Marketing has become more complex in recent years. The number of tech tools and communication channels available to marketers has exploded. 

On the one hand, this has given smaller businesses unfettered access to audiences they couldn’t reach before, like millennials. On the other hand, the sheer size and scope of modern marketing have made it an overwhelming proposition — especially for a small marketing team. 

Three Ways to Make Your Small Marketing Team Efficient

Figuring out what tools to use, choosing the right channels, and optimizing things like data and content are all challenges that small marketing teams grapple with daily. If your team is struggling to keep up or has no idea where to even start, there are a few essential ways to make your small team more efficient.

1. Consolidate Your Marketing Tech Stack

One of the first steps to maintaining efficiency is to restrict your marketing tools. With so many options out there, it’s easy to try to use everything with any kind of potential (and there are a lot of those kinds of tools out there these days).

The truth is, though, if you try to do that, you’ll end up overextending yourself and watering down your results across the board. Social media is a perfect example of this concept in action, especially when trying to reach a millennial audience. 

Platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, and TikTok have incredible reach and provide direct access to millennials. You can also utilize each platform differently, tapping into the power of paid ads, influencers, user-generated content, and so on. 

What many marketers fail to realize is that this buffet of options doesn’t mean every single one is the right fit for you. Instead, marketers should focus their efforts on the platforms that their millennial target audiences are most likely to use. 

Even then, don’t resort to generic marketing. Tailor each campaign to the way your millennial target audience utilizes the platform. If your millennial audience spends a lot of time on TikTok, develop a paid and organic presence on that network specifically. Building custom content for this platform can result in explosive reach if it’s done well. Or maybe your audience of millennials turns to Facebook for an online community. In that case, engage and interact with your followers as much as possible. Soon they’ll become brand ambassadors on their own Facebook pages. If your audience follows a lot of celebrities, build out an influencer program.  

Make sure to take the same approach with all of your marketing tools, channels, and associated activities. Are you using each tool because it’s the best option to achieve a specific KPI? Or is it just cluttering up your tech stack with inefficient or unused applications? If it’s the latter, get rid of it and focus only on what’s working.

2. Automate What You Can

For a lot of marketers, automation seems obvious. For smaller teams, however, it’s not just convenient – it’s imperative. The number of automated tools available is growing every day, and many of them offer valuable services to improve efficiency.

Take email marketing as an example. Tech providers like Constant Contact and Mailchimp offer multiple automation options. You can automate a sales funnel, onboarding sequences, and abandoned cart emails. This reduces the amount of time a marketing team needs to invest in their day-to-day emailing activity.

Another area ripe for improvement is social media. The complex, ever-growing world of social media marketing can make it hard for a smaller marketing team to manage. Also, the variation in platforms, the relentless need for new content, and the constant need to babysit responses are major headaches for marketers. 

Fortunately, you can use things like scheduled posts and recycled content to reduce the time and effort required to run social media campaigns. Tools like Canva generate content in multiple formats for different platforms at the same time.

Automation is an affordable and accessible way for smaller marketing teams to improve their efficiency in multiple areas of marketing. It’s well worth a small team’s time and effort to explore ways to automate their current or future marketing efforts.

3. Outsource (at Least Some of) Your Marketing Needs

Sometimes when a small marketing team is overwhelmed, the best option is to bring in outside help. Outsourcing is a common option in the modern business world. It’s also more accessible than ever, thanks to the internet and the rise of remote work.

As is often the case with marketing, there are multiple options to choose from when outsourcing. You want to consider each carefully to find the one that fits your team’s current needs.

For instance, if you’re struggling with the grunt work, you might want to contract a freelance writer or graphic designer to help with content creation. If your larger strategy is the issue, you may want to recruit a fractional CMO. These are experienced C-suite professionals that split their time between multiple small and medium-sized businesses that can’t afford a full-time CMO. 

Another option is to outsource to an agency. This often comes with a larger support system. For instance, outsourced CMO Hawke Media offers more than just a 10,000-foot view focused on strategizing. The company has a range of à la carte services, including email, paid search, social media, affiliate marketing, and SEO. Agencies like these allow you to outsource select items that your team is struggling to manage.

Outsourcing, automation, and consolidation. These are three key areas that small marketing teams should keep in mind when trying to maintain efficiency. If you can keep your tech stack clean, automate wherever possible, and recruit third-party help when needed, you can create a lean, mean marketing machine that can take your company to the next level.

Image credit: Ivan Samkov; Pexels