How to Build a Strong Remote Marketing Team
Every organization needs a marketing team to grow and nurture leads, whether small or large
Using a dedicated team allows you to effectively conduct marketing research and target the right audience.
Your team can use tools like Owler Pro to gather information about your ideal prospects. This information helps you guide your leads through the sales funnel and hand them over to the sales team.
However, startups and small businesses can scarcely handle the financial burden of running an in-house team. While marketing is a critical part of any business, its financial returns show up in the long term.
As a result, entrepreneurs choose to outsource this aspect of their business.
But, what if you can build and maintain your own marketing team cost-effectively? Remote work now makes it possible.
Building an Effective Remote Marketing Team
Remote work is becoming the new normal, and one of its perks is financial relief.
You can build a team of freelancers to run your marketing department, saving you the cost of an in-house team. This recruitment strategy also allows you to enjoy the perks of a dedicated marketing department.
On top of that, research has shown that remote workers are more productive than their in-office counterparts. For example, a CoSo Cloud survey reported that 77% of interviewed employees claimed they experienced greater productivity while working from home.
However, putting a remote team together is one thing, and using them effectively is another.
Without proper management, you’ll fall victim to the downsides of telecommuting. Maintaining inspiration, consistency, and teamwork can be challenging since employees are not physically together.
These issues could then lead to performance drops and inefficiency.
To help you build a solid remote marketing team, we’ve put together a guide covering what you should do and avoid.
Hire the Right Professionals
Another benefit of using remote teams is hiring professionals from anywhere. This geographical freedom gives you access to a deep talent pool and diversifies your creative input.
That said, finding suitable candidates may pose a unique challenge. While there are many experienced marketing professionals in the digital market, you also have to filter out the inexperienced ones.
Your priority should be hiring people who are comfortable working remotely and have a proven track record in marketing. You also want to make sure you’re hiring team players and excellent communicators.
Set up a recruitment process that tests these skills and other traits suitable for your organization.
Thanks to freelance and social media platforms like Upwork and LinkedIn, building a remote team is now less challenging than before. You can check out each professional’s work history and activities to determine if they’ll make the right fit.
Use Specialists
It would also be a good idea to employ a team of specialists, not a jack-of-all-trades. For example, you can fill your ranks with content marketers, email marketers, pay-per-click experts, and social media professionals.
This way, you have team members dedicated to different marketing areas. While their duties can overlap other marketing tasks, it pays to have specialists handle specific digital marketing campaigns.
Depending on your budget, you can employ more than one expert for each branch of your marketing campaign.
Set Clear Expectations and Lay the Groundwork
Clear expectations create direction and establish a game plan. They keep your workers in sync and help them achieve the clarity required for success.
You must define roles and responsibilities, assign work hours, set targets, and explain the overall work process. When team members know who’s in charge of what and the steps involved in the workflow, work becomes more effective and streamlined.
Communicating expectations involves explaining the goals and objectives for each project and marketing cycle.
You can also set milestones and quantifiable targets. For example, one of your objectives for the first quarter can be to build a robust customer profile and grow your sales funnel by 200%.
You must also be precise and intentional about your company’s culture. While inducting your new recruiters, show them how communication works in your company. For example, who runs point on specific issues, and what communication channels should be used to address particular problems?
Tell them the practices you frown on and the work activities you encourage. This way, everyone’s on the same page from the start.
Avoid Micromanagement
Fight the urge to control everything. Micromanagement eats away at your progress and erodes trust and loyalty.
The point of hiring marketing experts is to ensure you focus on the core aspects of your business and allow the professionals to do their jobs. Constantly hounding them will make them feel incompetent.
According to a Trinity Solutions survey, 89% of respondents said micromanagement negatively impacted their morale, and 71% claimed it affected their performance.
Giving your workers freedom and autonomy over their job process shows your faith in them. In addition, this strategy gives you more time to manage other business aspects and improves the overall work atmosphere.
Marketers can work freely and flex their creative muscles to get things done.
So, to avoid micromanagement, always ensure you give clear instructions and set your expectations. Focus more on results and allow team members to work out their approach and process. Conduct non-obstructive check-ins to get progress reports. And encourage collaboration between team members.
Encourage Communication
Communication allows team members to work as a cohesive unit. But remote work has the downside of making employees work in silos.
You can avoid falling victim to this issue by improving your team’s communication at every step.
