Whether it is traditional marketing or digital marketing, handling marketing-related tasks on your own is not easy.
In some cases, it may be virtually impossible.
After all, it is unlikely for any one individual to be strong in all areas of marketing, and unfortunately, your weaknesses can hold you back.
So, how do you improve the processes within your organization? Delegation.
Delegating tasks that you aren’t fully comfortable with will allow you to invest your time and energy into the most appropriate part of your business.
In order to become a smart leader who is at the top of their game, you must learn how to delegate marketing tasks properly, which is exactly the focus of this post.
What is the Importance of Delegating Tasks?
Delegation is important because it frees up your time and allows you to put your attention where it is best used or for more pressing matters.
While you may view delegation as simply piling your workload onto another individual within your team, the process of delegation is important for productivity.
It also empowers your team members and shows them that you value and respect them.
In the end, delegating tasks creates a strong organization and improves your bottom line, since operations are more efficient and productive.
You and your team will also be working with a more seamless workflow, increasing morale and ensuring projects are completed on time.
Marketing Tasks You Should Delegate
As the owner of a business, especially in this digital age, your to-do list likely consists of an overload of marketing-related tasks. Since you are only one person, it is important to consider delegating some of them.
Here are a few marketing tasks you should consider handing off to someone else.
Social Media Management
There are millions of people that use social media on a daily basis, so it is important that you are in front of them.
However, you can’t just post something and let it be. You must also like, comment, share, etc.
Unfortunately, this can take a lot of time. The good news is a virtual assistant or social media manager can handle these tasks for you and keep your social media sites current and active.
Lead Prospecting
Reaching out to qualified leads can take hours, depending on how many you have.
To ensure that you are only dealing with the leads that have value, hire a virtual assistant to weed out the bad leads and schedule the quality leads.
This will free up some of your time while increasing your return on investment.
Market Research
Market research is very time-consuming, which is why a data professional can help you in the creation of surveys, sending those surveys out, and then organizing the returned results into data that can be used effectively.
This person can also create and manage focus groups, if this is something that works for your industry.
They can also conduct necessary research within your target market and about your competition to ensure you are moving forward equipped with information that will lead to success.
Newsletter Writing
Communication is key when trying to grow your brand.
If you don’t have the skills to create a powerful newsletter or just don’t have the time, the right virtual assistant can help.
This person can develop, edit, and send out the newsletter for you. Just make sure that you have provided an idea of what you want.
This is not a task you need to spend all day on when someone more capable can handle it in an hour or two.
(Speaking of newsletters, are you subscribed to ours?)
Email List Management
When trying to grow your business, an email list is essential.
However, it must be managed to ensure you aren’t spending time or money sending out emails to those who are no longer interested or to email addresses that no longer exist.
A virtual assistant can manage your email list to ensure your content is arriving at its destination while also tracking the results of each email campaign.
Graphics and Image Editing
Words will only take you so far in this world, especially when you consider the fact that social media posts with images and videos tend to perform better.
You’ve probably heard the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, and this couldn’t be truer when building your brand.
However, it takes time to take or find the right graphics, edit them to your needs, and connect them with the right content.
And when your schedule is already jam-packed with other tasks and commitments, how do you find the time?
This is where a professional designer can come in, search for the most appropriate images, edit them, and then insert the edited images into your content to increase the appeal of your content.
Content Scheduling
It is just as important to know when and how to share your content as it is to create quality content to begin with.
If your content isn’t being shared properly, it is unable to be valuable to others.
A content professional can identify topics, create a timeline for posting, and even respond to comments. In the end, this all helps to improve your brand visibility, which is necessary for growth.
Content Promotion
The job isn’t over when the content is published. It is imperative to get that content in front of people, which requires promotion.
You want to go beyond social media platforms by incorporating guest blogs on social influencer sites and other steps based on your industry and niche.
This ensures that your content is the valuable marketing tool it should be, and a virtual assistant is more than capable of handling these tasks.
How to Delegate Marketing Tasks: The Top 9 Tips
So, you know which tasks should be delegated, but how do you go about it?
1. Identify Areas Where You Need Help
Do you have certain areas that you are spending far too much time on, reducing the amount of time spent on other tasks?
Are there certain responsibilities that could be shared and improve productivity as a result?
