When the novel coronavirus began to spread rapidly around the world and forced businesses to transition to online, it caused a massive shift in how organizations approach work. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than half of Americans currently work from home, and over a third of managers have reported that their workers have experienced an increase in productivity.
The transition to remote work has also significantly impacted those working in marketing. Businesses have begun to understand the benefits of bringing together a remote marketing team not limited by geography. Instead, they can recruit the best possible professionals for the job, taking advantage of the global talent pool.
Teams that employ remote workers also find that they can increase worker satisfaction and even reduce costs. This explains why marketing is among the top five positions that brands have begun to use contractors to fill.
However, building a remote marketing team entails somewhat different concerns than hiring an in-office department. Businesses need to understand the challenges that their remote marketing teams might face and how to empower their organizations to perform and take advantage of the many benefits of remote work.
Let’s explore how you can capitalize on the benefits of building a remote marketing team while still taking the necessary steps to overcome potential obstacles.
1. Build a marketing team that encompasses a range of talent
A successful marketing campaign will bring together professionals with several skill sets. Not only do you want to carefully consider the different channels that will help you most effectively target potential customers, but you also need to consider the strategies you’ll use within those channels.
For example, social media provides an excellent way to engage customers. Nearly 80% of U.S. adults have at least one social media account, equating to approximately 247 million U.S. social media users in 2019. However, simply posting material on your social media page will not provide a considerable amount of interest, clicks, or lead generation.
Instead, posts that contain images receive as many as 94% more views than posts without visual stimulation. Potential customers are also more likely to remember visual information than the information they’ve read or heard.
Video has also become increasingly popular across different channels. YouTube boasts a billion hours of streaming content watched daily, and video options can be found across different social media platforms and your core website.
An effective marketing team will anticipate these needs and can create campaigns across different channels. You may want to consider independent professionals for these specific roles:
- Content creator
- Graphic designer
- Social media manager
- A team member who specializes in video or photography
- A marketing manager who can help keep track of the different channels and overarching goals
2. Know what marketing tactics you want to use and engage the right specialists
Although marketing teams across industries have the common goal of promoting their businesses, the exact composition of a marketing team can vary depending on the brand and their precise needs at the time.
For example, a new business might place a larger priority on building a highly effective website and investing in pay-per-click (PPCs), more established brands might require a more complex marketing team that includes digital marketing specialists, product marketing professionals, and account-based marketing experts.
Consider carefully the different channels you want to use to promote your organization. Take into account criteria such as:
- Where your customers are most likely to live online
- The current state of your sales and marketing funnels, including what channels bring in the most leads and customers
- How market research and customer analysis indicate your customers’ behavior when considering a purchase, such as their likelihood of performing extensive research versus making an impulse buy
Use this insight regarding the types of channels you want to guide your hiring decisions. Make sure you have a specialist to guide your marketing team across your most critical channels. Consider these categories as you fill out your team, which may include independent professionals:
- Content marketing and SEO
- Website design and development
- PPC and paid marketing
- Product marketing
As you engage each person for the marketing team, design interview questions that articulate their experience with the particular project you want them to work on, how their strategies and goals align with what you want for the business, and how well their marketing philosophy aligns with yours and the existing team members.
With a remote team, since people tend to work more individually, having a common philosophy and strategy remains an important cornerstone in your remote marketing team. Differences in these central ideas can make it hard for people to trust each other and work together effectively.
3. Use data to help your marketing team gauge success
Marketing teams today must allow data to guide them. With the wealth of channels available, from paid search to social media, brands cannot afford the time and resources to run ineffective promotions and campaigns. Instead, they want to target the right people with the best content for their situation. Data is the cornerstone of these successfully targeted campaigns.
A wealth of tools exist now that make it easy for organizations to monitor how sites perform in response to different digital campaigns. They can watch for clicks to come through paid ads and the engagement to follow and activity around their website articles and social media pages.
To effectively use data to guide your marketing campaigns, follow these steps.
- Determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter the most to your brand for particular campaigns and goals
- Identify the tools you can use to track and measure these KPIs
- Bring your remote team together around this data to ensure that everyone can monitor it in real-time
Following these steps will help your entire remote team remain connected with the progress of the marketing group. They will have detailed information about consumer behavior and can use that insight to improve their ability to engage with customers moving forward.
