101 Guide To Set Up A Marketing Team for Remote Work

Managing an in-house content marketing team may seem difficult. Building a team of efficient remote workers from around the globe is even harder. Over the last decade, many companies have transitioned to remote working options for their employees.

Additionally, the global pandemic has given rise to make a massive shift in organizational work. The adaptation of remote working has significantly impacted the marketing industry.

Today more organizations are understanding the importance of hiring professionals from the global talent pool without any geographical limitations. It is bringing around the urgency of setting up remote marketing teams for making a change.

This article will guide fellow marketers to build a professional marketing team for remote industrial work.

Creating a powerful marketing team for remote work

The recruitment of remote marketing teams has successfully increased employee satisfaction while cutting down on costs. Building a remote team involves understanding its challenges and benefits to empower industries to work better.

Hiring the right talent from around the globe

Finding the right people is essential for creating an exceptional remote marketing team. Hiring remote marketing teams involves choosing the most reliable, disciplined and focused professionals from around the world.

Talented and skilled people are available in abundance. Golance offers the right freelancing professionals for the marketing teams who provide quality work and affordable pay. The right incentives and motivation will swiftly fill in the right positions in a company. With the help of effective marketing campaigns, companies can combine professionals from around the world with varied skill sets.

A highly productive remote marketing team will require an in-depth understanding of a company’s target customer base as well as the appropriate technical expertise to communicate with them. The right balance will engage more customers, bringing more sales.

Certain personality traits of remote workers are bound to create a productive virtual environment. They include communication, management, organization and self-management skills. Alongside autonomous working and independent decision-making abilities are crucial determining factors for an effective virtual habitat.

A critical part of the company’s success is to have remote teamwork anonymously within the given deadlines at the comfort of their space.

Discussing the visions and values of the company.

The company’s vision is what the remote team will be working towards to create the appropriate brand image and its culture. What the company aspires to be must be visible to the internal remote team as well as the external target market.

Each of the remote team members must have similar mindsets to be able to flow in the right direction for accomplishing the same company goals. Without proper understanding of alignment, the remote workers will end up miscommunicating and clashing, leading to more losses than is necessary for any company.

To avoid such a scenario among the remote teams working from different geographic locations, the company must try to generate a mission statement. The declaration must highlight the company’s long-term goals.

They must be shared amongst the remote teams to educate them further about the brand’s identity. Breaking the company’s heritage into its principal beliefs is important to uplift the business. Further, the core values must be documented and fortified among the remote team members.

Ways to creatively share a company’s values:

a. To welcome the remote team members as a unified group.

The most effective method would be to carry out a video conference call amongst the members of a remote team. A face-to-face introduction is necessary with whom they will be working on a daily basis.

It facilitates the development of better relationships among members of remote and in-house teams. The early experience provides the opportunity to display the company’s values and cultures before commencing the remote routine.

b. Build communication channels for effective communication.

With the help of in-built chat tools provided by the company, team members can communicate amongst themselves. The informal communication channels allow the remote teams to feel more connected to the company values. It serves as an opportunity for them to affirm those values.

c. Make efforts to recognize team workers who represent the values.

This method guarantees remote workers feel appreciated when working alongside in-house teams.

The aim is to empower them to take dynamic initiatives aligning with the brand values and business objectives. Clearly communicate those brand values and identity when reinforcing the concepts during the orientation process or training process.

Employ relevant data to assess the success

With technological evolution, companies are more concerned with using the data as the cornerstone to offering a successful target campaign. Brands therefore neither have the time or resources to carry out inefficient campaigns.

Multiple channels, starting from paid search to social media platforms are available. The focus is to target the right customer base with the best possible content to make the change.

A broad range of tools is available for companies to monitor how their modern website is performing in response to the digitally targeted campaigns. It allows them to view the clickthrough rates of the paid advertisements and brand engagement, including ventures around their social media platforms and website articles.

Steps to effectively use data for marketing campaigns:

a. For specific campaigns and their goals, the company needs to first determine the key performance indicators or KPIs necessary for their brand.

b. The company needs to identify tools appropriate for tracking and measuring KPIs.

c. To ensure data monitoring takes place in real-time, the company must try to bring the remote team together first.

These steps will allow the team to remain intact with the progress of the marketing group. Detailed insight into consumer behavior will allow them to engage better with potential customers.

Providing effective onboarding process and guidance

After hiring remote team workers, efficient onboarding is necessary for the success of the company. To allow the new workers to function productively, establishing the onboarding process seems crucial. It helps to speed up the marketing strategy and goals.

Benefits of a good onboarding structure:

a. The new remote workers can integrate better with the team.

b. It helps to reduce anxiety among the remote workers.

c. Increases retention among the team members.

d. Helps to make the team more productive.

For efficient and independent working, the remote marketing team needs to understand different operational procedures like internal workflow and communication protocols. A consistent work quality encompasses clear expectations and a streamlined business process on the part of the remote team.

To execute a digital campaign, marketing teams need direct collaboration is necessary among the different disciplines.

To ensure this, the processes under work must adhere to set working standards, workflows and timelines. The processes help to avoid common pitfalls among remote employees like miscommunications, delays and bottlenecks.