Take the time to determine where time needs to be freed up and what tasks can be shared among team members.
By identifying and evaluating these areas, and ultimately letting go of full control of your projects, you will realize success easier and quicker.
2. Delegate Tasks You Don’t Master
Take the time to identify the tasks that you are good at and which ones you struggle with.
Once these are identified, you will want to put your focus on your strengths while delegating tasks related to your weaknesses.
For example, you may be really great at giving presentations and public speaking, but when it comes to creating informative, quality, and valuable content, you struggle a bit.
Therefore, you should delegate content creation tasks to a professional writer.
Another example is having trouble figuring out how to use and manage social media, but you consider yourself good at generating leads.
Identifying the areas of your company where you could use a little assistance will help in improving the performance of your overall team and business.
3. Learn the Strengths of Your Team
When it comes to being able to delegate tasks effectively, you need to know which members of your team are good at what tasks. Their strengths and weaknesses, basically.
There will be some members of your team that are better at specific areas of marketing than other team members.
Figure out who your best team members are for certain tasks so that you’re able to delegate necessary tasks to them.
It is also important to make sure that you are hiring strategically, which means hiring individuals that will add value to your team.
If you already have someone that manages your social media, then you don’t need to hire an individual whose primary strength is social media management.
Determine the areas that need help or that you’re lacking sufficient strength in and hire for those areas specifically.
4. Outsource Strategically
In some cases, you may not be interested in hiring someone to work for your company full-time.
This may be the case if you are just getting your business started or just creating a marketing team.
Whatever the case may be for your individual situation, consider outsourcing. It allows you to hire experts in fields to assist in your areas where you are weak or behind.
They can be hired for one-off projects or for a certain duration.
Whether you need a virtual assistant, content writer, or graphic designer, you can find a professional to outsource to.
Just never forget to review their credentials, portfolio, and testimonials to ensure you’re hiring wisely. Further, you may want to start with a paid trial period to ensure you have found the right fit for the job and your team.
5. Always Delegate with Detailed Instructions
When you need to delegate tasks, you may understand exactly what needs to be done. However, this doesn’t mean that your team will.
Therefore, clear, detailed instructions need to be provided with each delegated assignment.
For example, if you need someone to manage your email list, make sure that you offer clear instructions as well as goals.
By providing clear instructions to your team, things will be easier for you, and you will be able to spend more time on the most important tasks.
6. Explain the “Why” Behind Each Task
You may assume that your business strategy is something for high-level executives, but the truth of the matter is that your marketing team can work more effectively when they know the “why” behind their work.
Sharing your vision will give them something to work toward, improving their overall productivity.
Further, you must trust your team to get the job done on time and correctly.
This allows them to move forward on their own while also holding them accountable for their own actions.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t perform periodic check-ins to ensure your team has everything in check.
7. Pick the Best Tools and Set Up a System
Delegation can become much more effective and efficient across the board when you use the right system.
There are a vast number of marketing tools out there, including:
- Trello, an application that allows the creation of color-coded boards and cards to create a good workflow.
- Asana, a great tool to track the progress of projects within your team.
Using a system like this, you can delegate tasks even if you aren’t physically present.
You can also keep track of how well all projects are moving along or if one has become stuck without reaching out to your team, which saves you considerable time.
8. Set Defined Milestones and Completion Dates
To ensure your team is working at the highest possible capacity, they need to know what you expect of them.
They also need to know how and when they should be achieving the goals you have.
Therefore, by clearly identifying and setting project goals and milestones, you will be clarifying your team’s expectations and setting them up for success from the very beginning.
9. Analyze and Improve
Although we have mentioned that it is a good idea to trust your team and step back, we also mentioned that you should track the progress of their work periodically.
It is important to ensure you know how the project is progressing.
Further, it is important that you offer suggestions when needed and be ready to make adjustments when the need arises. This allows the project as a whole to run more smoothly.
For more information on how to delegate marketing tasks, Ahrefs has a great video about it:
Wrap Up
Now that you know how to delegate marketing tasks, all you need is some time to get used to the new system.
When delegation is set up correctly, you will quickly see an improvement in your team and project workflow.
Ready to become a successful leader? Learn how to be empathetic and how empathy plays a role in you and your team’s success!
