How to get your Marketing Team Thinking and Acting more Strategically

In our recent protecting your Marketing career from the onset of AI post we talked about how creativity and strategy are two of the key ways to protect and preserve your marketing career from rising automation.

With modern marketing departments requiring specialists with a broad understanding of core marketing principles (T shaped marketer), how can a Head of Marketing foster a team capable of thinking more strategically and adding greater value to the organisation?

We’ve taken the points from our how to improve the perception of marketing in your business to create practical actions for you, the team leader to implement across your team.

1. Encourage strategic thinking

The number one way to improve a team’s ability to think more strategically is to empower and encourage them to think strategically.

Use all levels of an established learning pyramid (listen, read, watch, apply, critique, teach others) to embed strategic thinking by involving team members in brainstorms, offering side projects, client projects and new projects for them to apply and learn from.

It’s no surprise that the biggest tech company on the planet Google encourages all Googlers to ring fence 10% of their time for new product innovation and improvement. Many of their best software products came from Googler’ innovative thinking, solving problems and improving outcomes.

2. Frame their work in business goals

Strategic project opportunities should be as real-world as possible – aligned with improving what organisation offers and or its’ performance so as to impact customers. Your people need to see the connection and the onward impact of their work in order to truly buy into your claims about operating a nurturing and empowering culture.

As we talked about in our previous post, this also begins to position all the individuals in your team as innovative in thinking and they will naturally be asked to join project teams and emerging initiatives because of their infectious forward thinking as a result.

3. Help them build strategic relationships

Marketing has a tremendous opportunity to both offer insight into all aspects of the business – when it operates truly as the voice of the customer – but also as a value adding service to the business too.

Having a greater understanding and interest in the work of other parts of the business will help build stronger relationships.

Create secondment opportunities where your team can spend time with other colleagues to learn for themselves what works and crucially what doesn’t, so they can offer improvements that help everyone.

Create cross-department collaboration and encourage your team and representatives from others to knowledge share and problem solve together so everyone’s perception of each other – and especially the perception of marketing – is elevated to new heights.

4. Help them position and use the right language

We talked about tone and confidence in the previous post. But here, in acting as a facilitator, you’ll want to ensure that when you create opportunities for your team, they are able to make the most of them.

As a minimum, they need to be primed on product and service and have a good working knowledge of what other departments are doing so they can hold a conversation and add value.

Bear in mind to offer strategic counsel to the C-suite, know they value advancement of key organisation metrics and protection of the reputational brand; engineering and operations will see value in contributions that display a shared passion for product and service design and delivery; and R&D and “white coats” are more likely to build relationships with marketing colleagues who understand the purity of the work.

In all instances, treat them like a customer i.e. a rockstar and you won’t go far wrong.

5. Use Marketing best practice to build confidence and add value

Marketing teams have the opportunity and time to bring valuable strategic insight into the organisation.

Think about the value that comes from understanding customers more deeply, assessing the competition in terms of what their talking about and how they are positioning, curating the media agenda to understand the salient issues the industry cares about and identifying who the influencing voices are.

All of these offer tremendous opportunities to research and present back findings to colleagues in a way to add value in a strategic sense.

6. Get qualified

Practical application will get you so far.

But the serious strategic thinkers submit themselves to the rigour of professional qualifications – knowing the learning and assessment they go through will benefit them for life.

Organisations benefit too. Marketing teams composed of individuals with the strongest possible marketing strategy knowledge are exposed to new thinking and new ideas and generally deliver better products, services and customer experiences.

MMC Learning offer a range of short and full professionally accredited courses of study that team members can take together.

Access all our CIM and CMI courses in our main navigation.

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Rene Power

MMC Learning’s Director of Marketing, Rene is passionate about making marketing more accessible and has an interest in businesses in the industrial and professional services sectors. Among his responsibilities as a member of the MMC Learning team are designing and delivering the company’s own marketing activities, and assisting clients with their team training.