One of the easiest ways to achieve successful business growth is creating and implementing universal business systems, or UBS. These are dynamic documents that will lay out certain aspects of your business, how to do them, what resources are needed, and notify you of whom to contact should someone need additional information or close the loop on the task in question.
The primary goal is to have a document that provides your team with all of the resources needed to do any given task, which can be an excellent advantage when you are experiencing a staff shortage or have many people out at once. How you document the resources and steps for a particular task will vary depending on the type of job. Some leaders may find a word document appropriate, while others a video recording or even a self-guided report or spreadsheet. Getting a feel for each kind is excellent for finding out what works for your team. Here are the four essential things every marketing department needs to streamline:
Email Best Practices
Having your organization’s best practices written up will give new team members a guide to follow from the start, which will provide them with greater insight into everyday tasks and expectations. This could include company-wide email signatures, carbon-copy protocols, and how to designate when an email is a top priority versus an FYI situation.
Social Media Posting Best Practices
This may include how to post on your social platforms, what tags should be included, appropriate social platforms, and the dates and times. Some businesses may also have distinct language about personal social media accounts and emphasize what they would like their employees to refrain from when online. Whatever you want to transmit, please put it in writing and update it often based on your needs.
Website Controls and Processes
When the IT person is out on vacation, you will be grateful that you recorded the necessary controls and processes needed to run your website. It would be best to include procedures for where and when updates need to be made before they go to avoid conflict and data corruption. In addition, it should have details on data backups, vendor names, contact information, and account login information.
Promote Best Practices and Checklists
Over time, your marketing team will learn a bunch about what works and what doesn’t for your customers and team. To keep moving forward, try to keep running documents of tests and campaigns that your team has run and write down what was beneficial, what was negative, and what should be different next time. Moreover, do your best to keep checklists of everyday marketing tasks and strategies like email campaign creations so you can have another team member fill in case someone is absent.
Once you successfully streamline these four things, you can focus on more high-level tasks that will help create growth in your business.