5 Tips for Effective Remote Marketing Teams

Remote marketing teams are an increasingly popular way for companies to handle their advertising needs, but doing this effectively requires some changes from running in-person teams. Here are 5 tips for running remote marketing teams better.

Use Team-Building Exercises

No, not the groan-inducing type that just makes people sigh. It’s one thing to talk to people while adding their information to accounting software and monthly reports, but working from home can get a little lonely at times. There are a few things to keep in mind here.

First, try to schedule these interactions and have them as a regular part of the workweek. Fridays are a good time for this, where you can use voice or video calls to check in and see how people are doing. To make it really interactive, you can even host weekly webinars. The best webinar platforms have interaction tools where everyone can participate. 

While you’re doing this, make sure to tell people how they’re contributing and how past projects are performing. Without metrics at home, people can feel like they’re working into a void. Positive reinforcement and encouragement will help keep morale higher.

Make sure to include non-work communication as long as it doesn’t negatively impact performance, too. All members of your marketing team should feel comfortable getting to know each other, chatting about topics, and even sharing funny pictures or videos.

Aside from keeping employees happy, regular communications allow managers to help solve small problems before they snowball into bigger ones.

Change Your Documentation Processes

Documentation is one of the most important parts of running remote marketing teams. You can’t measure all remote work the same way you can check things in-office, so you may need to create new metrics and guidelines to see how well people are performing.

At the same time, consider asking employees to create a write-up of their day-to-day processes and how they do things when they’re working from home. Don’t imply that them taking breaks and working on their own time is problematic because that only encourages them to lie.

Remember: Part of the appeal of working from home is flexibility. As long as they’re getting all of their work done on time, it’s okay if their day-to-day processes look different from in-office work. Good managers care about the results here, not the exact method of achieving them.

The main reason to get documentation on how people work is to help bring new or replacement team members up to speed as quickly as possible any time the team changes.

Create A Team Style Guide

A style guide is essential for remote marketing teams. Whether you’re dealing with a point of sale or creating blog posts, style guides help ensure consistency in your messaging across all platforms. This is especially important if you’re occasionally hiring outside contractors.

Similarly, consider putting someone in as an editor for your team. Having one or two pairs of eyes reviewing things for consistency can help catch hiccups. Alternatively, if you want different voices, you can remove some parts of the style guide and ask people to be more like themselves when creating marketing material.

This is especially useful if you’re telling your customers that different people are involved. For example, if you have a blog with several contributing writers, it’s often better to have the posts sound a little different.

Get The Right Communication Tools

It’s hard to overstate how important communication is in marketing, and this is especially true for remote marketing teams. It’s one thing to have everyone on the same CRM for advertising, but people need to know what others are up to and how to interact with them properly.

Most remote marketing teams should have some combination of text chat, email, voice calls, and video calls. Try to minimize the number of video calls people get; that can degrade performance over time.

Text chat systems are especially useful because you can often configure them to your team’s specific needs. For example, if you have several graphic designers on your team, they could have their own chat alongside the larger marketing team chat. Setting things up correctly ensures team members will only contact those they need to talk to.

Teams have different needs, so don’t be afraid to customize things as necessary. For example, if you need to send many files back and forth, you might need to set up a business-oriented torrenting service or even mail hard drives back and forth occasionally.

Don’t be afraid to get creative and consider different options for communicating. It’s often fine to stick with something simple, too, such as word processors that let people edit them collaboratively.

Improve Your Information Security

Managing your team’s security is more important than ever before. Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to protect your team and your business even when working remotely.

Start by getting a company-wide VPN. This helps encrypt and protect data so outsiders can’t peek at anything your team is doing. VPNs have widely different services, so check a few different options to find the one that fits your team the best.

Remote marketing teams have different needs, so we’re not going to recommend any VPN as the best solution for everyone. Only you know what your team needs, so only you can decide.

Next, consider using a web-based service for storing passwords. Look for a reliable company that can keep every password secure, with the ability to filter who can access each password. 

If possible, try to get work computers for your team, separate and aside from any regular home computers they have. Keeping some machines dedicated exclusively to work can help protect your business from viruses, spyware, and other threats.

This is also good for employee morale because it means they can do anything they want on their home computers, such as shopping or streaming movies, without worrying that it will affect their work.

Final Thoughts

Remote work is here to stay for many people. While it takes some time to adjust to it, embracing this new normal can ultimately improve performance and help your business achieve its goals.

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