Using scorecards or call coaching tools can assist the team workers by evaluating their work performance, providing necessary feedback for prompt outcomes. Regularly scheduled checkpoints, open communication and virtual meetings refine the processes continuously in hopes of increasing efficiency and productivity.

Assisting remote coordination of teams

Just like paid advertisements work in collaboration with good SEO, an effectively functioning remote team requires good coordination. With a remote marketing team, several obstacles to good communication may arise.

The following considerations can be made when reviewing the marketing group:

a. Significance of time zones.

At times, remote teams are created by appointing professionals from different time zones. They may have to collaborate routinely on different projects.

The meetings must therefore be scheduled keeping in mind that there are ample overlapping working hours for all the members to attend the meetings comfortably.

b. Handling cultural expectations and obstacles.

Different countries or different regions within a country may have varied work cultures and expectations. With the lack of company culture encircling the team, it becomes difficult to meet the work expectations. Clear communications encourage open conversations about work culture issues, thereby managing the expectations.

c. Virtual meetings to create a better connection.

The team members must know who they are working with to coordinate different campaigns, jointly track the results and brainstorm together to bring the company forward.

Correct technological advancements for effective communication

Often casual conversations can help build sustainable relationships in traditional work environments. It is something remote teams do not get to be a part of because of their geographical distance.

Simply put, face-to-face communication is a big hurdle for remote teams. Email marketing seems to be a clinical approach, whereas sms marketing may hinder relationship building.

Despite the obstacles, remote marketing teams require a common ground for meeting the goals. Common tools for effective communication in the marketing team include video conference calls, KPIs or dashboards to name a few.

Creating a hybrid team of professional workers

A productive marketing team of remote workers can quickly scale and adapt to the evolving marketing demands. The curated talent pool has the capacity to engage prospective targets across multiple channels, aiming them towards the sales funnel.

This is where a hybrid team comes into play. A combination of in-house employees and remote marketing teams can simply the aforementioned problems by:

a. The company needs to begin by considering the tasks that need to be completed by the marketing teams.

b. Noting and differentiating tasks with constant and fluctuating workloads.

c. Look through projects that may require high expertise for short periods or require remote workers with few hours of work per week to reach the goals.

Based on the aforementioned points, companies will be able to distinguish remote workers as independent professionals from full-time employees. A hybrid team is capable of scaling up or down depending on the needs of the team.

Common tools for remote marketing teams:

1. Project management tools

These tools allow the marketing head to track and monitor the work of the remote teams. Initially the focus is on completing the currently scheduled tasks. Some workers may however go beyond the working hours when working remotely. In that context, implementation of a whole new plan becomes mandatory.

Common martech tools like Monday or Asana are available for marketers can ask for updates from remote teams using the digital version. The tools help to monitor status updates and other variations in the marketing platform.

For the remote team handling the social media platforms, automation tools can be used. You can design and bulk schedule a number of posts using social media scheduling platforms. Such tools help to schedule Instagram posts, Twitter posts or Facebook posts to name a few.

The tools allow remote teams to monitor any project and create workflows side by side, while integrating with third party apps.

2. Communication tools

Having a team of remote workers with different preferred communication platforms may come across as an obstacle. For effective communication amongst the team members, its crucial to bring all of them onboard with one common station for team discussions.

Slack is a commonly used communicating tool to bring about one-to-one as well as group chats, easily managing multiple directions.

Then there is Google Hangouts that most marketers and employees are familiar with. For marketing teams, It serves as the perfect opportunity to discuss and make necessary changes in administrative, or other operative tasks.

Since most of the remote team workers are working from their home space, video conference calls are mostly used for meetings. Zoom or Google Meet are common platforms for hosting meetings for remotely working marketing teams. They offer video and chat messaging features side-by-side, partnering well with teams who are already using GSuite.

3. Collaboration tools

Members working from different time zones makes it hard for the marketer or the manager to understand if all of them have completed their tasks and are on the same page. At times the manager may not have the right assets to access the project in hand or get in touch with the teammates for hours.

The reduced visibility over the remote team can halt any initiative in its track. Considering how fast-pacing the marketing industry is, the team may not be able to afford to complete the required goals.

Using cloud-based collaboration tools alongside communication tools can reduce this issue. Collaboration tools like Trello and Wrike provide project managers with the ability to assign and regulate clear deadlines for tasks set for each team worker.

4. Security tools

Ensuring the network is secure is easier when all the employees are working in the same office space with a single wi-fi connection. With the team spread out all over the world, in different regions, it becomes difficult to guarantee if the external wi-fi connections are secure or not.

For official work, having a highly secured network connection and two-factor authentication is a must for modern-day technology. For marketing teams working remotely, tools like Okta or OneLogin offer risk-free working from the comfort of their homes.

The tools prevent any external viruses from causing added complications to the worker’s desktop or laptop.

To conclude

With the aforementioned guide in hand, it's time for marketing teams to grow and evolve while working remotely. Hiring the right professionals within a team will make the change. The key is to ensure good communication channels maintain workflow.

Effective onboarding, data employment and team coordination can create efficient teams expertised in technological advances. Whether a company is adopting new tools or upgrading the managerial methods, there is always room for making improvements in the marketing industry.