There are many marketing options available today that weren’t available even just a few years ago. It’s no exaggeration to think of your marketing like a machine. The more moving parts you have, the more chances there are for it to break down. And there are a lot of moving parts that go into connecting your business with your customer.

But just like with any machine, if just one part isn’t working right, the whole thing can come to a grinding halt. Even if you have top-of-the-line parts, you’ll hit a dead end unless they’re all working and cooperating.

Marketing is the tool you use to turn those parts into a well-oiled machine. Knowing which tools to use, when to use them, and how they work together is the key to streamlining your marketing.

If you feel like your business is about to have a major breakdown, streamlining can give it the tune-up it needs. Check out GR0’s eight tips and tricks to streamline your company’s marketing process.

1)  Coming to Terms

We all have pet names and slang in our work. Sometimes these are just the ones in your head, and sometimes they spread team-wide. If two people can hear the same word and interpret it differently, such unofficial terminology can easily cause confusion between teams. Get everyone on the same page and make this terminology official. And encourage your team to ask if they don’t understand a term.

2)  Get SMART

If your team doesn’t have a unified purpose, it’s likely to latch on to anything that comes along. That is chaos, not a marketing plan. Streamline by establishing the S.M.A.R.T. model. Your marketing strategies should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. This gets everyone on the same page and doing their part. And it’s okay to reassess, move the date, and take another crack at it.

3)  Service With a Smile

It might seem too formal to establish service-level agreements within your teams. As with terminology, it’s hard to set expectations if everyone has a different interpretation of what they’re supposed to be doing. Streamline team roles as clearly as you would in a well-written job description. Every team should know what level of service to expect from other teams and each team member of their peers.

4)  Team Talk

Team collaboration is essential to success in any company. It’s even more important if you have a distributed team working from different places around the globe. If they aren’t actively working together to achieve company goals, then you can expect substandard work, missed deadlines, and frustration. Streamline by making sure your teams have the tools they need to collaborate effectively.

5)  Independence Day

Individual empowerment is just as important as collaboration in a successful marketing team. A lot of time can be saved by reducing meetings and allowing your team the independence to complete its tasks without distractions. Your team will move more quickly and feel trusted to do its best work. Streamlining in this area can also improve morale and retention.

6)  Switch Off

Despite how we think of ourselves, studies show we’re not great multitaskers. We lose time and efficiency every time we switch tasks. Specialization can help with this. Streamlining could mean breaking up a task into smaller pieces and spreading the work. While each individual will have their specialty within the task, they’ll still be unified in a common purpose and be more efficient for it.

7)  Share the Load

Streamlining how information is shared can be a huge time saver and reduce frustration. Make sure your team has all the necessary files accessible from a centralized source. If everyone has access to them, it will save time having to ask around or hunt for them. Shared knowledge like style guides, brand voice, or templates should be readily available. This will also save time when making modifications or training new hires.

8)  Change the Channel

Why spend time and money on marketing efforts that aren’t performing? Streamlining your marketing channels can mean taking a hard look at how they’re truly performing. Pare back on the beloved one that is underperforming and boost the signal on the new one that is doing surprisingly well. And remember that if your different channels aren’t working together, you don’t have a marketing strategy.

Your Well-Oiled Machine

If you’ve been in the marketing field long enough, you can look at the staggering number of changes over the last few decades. It’s easy to think that we’ve seen it all… but something new seems to appear every time we tell ourselves that. What doesn’t change is needing an efficient, effective marketing process and a team to put it all in place. The last thing you want is to have your machine break down at the very moment you need it the most.