How to Foster Employee Creativity to Keep Your Marketing Strategy Innovating

Digital marketing is hard to organize, but it is even harder to innovate.

Once a business discovers a tactic that really works well, it becomes too easy to just focus on that one method and pour all your resources into it.

I’ve seen this happen again and again for a good reason: It is profitable. It is too easy to keep doing what works well, so ultimately your team has no time to invest into learning anything new.

And yet, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, even though it sounds cliche. Yet, it’s still the truth, moreso with digital marketing which keeps evolving and changing at an unprecedented pace. 

We’ve seen multiple well-explored marketing channels cease to exist (remember, Myspace, StumbleUpone and Digg?) And even search engine optimization that traditionally is the focus of most online businesses has long become too unpredictable. We’ve seen too many businesses perform lay-offs once their websites lost organic visibility over yet another update.

This is why investing into marketing innovation is investing into the future.

The only way to keep your business afloat when your main marketing channel fails is to explore various newer options. Thiswill allow you to discover alternative sources of traffic and conversions.

Generating fresh marketing ideas is not something a single person can master on a continuous basis. Actually, from personal experience, agreat marketer is likely to find a single great marketing idea throughout their whole career. Yes, normally, it’s one idea per a successful career.

This is why picking someone else’s brains is such a good idea. Even experienced marketers should be willing to learn!

Your own team is the first place to look. They already know your business and your product, and many of them likely know your customers as well. They are likely to have lots of marketing ideas, or they may find them if they are given an opportunity. Here’s how:

My first job was in customer service. Less than a year into the job, my boss suggested that I start an SEO blog and learn SEO. This is how my career in SEO started, and this is why I am a big believer in letting employees own projects.

The well-known Google’s 20% policy comes to mind here: Google allowed its employees to spend 20% of their work time working on independent mini projects. Lots of notableprojectswere born thanks to that policy, including Gmail, AdSense and Google News.

Obviously, only a small percentage of those projects will really benefit your company’s bottom line but if you encourage your team members toalign those projects with what your business is doing, that will also be a learning curve that will enrich your marketing strategy with new tools and experiments. 

For example, in my old days as a customer support rep, I set up a free blogspot site to upload our customers’ product demonstration pictures they were sharing with me in exchange for a coupon. I was responsible for designing, updating, promoting, etc. that blog and it became an impressive collection of visual and video reviews for the company I worked for. And it cost my employees nothing apart from my time which I was happy to spend. 

Side projects don’t have to be a huge investment. 

To keep these mini-projects organized, consider using some kind of SEO productivity platform that is able to consolidate data for many sites.SE Rankingis a great and affordable option that offers everythingfrom position trackingto traffic monitoring for multiple websites within the same dashboard:

Digital marketing is only effective if it is integrated into each and every department of your business. 

In many organizations there’s a disconnect between a marketing team and the rest of the company, even if each team consists of 1-2 employees. In other words, organizational silos are a big problem for any business, big or small.

Hosting regular brainstorming meetings to allow employees to share ideas and insights is a solid first step infostering collaboration. Cross-company chats will be helpful as well, especially for identifying those quiet talents that don’t speak in public but have lots of ideas to share. Solutions likeSlackrequire no technical set-up and are easy to integrate into any business communication.

Not all employee initiatives will turn successful. Lots of marketing tactics provide non-tangible benefits (e.g. branding), many of them become obviously beneficial after some (or a lot of) time (e.g.customer satisfaction). Not everything can be measured.

In fact, there are very few marketing tactics that provide obvious measurable results in a short period of time (the only one thatcomes to mind is PPC). When it comes to digital marketing, it is often about contributing time and effort for months before one can actually see any results at all.

Therefore I don’t believe in rewarding marketing initiatives, especially when it comes to innovation and experiments.

Instead of rewarding, consider praising.

If your employee discovered a new idea and started implementing it, announce that to the company. Make it clear that you value your employees’ time and effort. Ask them how you can help and which resources or tools they need access to. Feeling valued is often more rewarding than a bonus.

Fostering employee creativity to spark Innovation is definitely an investment that not many businesses think they can afford. But considering the pace at which digital marketing is changing it is also a necessity.

Letting your employees help your marketing strategy innovate is the most affordable and effective way to prevent your business from going stagnant. 

As an additional bonus, through encouraging initiative and collaboration, you are likely to find your team much more motivated and inspired which will inevitably result in better productivity andemployee advocacy.