How To Build A Successful Remote Marketing Team

7 Secrets Of Remote Team Collaboration

The ultimate goal of every small marketing business or a large corporation is to build a team culture where productivity will thrive and where all people are tied to the belief that “none of us is as good as all of us.” If you are sharing an office with a couple of people, with your mind set on one thing only, you become a part of a flow and the culture naturally happens.

However, if you are miles away from your marketing team, building a culture and becoming a part of it doesn’t just magically happen. While there’s no doubt that remote working is a growing trend, the question still lingers:

How to build trust and leverage the way marketers work together no matter where they are or what time zone they belong to?

Here, we’ve rounded up a few ways how you can build a vibrant working culture even if your marketing team is hundreds of miles away from you.

1. Use the right technology

The principal charm of working in an office environment is that it gives you the ability to feel how your marketing team reacts and feels about even the most trivial things that happen during the day. In other words, just by being surrounded by people helps you build their trust. Since working with virtual marketing teams lacks this essential feature, it’s imperative to create a virtual office that will help you avoid any traps of miscommunication.  

Mark Mortensen at Harward Business Review suggests focusing on the criteria that shape your daily routines and choosing the tools that are simple, reliable and accessible. With a plethora of applications available on today’s market, this may be easier said than done. However, if you focus on the technology that allows you to communicate with your marketing team in real-time, you are on the right track.

When it comes to virtual chat, most successful remote marketing teams use Slack or Hipchat to report on the performance of the content or any special marketing project. As for virtual meetings, a video chat like  Google Hangout will help your team have weekly content team meetings where they can review the editorial marketing calendar with product marketers or designers.

2. Build relationships through initial in-house time

One of the common challenges of being a part of a marketing remote team is an inability to feel connected with your employees. According to Google’s Project Aristotle, the most successful teams are the ones that have a higher level of understanding how their fellow team members feel. While using a video chat and video call is the core of successful virtual team collaboration, there is no substitute for face-to-face communication.

Here, at our company, we introduced new content writers to the rest of the marketing team by letting them spend three months in-house before they started working remotely. This not only helped them feel the energy of the marketing team culture, but it also helped them create social sensitivity and get immediate and constructive feedback on their works. 

3. Hire culture-fit people

To be able to build a real marketing team culture you need to have the right people. Besides focusing on creating a highly collaborative marketing team, you need to include a few more principles in your criteria. The fact that your marketing team is geographically dispersed around the globe makes it more difficult to physically manage them and keep track of what they are doing. In such scenario, the only thing you have to rely on is their personality and attitude to work. In other words, you need to hire remote marketers who are organized, motivated, autonomous and who don’t care about social facets of a workplace.

4. Demand feedback

Another thing you need to keep in mind is communication. Ann Macdonald, director of a content strategy at LovetoKnow, says that staying in touch and working through challenges is much easier if the people on the marketing team are communicative. Whether you’re discussing a minor problem or a serious issue that your team may come across in large marketing projects and campaigns, it’s important to constantly encourage your employees to give feedback both on their progress and barriers they run into.

To keep the communication flow at the highest level, combine communication mediums such as video conferencing, 3D environments and telephone calls. Instead of relying completely on virtual chats, organize a weekly video conferencing and allow your marketing team to measure the results of their marketing effort by sharing their ideas or pitfalls they have to tackle. Jake Goldman, a president and a founder of 10up Inc., points out that remote employees need to over-communicate to compensate for reduced face-to-face time.

5. Make clear and transparent processes

When working with freelance writers, PR agencies and social media consultants, online chat is an effective medium of communication. However, the lack of physical contact and face-to-face communication may result in misunderstanding and create a serious bottleneck in your marketing team’s workflow. To avoid such a scenario, you need to keep your team regularly updated and keep your processes transparent at real time. Your marketing team needs to have a clear understanding on the why and the how and the when and they have to be aware of each other’s priorities.

Besides organizing periodic virtual meetings, consider investing in a simple and efficient project management tool. It will clearly define the roles and responsibilities of each team member and create a culture of open communication. Joel Sposky, the CEO of Stack Overflow, uses a technique of emailing updates on weekly basis. He explains that every Monday, everyone at Stack Exchange emails their manager a status update of what has been done the previous week and what kind of challenges they had to struggle.

6. Create a culture of productivity

There’s no doubt that collaboration and productivity are tightly connected and heavily dependent on each other. The healthier the working environment is the more productive you are, and the other way around. Collaboration fosters creativity. Studies show that the most powerful research papers are often the result of “not so bad” ideas made ingenious by group work. In other words, being an integral part of any discussion like weekly content planning and contributing to the brainstorming process in your weekly content team meetings is the key to efficient team collaboration.

By sharing your thoughts on how to increase your brand’s awareness and laying out the ideas that have been swarming in your head you are likely to become more motivated to work towards positive results. There is a wide range of chat tools like HipChat that allow your team of marketers to brainstorm their ideas, comment on them and reach the final decision no matter what their location is.

7. Develop an efficient work schedule

When working remotely, time differences have a huge impact on the general workflow and the dynamics of the team. Besides being geographically dispersed around the globe, the members of the remote team share different time zones and don’t necessarily have to be at the computer at the same time.

Timeshifting is a mandate if you want to coordinate work across your marketing team more effectively. Adjusting your work hours to better sync with your team’s working hours will allow you to interact. Your marketing team can either choose a one time that bridges various time zones or break up their day and spread out time into intervals rather than doing it all together. Also, encourage your team to work at least one week in advance on anything content-related. This way they will easily keep track of their content marketing strategy.

Finally, praise your colleagues. By singling out colleagues for their achievements and sending thank-you emails publicly will boost your remote marketing team’s morale. Stimulate them to feel a common goal and work towards achieving it.

Long are the days when business was viewed as a purely chronological system where face-to-face communication was the foundation of successful team management. With the technological craze that has been taking the world over the last decade, more and more companies are shifting from traditional office environment to remote work. Studies show that remote business model grew by almost 80% between 2005 and 2012, and we are still experiencing its massive impact on business culture in general. Even some of the cutting-edge marketing companies who exclusively operate with geographically dispersed teams have proven that working remotely will be the future modus operandi.

Maja Mrsic is a professional content writer and editor at Active Collab. After finishing her Master’s Degree in English studies, she pursued a career in content and technical writing in digital marketing.