Conduct regular meetings to remind employees they’re part of a team. Encourage them to reach out to colleagues whenever there’s even a slight confusion, and keep the lines of communication open, even to yourself.
To make communication easy, provide easy-to-use communication channels that foster collaboration. Platforms such as Slack and Zoom should be set up for each employee.
You should also find opportunities to organize activities that foster team bonding. These activities can include games and icebreakers before or after meetings.
Adapt to Your Team’s Diverse Time Zones
Most remote teams are distributed across different continents. This structure poses the challenge of adapting your work schedule for different time zones.
However, you can make things work with efficient scheduling and planning.
Identify each employee’s work hours and assign shifts and tasks accordingly. Each task should follow a strict timeline and be set according to expected deadlines.
When you schedule meetings, pick periods when everyone’s time zone overlaps. You should also plan ahead to ensure you assign tasks with enough time for each worker to complete them.
Promote Collaboration
Collaboration makes your team tick and achieve success together.
Indeed, it’s great to have specialists that focus on different aspects of your organization’s marketing. However, you must ensure that everyone is focused on a shared mission.
For example, your social media and web content team or experts should be able to synergize on different fronts. They should use uniform messaging across the company’s blog and social media pages.
Each department’s ultimate goal is to use research data to generate new leads and turn them into buyers.
To encourage this kind of cooperation, assign collaborative tasks from time to time that the marketing team has to tackle as a unit. You can also organize brainstorming sessions about things like brand image and language.
These measures will encourage team members to see themselves as a unit and motivate them to communicate more.
Provide the Right Tools
Your team will be as effective and efficient as the tools they use.
To build an effective marketing strategy, your marketing team needs to do many customer and competitor research. It also has to explore your company’s technical performance and infrastructure.
Your team members need market research tools to streamline the process and gather the required data across the board.
Tools like Owler Pro, Google Trends, Make My Persona, and Social Mention can help you collect this data.
It doesn’t end there.
You also need internal communication and collaboration tools to facilitate teamwork. For example, project management tools like Asana and Basecamp allow team members to track work progress and streamline the workflow.
Get Payroll Right
Delayed paychecks and payroll mistakes cause employee engagement issues.
A Kronos survey found that 49% of workers will start looking for new work after experiencing two payroll issues.
Workers this dissatisfied could cause serious productivity problems.
So, take measures to ensure salaries are paid correctly and on time.
Time tracking applications are great for calculating the billable hours of remote employees. This way, each worker’s monthly timesheet is automatically created using tracked hours, ensuring accurate payrolls.
Measure Productivity
Understanding each team member’s capacity enables you to optimize your workflow.
You can assign suitable jobs to each employee to ensure each task is handled efficiently.
To track productivity, you need to monitor how much time each worker spends on a task and how efficiently they execute it. This way, you can determine the right person for specific assignments.
This strategy also allows you to pinpoint areas for improvement. Then, you can provide the required training to upskill your staff where necessary.
The results of using productivity metrics include enhanced performance and collective efficiency.
You can use productivity tools that monitor employee activities to measure output and performance and assemble the necessary data.
Avoid Overwork and Burnout
Remote workers tend to overwork since they work from home. It’s more difficult to pull themselves away from work due to the fluidity of the work-life boundary.
Burnout can significantly reduce your remote team’s productivity and wreak havoc on your bottom line if you don’t prevent it.
You can help your workers find a balance and prevent them from working more than they should.
Create a strict working hours schedule and manage each employee’s workload to avoid overwork. Using time tracking data can help you identify employees who’re doing too much and require rest.
You should also assign reasonable amounts of work that won’t overwhelm your team members.
Recognize and Reward Remote Workers
Rewarding team members for their hard work will motivate them to do more of the same and better.
According to a WorkHuman Research Institute study, 79% of workers said they are motivated to work hard when they’re recognized.
Recognition also builds a sense of belonging and importance. For example, 93% of respondents in the study claimed they feel like they belong in the brand.
So, take your time to appreciate remote workers whenever they achieve an important milestone.
Keep Improving Your Remote Team’s Performance with Owler Pro
Your marketing team’s effectiveness depends on the data they can gather on their target market. This data allows them to build a meaningful connection with prospects and shape how they interact with your organization.
Research tools like Owler Pro enable your marketers to gain insightful business intelligence by connecting them to a robust network of professionals. In addition, you can gain insightful knowledge about your competitors to understand better how to generate and convert leads.
