Have you ever passed by a billboard that just didn’t make any sense? Did you ask yourself, “Wow, who let that happen?” Maybe you had the same experience when you saw a Facebook ad that was confusing, or a sponsored post from an influencer that was just cringey.
What was the cause of all those bad ads? Well, to put it simply, bad marketing let those mistakes happen.
You need a strong marketing team to make help drive your business to success. There are many ways to form a marketing team, but more and more businesses are taking their marketing efforts online.
That’s great, if you know how to manage a remote marketing team. Remote teams that are just told, “Do what you do, but from home” aren’t prepared or equipped to lead your company to success.
Instead, you should establish a clear path for your remote marketing team. It’s important to:
- choose the best team for the job
- set clear expectations and high standards
- make communication a top priority
These three tasks are more complicated than they seem and require time and attention. To help guide you along the process, we’ve come up with four key factors that support these three tasks. Making sure you have these four key factors will help you build a successful remote marketing team.
- Hire Right
First, it’s extremely important to make sure that your team is made up of people who can handle the work.
Before spending time on an interview, it’s a good idea to have your potential new hires take a test that gathers information about whether or not they’ll be a good match for your company culture. Culture fit is a factor that shouldn’t be neglected when considering who to bring on to your team.
You should also make sure that you have at least one video conference interview with the candidate before offering them the job. Make sure you ask your potential new hire about how any time zone differences will affect their ability to work with others and to meet deadlines.
Choosing team members who fit in to your existing culture and who you can trust completely is a key factor in building a solid remote marketing team.
- Encourage Collaboration
When you’re working from home by yourself, it’s easy to get stuck in a routine of going at tasks solo. However, it’s important to be able to bounce ideas off of others, especially in a creative field like marketing.
There are many collaboration tools available for remote teams. Slack, Trello, and Wrike are all fantastic ways to communicate and organize work.
Google Docs, which is famous for its real-time collaboration, is also a great place for team members to virtually “meet” and work together on brainstorming new ideas.
Collaboration is key to making sure that every aspect of a project is handled well.
- Stick To A Style Guide
After all the brainstorming, idea testing, writing, and designing, when it’s time to turn in the final product, it’s essential that every component is as polished as it can be.
That’s where the style guide comes in. Every team member should have this all-important document that contains the fonts, sizes, colors, logos, and slogans of the company. All the important design elements, as well as information about the tone and style for copy, should be included in the style guide.
If your remote marketing team doesn’t have a style guide to reference, then that’s a problem. A style guide will make sure the final product, whether it’s an ad or an email, looks like it comes from your company and wasn’t created at random.
- Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
Above all else, communication is the most important factor for success. Projects change. For example, an ad that would have worked on Friday when it was finished might seem totally tone deaf on Monday because of an event that happened over the weekend.
Those changes need to be communicated as soon as possible so that the team member can adjust their work for the best final product possible.
On the other hand, what do you do if you, the leader, is communicating well but your remote team member isn’t turning in quality work?
If this is the case, then it’s time to explain that expectations are not being met. The team member should be held accountable and informed that higher-quality work is expected.
Lastly, you want to be sure that you’re not communicating too much. Over-communicating can lead to an unhealthy work-life balance. Communicating during work hours only should be a top priority, unless there’s a very rare exception.
In Conclusion…
By hiring the right team members, encouraging collaboration, sticking to a style guide, and emphasizing communication, you can build a remote marketing team that will get your business the results you’re seeking.
Working remotely can allow you to form the best team for the job. Make sure you follow these steps and you’re on the road to success!