21 ways to keep your marketing team productive

When you have a productive team, you’ll have happier clients. And happy clients equate to sustainable business growth, which keeps your team employed and equally happy.
The problem is many marketing leaders were trained in archaic productivity techniques, such as meeting madness that can quickly drain the creative air out of the room, or non-stop daily nagging via Slack.
I’ve also witnessed many clients implode due to a lack of focus on productivity measures – not only within their in-house marketing departments but across their entire staff. This is a major downfall for agencies like mine – because of their lack of productive habits, they failed internally, and I lost a client. This lack of productive discipline hurts hundreds of agencies across the world.
Old habits die hard, especially when productivity comes into play.
So whether you’re leading a team of writers, SEOs, or social media influencers, these productivity hacks will help your agency succeed.
And the more you repeat good habits, the stronger you can build on these, making you and your staff outrageously productive.
With that said, here are 21 tips to keep your marketing team – or any team – productive.
1. Know the role
One of the main productivity issues I’ve seen across hundreds of agencies and companies I’ve worked with over the past two decades is the lack of understanding roles.
Undefined roles and responsibilities can result in leaks in your project management funnel, where certain deliverables are not met, or clients are not given the required attention.
On the flip side, leaders have a natural impulse to put more responsibility on their most productive staff, creating bitter resentments between staff members and management.
To avoid these issues, it’s essential to define your work process as a company and clearly delegate roles and responsibilities to staff. Consider even minute details like administrative work, who takes leads on projects, and who needs to do the grunt work.
2. Leverage your team’s strengths
With various roles and responsibilities defined, you must put your team in the best position possible to succeed. Clearly, someone with little knowledge of SEO or writing will struggle in those roles, dragging down your business.
So if someone is better at client communication than one of your SEO associates, consider making them responsible for client relations.
However, no agency is perfect.
Outsource your weaknesses. Hiring freelancers or white labeling services is a great way to fill labor gaps without overwhelming your team or hiring new individuals.
Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses.
Your job as a leader is to put these individuals in the best position possible to succeed.
Capitalize on your team’s strengths. Delegate the rest.

3. Partner ownership
Because your team will have a diverse set of strengths and weaknesses, it’s common for some employees to at least feel like they are taking on more responsibilities than others.
Therefore, to prevent any sort of hostility and to incentivize greater production, it makes sense to tie compensation to productivity.
There truly is no greater incentive at a workplace than to base pay on performance. But better yet, give workers the freedom and flexibility to work on their schedule (including remotely) to save money and also save your employees their time.
4. Minimize meetings; prioritize all
Meeting mania – many managers love it, but employees hate it.
There is no bigger impediment to the workday than taking a big chunk of time (especially in the mornings when people can be in full creative mode) to talk about strategy.
Cut out wasteful meetings, but make the most of the meetings you do need.
Apply these productivity hacks to meetings to ensure that you and your team are as productive as possible:
Set a strict time limit (I keep meetings under