurement of their work can feel somewhat like a black box – you don’t know what they do and you don’t know how to measure it.

I’ve found many marketers often cloud their track record with statements like “It will take time to show results,” or “I’m being strategic.”  There is no end to ways to spend marketing dollars and also no end to the work that can make a marketer busy.  Many people managing a marketer don’t know what the person is doing. When the marketer started, they may have come in with great ideas and lots of energy so the company left them to do their work and checked ‘marketing’ off their shared To Do list.

The problem with this approach is that, eventually, every company needs a marketer to produce results. That’s why companies hire a marketer – to increase sales. If no one is tracking the work of the marketer, their efforts may not be positively contributing to the goals of the company. That’s neither strategic for the business or good for the budget. If you think you’re headed this direction, here are a few tips to help you get everyone rowing in the same direction.

1. Understand the Work

I’m not suggesting that you learn how to optimize your website for search engines or know how to measure performance of your Google ads – that’s what you hired a marketer for! I am suggesting that you should know enough about the company’s approach to finding and satisfying the needs of customers that you can speak that person’s language. How do you currently find customers? Is that working for you? Are you connecting with the right people? Are your sales efforts falling off somewhere along the process? Do you want to explore new opportunities? Give your marketer some direction and let them figure out how to get there.

One of my clients was a group of engineers with an awesome technology. They knew they could hire a programmer and guide his progress.  They also knew they needed a marketer but were quite sure they couldn’t provide mentorship for that position. We helped hire and train their new marketer. We were very clear on what the business was working toward and worked with the new marketer to ensure her work was getting the company where they needed to be. We talked marketing but made sure she was speaking about the business when she reported back to the ownership team.

2.  Set Strategic Goals

Your marketer’s work must move your company closer to your goals, otherwise, what’s the point? Everyone in your organization should know what the organization’s priorities are and your vision for the future – your finish line and several lanes to get there. Here are some more specific questions you should answer before evaluating your marketer:

• What do you want the marketer to contribute to the company? What can they do to make their salary worth paying? What can they help the company accomplish?
• What are all of the activities that the marketer is planning to do to help achieve those objectives? You don’t have to know how to do all of the work but you have to know the steps. Note: If you have hired a junior marketer, it may be helpful to get some guidance from a seasoned professional who can confirm that the planned tactics are actually going to move the ball down the field.
• What are the priorities? As mentioned, there are a lot of ways for a marketer to stay ‘busy’ but are they being productive? Ensure that the marketer has 1-3 priority activities to accomplish before the next meeting. If they do nothing else, they need to do these things.

One of my clients had some supplier marketing dollars that they wanted to access. They’d left thousands of dollars in a promotional account for years and thought it was time to spend them. We came up with specific objectives that met goals for both the suppliers and my client’s company. Armed with that direction, the marketing intern and I brainstormed marketing tactics that would accomplish those specific goals then we narrowed them down to the activities that would have the greatest impact with the least amount of resources (time, energy, and money).  That simple plan helped focus all of the work that the intern did, and she didn’t get distracted by the temptations of the latest marketing trend.

3.  Connect the Work to the Goals

This step is always the biggest challenge because it requires carving out time on a regular basis (maybe weekly at the beginning and less frequently as the person develops in the role).  The conversation can be as simple as:

• What did you say you were going to accomplish the last time we met?
• What have you actually accomplished?
• What made the difference between the two? What can you do differently?
• What are you going to accomplish for next time? What are your priorities until we meet again?

Your job as the manager of the marketer is just to keep them on the rails – make sure that their work is making a difference for your company and they’re not spinning their wheels or going off in all directions.

We’ve had these indicators all through our lives. From report cards (now called progress reports) in school to raises or promotions at work, we’re always aware of how we’re doing. My husband’s favorite is the fuel consumption reading on our vehicle. These checkpoints help us to see where we’re in the rough and force us to find a way back to the fairway.

Driving around today, it’s easy to see where we’ve gone off track. We can see the tracks of a neighborhood cat or errant child across a lawn. We know how many people slid off the road and into the ditches. In business, we can’t always see where people are off track until they’re so far off course that it’s difficult to get back. Help your team see the goal and offer corrections along the way – your productive, strategic, engaged employees will thank you for it.