1) Know your role
Before you start filling in the various positions, you’ll need to decide what positions are absolutely necessary for your digital marketing team. Do you want an in-house graphic designer or are you willing to outsource? What positions/skills are needed to build your marketing team?
Define each role and their responsibilities. That way, when you have your team built you’ll have clearly defined roles and accountability from each team member. If something goes wrong or doesn’t get done, you’ll know who to talk to, and avoid your team playing the blame-game.
2) Establish a shared vision of success
Many companies have a mission/vision for their company, but do they all use it? What about those companies without a mission/vision? You need to document a vision and get your entire team on the same page about where the company is going.
- Who are you?
- What do you want out of this business?
- Why?
This will help you centralize and manage all of your agency’s goals, priorities, and issues. It’ll give your team a sense of purpose, something to aspire towards, and help you weed out potential mismatches for your company in the hiring process.
3) Define your Passion
Along with your vision, passion is a very powerful motivator for your team. Think about questions like:
- What gets each individual (on your team) out of bed each morning?
- Why do you do what you do?
- What do you like most about your job?
- What dreams do you hope to accomplish by helping the company grow?
- What would make your team more happy/fulfilled?
Everyone on your team has his or her dreams, goals, aspirations, and reasons for coming to work every morning. Tapping into that passion and drive will only help you all produce more.
4) Set a regular meeting
You don’t need more than 30 minutes to meet. These meetings are not for you to bore everyone with a state of affairs for 30 minutes. Rather, these regular meetings should be used to discuss any problems that may be ongoing, how to solve them, who will be held accountable, any successes that may have happened recently, a (BRIEF) state of affairs, and your company’s core value for the week/month. Use these meetings to engage your team and move forward rather than waste everyone’s time.
5) Activate your core values
Your core values are the glue that will bring your team together. However, these should not spend their life on a piece of paper you printed out, they should be used! Use them to hire new employees, use them to train new employees, talk them with your current employees.
- How do we use these core values in our work?
- When do we not use them?
- How do we get better at using them?
Ultimately, the best team is one that’s united. It’s called a team for a reason. Like an engine, all the parts and pieces need to accomplish their task for the car to move forward. When one part fails, the entire engine stops running or at least loses part of its capability.
