Too many cooks in the marketing kitchen?

More than ever before, integrated communications strategies are needed to achieve success. New communications channels launch seemingly every day (okay, maybe not that often, but sometimes it certainly seems like it).

Your team needs to work together to ensure that your message resonates no matter where your audience interacts with it. Your PR goals influence your social media strategy and that impacts your advertising and sales messaging, which informs your design needs and so on. 

To meet these demands, it's key to pull together a team of professionals who can represent their respective disciplines, but also work together for creative and effective solutions. This ideal situation can also pose challenges. Having "too many cooks in the kitchen" can be hard to manage.   

Gathering a group of dynamic people to work together on a project requires a game plan. Here are a few to keep everything on track:

Identify a project success screen 

At the very beginning, identify the three top priorities of the project. These can be things like “earning live media coverage,” “generating 15 new sales leads,” “landing a book deal” or “gaining 100 new likes on Facebook.”

If the group is struggling with how to make a decision and move forward, this screen can help weigh options and keep the project moving in the right direction to where you are trying to go. If one of the priorities is to make sure that you get coverage from local bloggers, for instance, make sure that the work resonates with that community and that your timeline matches their publishing deadlines. 

Do your research

Time is money, and every person who is spending time on a project is a resource.  

Before a project begins, make sure that the team has access to background information and other resources to review. It seems obvious, but so often, a team comes together unprepared to tackle the work ahead. This can be especially challenging if everyone at the table is coming at the work from a different perspective or communications discipline. 

Make sure everyone has what they need to show up and get after it, right from the kickoff. Ask that everyone come to the first meeting having reviewed the background info and anything else you may have available, so you can hit the ground running.  

Do your best work first

Remember how often group projects in school were just terrible? There always seemed to be one or two members who would do the bare minimum and still earn the same grade. Don't be that person, and don't let anyone else be that person either. 

Do your best work first — don't rely on the rest of the team to edit or improve what you contribute. Even if it is an initial draft, take the time and make it great. Set this expectation with the team, and hold each other accountable.

Now, assemble a great team, lay a solid path and get to work.