Tips on Managing Remote Marketing Teams

Many organizations have faced unique challenges this year because they’ve had to switch from office-based work to remote collaboration. For creative, fast-paced marketing processes, this can become detrimental for productivity, client relationships, and overall business growth. As we’re quickly approaching, it’s time to create a strategy to ensure the success of your remote marketing teams in the months to come. What may have seemed like seamless, effortless collaboration at the office might need some help to survive the struggles or remote work. 

From implementing the right protocols and tools, all the way to regular interaction and ensuring transparency, your role as the manager should encompass a variety of decisions moving ahead. Let’s go over a few of the most effective solutions to the potential problems of remote collaboration and help you manage your remote marketing teams successfully.

Make your virtual meetings count

Not every collaborative process or decision calls for a meeting. Weekly meetings are an excellent way for your remote marketers to stay connected and understand their assignments for the week. However, it’s up to you to keep those meetings short and purpose-driven. 

If it can be summed up in an email, don’t call for a meeting – stick to this simple rule and you’ll save your employees’ time as well as your own, and boost your productivity.

Use PM tools to your advantage

Asana, Trello, and Slack are just some of many comprehensive marketing tools your remote teams can benefit from in 2022. Using a single platform for task and project management has become a staple of success for organizations switching to remote collaboration. 

These tools grant you greater visibility of what your teams are doing, when they need help, which deadlines are being breached, and what you can do to prevent future setbacks. Even workload distribution is another great perk that will help you maximize remote productivity for your employees with PM tools.

Keep track of employees’ schedules

One major issue companies have encountered on account of remote work is time tracking. If you don’t have an overview of the amount of time your teams need to perform certain tasks, or you don’t know who is available to hop on a client call – you run the risk of wasting time and reducing productivity.

To boost remote collaboration and transparency, your organization can use the best time and attendance software available and use the data to introduce smarter schedules and easier collaboration. You’ll learn how much time each assignment requires, what resources your employees need, and you’ll be able to make flexible work schedules without derailing projects. 

Automate menial tasks

Every marketing team handles a wide array of tasks, many of them tedious, repetitive and prone to errors. These tasks can take a huge chunk of your marketers’ time, causing them to focus on irrelevant assignments rather than growth-oriented processes that can make a difference for the long haul. 

With that in mind, you should implement automation in your business to clear your team’s schedule. Let software handle menial tasks such as social media scheduling and publishing, analytics and reporting, and the like. 

Empower employee flexibility

The beauty of remote work is that it can be organized to suit everyone involved. Unlike having to sit in the same office at the same time, remote work can be structured to enable flexibility for your marketing gurus in terms of their work hours and breaks. If they have kids, all the more reason to help them manage their home-based office to build a sense of freedom rather than stress and burnout. 

If your marketers can wrap up certain tasks more quickly, you should allow them to spend the rest of their time doing something else, while emphasizing that they should be available for digital communication for the rest of the work hours. Maybe parents need to pick up kids from school, or they need more than one break if the kids are taking their classes from home, too. Flexibility in 2021 will be the hallmark of success for your digital marketers.

Invest in your team’s wellbeing and balance

Even though your employees are no longer at the office, you as their manager need to make sure that they are healthy. Check in on them every now and then to see if they need to talk to someone, or if they have been spending their time sitting for most of the time. Empowering fitness and health through your benefits programs can help them lead healthier lives based on balance.

Despite working from home, your marketing team needs to recognize that they shouldn’t work all day long. Empower them to spend more time with their loved ones, focus on their health, and provide them with the means to do so. 

Education is still crucial

The focus during this year has largely been on the ongoing health crisis, and rightfully so. That, however, is no excuse to treat your employees as if their careers have come to a grinding halt. They still need to derive satisfaction from what they do, and they need to find meaning in their work. One significant contribution of you as a manager can be to continue encouraging and offering digital marketing learning opportunities.

Help your remote teams keep learning from one another and from industry experts. This is one of those “perks” that will put you over the top with the most qualified candidates and it will help your employees develop new skills to take your brand forward.

Take your time to get to know your marketing teams and recognize the needs of the individuals under your wing. Add to that, the listed ideas can help skyrocket your management capabilities and spot opportunities to be more productive as a unit. Make sure that your remote marketing department has the tools, the support, and the leader that will take them forward.