4. Help the marketing team coordinate despite the distance
To function effectively, marketing teams need high levels of coordination. For example, campaigns run on social media need to mirror content produced for the website. Similarly, paid to advertise performs best when it works hand in hand with search engine optimization (SEO).
However, with a remote marketing team, unique concerns and considerations will arise. Creating a list of likely obstacles and solutions for overcoming them can improve communication within the team. Here are some considerations to review with your group:
- Remember the importance of time zones. If you have team members who will need to regularly coordinate on projects, make sure that their time zones have sufficient overlapping work hours to make it easier for them to schedule meetings.
- Manage cultural barriers and expectations. Different areas, even various regions across a single country, can have different work cultures and expectations. These differences can be magnified when everyone works from home and lacks an overarching company culture to guide them. Creating clear expectations for work products and encouraging open conversations about cultural issues that may arise can help manage these expectations.
- Bring the marketing team together through regular virtual meetings to help everyone remain connected. They should know who they need to coordinate with for different campaigns, track results together, and brainstorm ways to bring the organization forward.
5. Bring in technology to enhance your marketing communication
When working remotely, communication can present several difficulties. People will not have the chance to speak in person. Additionally, casual conversations that help people build relationships—often seen in traditional work environments—do not happen. Despite these obstacles, you still need your remote marketing team to function as a single unit with common goals.
One of the biggest problems that teams encounter is that they do not have the chance for face-to-face communication. Without the chance to see each other regularly when speaking, the subtleties of body language and nuance can be lost. Email can feel like a more clinical approach, and using text-only communication can hinder relationship-building.
To help your marketing team work effectively, you may want to consider some beneficial tools:
- Video conferencing. You can use video conferencing to help your team connect for regular meetings, check-ins, and planning strategies. It can also allow you to use visuals to present marketing progress.
- A common platform to bring together all of your different marketing metrics and progress. Tracking your valuable KPIs will allow your marketing team to maximize their performance, and having a platform where all the information comes together for the team ensures it’s at everyone’s fingertips.
- A platform that allows for collaboration on projects. As marketing teams generally have different pieces that need to coordinate to move forward, you often have different people working on separate parts. The graphic designer may work on an infographic, the content producer writes a few articles, and the social media expert develops posts and plans for distribution. A dashboard where people can quickly communicate, offer and receive feedback, and monitor each other’s progress will keep everyone on the same page.
6. Consider building a hybrid team that includes independent professionals
An effective marketing team can scale and adapt quickly to changing market demands. It can also leverage a variety of talent to engage prospective customers across different platforms so that they can move through the sales funnel. A hybrid team of full-time employees and part-time or independent professionals can simplify this process by:
- Considering first the types of jobs you need to be completed by the marketing team.
- Noting which ones will likely have consistent workloads and which ones will have rising and falling workloads.
- Looking for projects that might call on particularly high levels of expertise for the short term or may entail workers who will only need to work for a few hours each week to reach their goals.
Using this information, you can start to see which members of your remote marketing team will work best as full-time employees and which ones should be independent professionals.
For example, if you have content production needs that rise and fall, depending on campaigns and the time of year, having a full-time marketing coordinator to handle planning but an independent content producer to manage the workload may work best.
A hybrid team will empower you to scale up and down depending on the precise needs of your team. Rather than onboarding more employees than needed or having a team that struggles to keep up with the workload increases, you have a group designed to meet demands as they arise.
When you need to call on particular areas of expertise, remote talent platforms for independent professionals, such as Upwork, can make it easy to find talent with the specific skills and expertise that will be an asset to your team.
Bring the right remote talent to your marketing team
A remote marketing team can produce outstanding results for your brand. Understanding the potential at your fingertips when you bring together the top talent for the job, regardless of their location, can provide excellent motivation. The benefits of offering team members the greater flexibility that comes with working remotely can help you boost productivity and save on costs.
The challenge lies in knowing how to build an effective remote team. As you begin to find people to fill positions for your organization, keep the steps outlined above in mind. Knowing how to find the right people, build an effective team, and encourage their cohesiveness and unity can allow you to produce the results you know are possible.
If you want to find professionals who have the skills and talent needed to create an outstanding remote marketing team for your organization, consider the potential found on Upwork.
As a global independent talent source from across nearly every marketing discipline, you can find the professionals you need to build a strong team with the tools that make onboarding, tracking, and paying team members simple.
