Marketing leaders are instrumental in the long-term success of your marketing campaigns – and your business more broadly. If you want them to keep delivering excellent results, you need them to keep growing.
So what steps can you take to make sure your marketing leaders keep acquiring new knowledge and experience?
Exposure to Other Marketing Leaders
One of the best ways to keep your marketing leaders learning and growing is to expose them to other marketing leaders. The people at the top of the marketing food chain all have a wealth of knowledge, skills, and experiences that they can share, but each individual marketing leader is going to have something unique to offer. Getting an opportunity to meet, talk with, and exchange notes with other marketing leaders can give the leaders in your organization more avenues for growth.
The straightforward way to pursue this is through traditional networking. If your marketing leaders make an active effort to meet and talk with other marketing leaders, they’ll naturally build their personal networks and get exposure to more thoughts and perspectives.
You can also look for a fractional CMO for hire to work flexibly within your own organization. A fractional CMO is someone with the same qualifications as a traditional CMO, but they can be hired and collaborated with on a much more flexible basis. Working closely with a fractional CMO, your CMO or other marketing leader can tap into their knowledge, experience, and perspectives to better refine their own.
Educational Opportunities
You can also support your marketing leaders with more educational opportunities. There are always new things to learn in the marketing world, including old principles and foundational ideas as well as fundamentally new considerations. There are new channels and strategies to learn, new tools and technologies to learn, and new theories and abstract ideas to learn as well.
Make sure your marketing leaders have plenty of time and resources to attend new classes, seminars, workshops, and conferences that can teach them these new things.
Time Off
The benefits of vacations are well-documented, but many high-ranking leaders in organizations avoid taking them. There’s significant pressure in our culture to continue working through breaks and skip vacations so that we can seem more productive and harder working. However, this is often counterproductive, especially for leaders at the top of marketing departments. It leads to higher stress, lower productivity, and eventually, burnout.
Give your marketing leaders more time off, and encourage them to take advantage of it. Taking breaks throughout the day and taking vacations at least once or twice a year can keep them thinking fresh and can stave off burnout.
Ambitious Goals
A marketing leader can also continue growing with sufficiently ambitious, yet achievable goals. Human beings, even if intrinsically motivated, sometimes struggle to see consistent growth because they lack concrete direction. But if you have a clear path for yourself, you’ll be much more motivated to take incremental steps along that path.
Let’s put it this way: how exactly are your marketing leaders supposed to grow? How are you defining this growth, and what objective metrics would make you think that you’ve achieved it? Set objective, reasonable goals for your marketing leaders, and then give them a blueprint for how to achieve them.
New Resources and Technologies
You might be able to spark some new idea generation or achieve better objective results by introducing your marketing leaders to new resources and technologies. These days, digital marketing is largely a byproduct of effective technology use, from the creation of core assets to the publication and distribution of those assets, and even to the analytics you study when the campaigns are over.
If you want your marketing leaders to be more effective or more capable, you need to give them the tools they need to succeed and train them on how to use them.
Rewards for Novel Thinking
It’s also a good idea to introduce more measurable rewards for novel and experimental thinking in your marketing department. Sometimes, marketing leaders find themselves in a rut simply because they’ve found a reasonable pattern for success and they’ve chosen to replicate it endlessly.
If you want to keep growing, you need to try new things and come up with new ideas. But some marketing leaders will only feel inspired to travel this path if the rewards are sufficiently enticing.
Mutual Feedback
Mutual feedback is also paramount for helping your marketing leaders grow. Give your marketing leaders routine feedback and guidance, and encourage them to give you feedback about how you can better support them.
With these strategies, your marketing leaders will be better positioned to grow and change for the better. With ongoing growth and improvement, your marketing results should only increase.
