5 Ways to Ensure Better In-House Marketing

Are you achieving maximum impact through your in-house marketing? Many organisations we speak to have perfectly good in-house marketing practices, but long for them to be great. Problem is, they don’t know to amp things up without it costing a fortune or threatening their current, good, practices. If this sounds familiar then read on as we give our best advice for how to turn things up a notch:

1 – Define what you’re trying to achieve

Great in-house marketing is targeted, specific and measurable. To achieve this, and clearly define what you’re trying to achieve, you’re going to need a strategy. 

A good marketing strategy will include:

• An analysis of your current position. What your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are. 
• An analysis of your target market/s. What their preferences, habits and characteristics are.
• Your business goals, and how these translate to marketing performance indicators.
• Proposed marketing tactics and associated activity.
• KPIs and implementation plan.

Once you’ve got a solid marketing strategy pinned down, your work isn’t done yet. You then need to share it with the key players in your organisation to ensure everybody is in agreement about what your goals are and how they will be achieved. To make sure absolutely everybody is on the same page, we recommend you favour clarity over complexity as you share the details of your strategy so the goalposts can be clearly understood by everyone from the CEO to the intern.

With a clear plan of attack, and buy-in throughout your organisation, you’re setting the foundations for great in-house marketing, and making it clear to everyone exactly what ‘great’ in-house marketing will look like.

2 – Hire for growth

In an industry like marketing, trends, channels, and audiences are constantly evolving, so to keep up and achieve better in-house marketing your approaches will have to evolve too. There are many ways to ensure your team can keep up with the changes in the marketing industry, but one of the easiest ways to ensure you can easily keep your finger on the pulse is to hire people who have a growth mindset from the get-go.

Wondering what a growth mindset looks like? When hiring roles who will be implementing your marketing activity, look for employees who have demonstrated an ability to grow and adapt depending on the conditions in their previous roles. Instead of someone who’s worked on only one kind of project, or with only one kind of audience, look for employees who have had experience pivoting when conditions change, or who have tried their hand at a variety of marketing tactics, sectors, and been able to execute great work in these many varied situations.

If you’re hiring an entry-level role, a growth mindset can be easy to spot even without previous working experience. Look for people with qualities like ambition, curiosity, open-mindedness and creativity and they’ll likely be someone who can ride the waves of change.

3 – Lead a culture of excellence

Like your new hires, your ‘higher up’ roles are hugely consequential when it comes to implementing better in-house marketing. In these roles, which may even include your own role, you’ll want to ensure there is leadership in a culture of excellence.

Given you’ll have a robust marketing strategy in place, you’ll have clarity on what excellent work looks like. Consider: What example are you setting for excellent work? Are you creating mentorship opportunities to upskill your team to achieve these new standards? When excellent work is achieved, how is it rewarded?

If you can be an inspiration to the team around you, they will naturally strive to achieve better results themselves. 

4 – Foster a ‘test and learn’ environment

Crucially, your culture of excellence should not forbid failure. In fact, it should do quite the opposite.

Better in-house marketing isn’t achieved without both trial and error, so you’ll need to encourage your marketing team and stakeholders to embrace experiments – with both the success and failure that might ensue. We are naturally risk averse (particularly if we own or have a close relationship with the business) so embracing failure requires a mindset shift, and consistent reminders that failure is perfectly okay and ultimately brings us closer to excellent work.

To ensure you hold space for testing and learning in your work culture, sometimes it can be valuable to set aside a dedicated ‘test and learn’ budget so there is clear agreement that the in-house marketing team can spend time – and money – trying new things and seeing what works.

Importantly, this kind of ‘test and learn’ environment has to be one where you measure the outcomes and results of your tests. Without hard data about what has worked and why, your ‘test and learn’ environment can quickly turn into a ‘shots in the dark’ environment. This is where your strategy can once again be your guiding light. How do your tests relate to your strategy and how do they perform against your historical performance and KPI targets?

5 – Seek bespoke in-house marketing training

If you’ve laid the foundations through steps one through four and you’re still looking to give your in-house marketing efforts the next boost, it’s time to bring in the big guns:

Bespoke training for your in-house marketing team.

By providing your team with marketing training which is bespoke to your strategy, organisation, industry, team size and experience level, you’ll short-cut your way to better in-house marketing. Through training like this, your team will learn new skills in targeted areas and know how to implement them to achieve the results your strategy aims to achieve.

Insourced Digital Marketing pairs digital marketing strategy and training to help organisations identify what digital marketing tactics would be most effective in their organisations, and then creates bespoke training programmes in these identified areas of opportunity. The result is a competent in-house marketing team who can hold the reins of their own digital marketing, rather than relying on agencies or consultants to execute competitive digital strategies.

Interested to learn more? Check out our packages and discover how your organisation might achieve better in-house marketing through bespoke training.