A marketing manager’s survival guide; a LinkedIn report

As a Marketing Manager, you’re almost certainly experiencing working life as you’ve never experienced it before. The good news is that the rest of the business is probably more aware than ever of why marketing matters. The less good news? This means more scrutiny, more deliverables, and more pressure to produce them faster, with fewer resources and without many of the tactics you once could rely on.

The manager’s role in any organisation is a shock absorber. It soaks up pressure from above and below while cushioning the impact for others. In times of rapid change, the shock absorber works overtime. It’s your role to do everything possible to keep those you manage (upwards, downwards, or sideways) supported and on track. Part of the challenge is that it’s easy to feel squeezed in the process.

That’s why managing those around you has to start with managing your own emotions, energy levels, and resilience. The better you are able to adapt to and accept change, the better you’ll be able to help your team navigate through it. Here are some of the guidelines shared by LinkedIn

 Top tips for staying resilient

·         Prioritise staying rested, well-nourished, and hydrated as much as possible

·         Plan key tasks around the times of day when you feel most naturally energised.

·         Think of the situation in terms of different phases: if you have to accommodate a heightened workload initially, can you plan to transition to a more sustainable routine?

·         Prioritise key tasks to maintain focus and flow

·         Embrace flexibility as part of the remote working package: try to use strategic breaks from tasks to increase productivity

·         Ask for things you would never normally ask for – you might find support in new places

·         Plan to keep ticking off some deliverables regularly (and daily if possible) to earn a dopamine hit and energy boost

Marketing runs on plans. One of the most disorientating aspects of the current situation is that those plans have to change – without a clear, confirmed, new strategy to replace them. As a manager, your role involves helping marketers regain their bearings and find ways to focus in these circumstances.

The plans that you put in place are likely to be quite different from those you had at the start of the year. They won’t cover the same timeframe. There will be hedges and risk-mitigating what-ifs, giving the opportunity to pivot and adjust if situations change. However, they can still provide a crucial sense of direction that helps your team move forward, allocate time, decide on tactics, and guide your discussions with the rest of the business.

It’s not a given that every aspect of your plan has to change. Some will just need adjusting or adding to. You might keep the same objectives but aim to meet them over a longer timeframe, for example.

Here are six principles for designing your plan

·         Accept that priorities may need to shift between different phases: from supporting customers over the last few months to building a solid plan with sales for the next quarter, and then forecasting more speculatively about changing market needs over the next year.

·         Distinguish between factors that you can control and those that you can’t – focus attention and KPIs on the actions that you need to take to enable a positive outcome, even if you have to wait longer for that outcome.

·         Provide for wiggle room and pivots, booking campaigns over shorter time periods so that you have resources for adjusting activity if you need to.

·         Be wary of metrics that become more or less meaningful – if your audience is consuming a lot of content it might be easy to qualify MQLs, but that doesn’t mean those MQLs will convert at the same rate as before.

·         Use data to try and pinpoint what’s changed and what hasn’t. Is your buyer journey still the same but moving at a different speed? Or has demand shifted?

·         Be alive to the opportunity to align more closely with sales.

In a world of unknowns, the role of a manager isn’t just to take instruction from above and execute a set business strategy. It’s equally important to help identify how the needs of the business are changing – and make proactive suggestions for how your marketing can respond to them.

Five key opportunities for more constructive relationships

·         As the speed of the buyer journey changes, work with sales to sense-check how leads are qualified and how you set targets.

·         Satisfy sales’ appetite for more information with earlier updates on how campaigns are performing – and how this will help to meet targets.

·         Build cross-functional project teams rather than relying on casual updates in the office to keep other departments informed.

·         Develop KPIs that can show how present activity will help meet sales goals further down the line – with pipelines moving more slowly, there’s more interest in this type of data.

·         Mine customer support and sales colleagues for insights and expertise that can be plugged directly into your content and communications strategy.

Marketing managers have been quick to recognise the new needs that their team members have and develop new communication habits and structures to help fill the gaps as well. We’ve become accustomed to virtual hang-outs and happy hours, embraced flexible working, and spent time thinking about how to manage performance and motivate people under difficult circumstances.

It’s becoming clear that managing and supporting your team in the new world of work isn’t a problem that you solve just once. As our teams navigate different phases of uncertainty they will need different forms of support. As objectives change, expectations of performance will need to as well. As time passes, we’ll need to stay alert, agile, and creative when it comes to keeping people motivated and engaged.

Ten tips for managing teams remotely

1.       Plan to transition from a sprint to a marathon, changing pace from racing to meet immediate needs to a more sustainable cadence of work.

2.       Don’t take productivity for granted – reinforce it by rewarding your team for getting through tasks and making a conscious decision to avoid pushing them too hard.

3.       Split larger meetings into smaller and more focused ones – distinguishing between admin sessions and creative ones.

4.       Stress the importance of coming to video calls prepared, with pre-briefs for your team to complete – it will help to maximise your use of time.

5.       Develop a weekly structure with space for different types of engagement: virtual hang-outs that anyone can attend, informal sessions at the end of the week, and structured planning sessions at the start.

6.       Encourage greater autonomy and ownership of tasks on a case-by-case basis.

7.       Don’t assume that everyone has the same needs – allow for those that need social time as well as those that don’t.

8.       Remember that people haven’t chosen to work from home – it’s reasonable for them to adopt flexible hours to accommodate childcare and other needs, and you’ll need to move quickly from 9 to 5 expectations.

9.       Use group learning and development as an opportunity for a mental break, helping your team to recharge and bond.

10.   Treat engagement as a continuous creative challenge – people will lose enthusiasm for virtual happy hours every Friday unless you can keep these sessions fresh and inventive.

It goes without saying that resilience is one of the most important capabilities a marketing manager can have during this time. However, in some respects, we may need to redefine what resilience means. We traditionally think of it as the ability to get back on track once something has happened to knock us off course. But the experience of the last few months has shown that resilience isn’t just a recovery process. It’s a learning process – and one that can move ourselves and our organisations forward in positive ways.