How To Build And Empower a Remote Marketing Team

Intro

Remote working can significantly improve productivity, employee satisfaction and engagement, and work-life balance. It can also considerably improve your employee retention rate. Still, the lack of structure and distractions can lower employee productivity if you do not manage it well.

To empower your remote marketing team, remove the barriers to remote working and streamline processes. This makes it easy for people to ask for information, get support, and make a difference.

This article shares a step-by-step guide on building and empowering a remote marketing team and keeping stakeholders engaged.

How To Build And Manage A Remote Marketing Team Effectively

1. Work on your remote onboarding program

According to Career Builder, 93% of employers think onboarding plays a significant part in an employee's stay in the company. Additionally, poor onboarding practices can result in resignations 12% of the time.

Your company's success depends largely on your team's skills and talents — people who work on the front lines and ensure your operations run smoothly. Developing a streamlined remote onboarding program, otherwise known as a virtual onboarding program, can help. It can even get new hires up to speed faster. It allows companies to focus on training new employees on aspects that will immediately impact the overall organization and also help in the long term.

If you design a robust 30-60-90-day scalable employee onboarding process, you will notice an uptick in the number of skilled employees you retain.

2. Keep lines of communication open

Even though people are getting accustomed to remote working, it can still be slightly isolating, given the limited daily interactions. Encourage weekly or bi-weekly huddles to ensure your remote marketing team is in the loop.

Besides these meetings, you can promote a culture of direct communication through 1:1 calls or direct messages. Further, you can create dedicated channels on Slack to direct work-related conversations and informal discussions to appropriate channels.

David Mara from Mara Law firm says: “When the pandemic hit San Diego in 2020, I struggled with maintaining good communication among my legal team while working remotely. I started using Slack and Teamwork since then, and it worked amazingly for the team and the clients. We still use those platforms when our attorneys visit a client in another city or they need to work from home.”

3. Focus on meaningful engagement practices

(Source: Shelly Kramer)

Engaging remote employees is not an easy feat. Because they are not in the office with you, you can't know when their engagement levels are dropping or what motivates them. So, HR teams and managers must find engaging solutions to keep the marketing team involved.

You can organize virtual coffee meet-ups, ice-breakers, team-building activities, or brainstorming sessions surrounding the latest project. You can also assign a buddy for new hires to ease them in or partner people up for routine meetings so they may get to know their colleagues better.

Determine their values and career goals through meaningful one-on-one meetings, and then you can start to find meaningful ways to engage your remote team to support them.

4. Facilitate collaboration

Creating a collaborative environment is essential so your remote team can grow and learn from each other. Creating a company culture that promotes collaboration can help you achieve this. You can also do this by getting your employees to brainstorm for projects.

This can help your employees feel more inclined to be productive and comfortable in their work environment. Apart from implementing collaborative activities, you can publicly acknowledge employee milestones and have timely rewards for a job well done.

A considerable part of collaboration initiatives heavily depends on creating a robust and inclusive work culture.

5. Create mentorship programs

Recruiting a strong team is a top priority for any organization. After all, a team that works well together usually creates high-quality work. Unsurprisingly, many marketing leaders look for ways to create employee relationships that foster collaboration and knowledge sharing. One unique way to do this is to create a mentorship program.

A mentoring platform is a great way to help people develop their professional skills and offer a chance to build relationships between team members. Based on your team size and goals, you can choose between mentoring styles such as 1:1, group, reverse, or peer-based mentoring. For personalized mentorship services, Pathrise stands out as a commendable choice, but it's advisable to read Pathrise reviews before making a decision.

Moreover, it’s a great way to help your team have fitting role models, build relationships, prepare for future leadership roles, and have a sense of community while learning.

6. Set clear expectations

The most important part of working with any remote marketing team is to set clear expectations for tasks and projects. This means you should always communicate exactly what you want to be done directly and share clear timelines for each task.

Poor or unclear communication will lead to delays, errors, and issues that can negatively impact your bottom line. If continued, it may even lead to lower employee motivation and morale.

An extension of open communication, sharing clear expectations, and setting up your marketing team for success can lead to extraordinary performance, better results, and higher retention rates.

Some points to share here are:

• Project goals
• Task deadlines
• Expectations for the project, quarter, or even from the job role
• Important metrics for success

If your company has distributed teams, try to discuss a common time for all team members to be online. If it isn’t workable, attempt to have a weekly team meeting where the entire team is present.

7. Provide marketing tools to boost results

Today's companies have very high expectations for their marketing team's work. Besides the typical project management and productivity tools, leaders must support their teams with the right marketing tools.

New tools could be the key to unlocking opportunities and delivering the results you're hoping to achieve. The best marketing tools collect data, provide insights, and deliver your brand message. They are affordable, easy to use, and help your team create and publish marketing material that can increase your reach and improve conversions. This can help your business grow and reach a wider audience, whether a small SME or a large multinational corporation.

An all-in-one SEO tool like Rank Tracker can help you audit your website, find keywords, monitor backlinks, and track your SERP rankings.

8. Create channels for knowledge sharing

When working remotely, it’s essential to keep in touch with your team. Because your team is spread out, it can be harder to achieve.

In a physical office, it’s easy to access SOPs or reach out to senior employees. However, in a remote marketing team, you might need to embrace new workflow management software, such as Asana or ClickUp. Alternatively, to solve any information-based issues, have dedicated channels for sharing knowledge on platforms like Slack. You can host discussions, share documents and pin them to the channel for quick access. You can also use marketing tools that offer insightful web audit reports.

This will get everyone on the same page, improving communication, decision-making and productivity. You can start by writing the processes, procedures, and policies and then sharing them with team members. If you provide the information beforehand, there will be room for fewer problems and better outcomes.

You can even create internal channels and project-based channels to streamline communication. Additionally, you can share all the important documents and project guidelines in a single place for easy access.

9. Give feedback

It can be very difficult to lead a remote marketing team. You can't always be sure if your team is continually engaged. The solution is to give your remote workers regular feedback. You can engage them with weekly retrospectives by keeping track of their accomplishments and how they can do better the following week.

Schedule a time to talk with your remote workers each week and ask how the projects are going. Talk about the successes and struggles that are happening. Give genuine feedback. It will help you feel more connected with your team and help them be more productive.

You may conduct monthly peer-to-peer feedback sessions to improve team bonding and help your team view things from a different perspective.

If you stay consistent with these practices, you'll have a more intrinsically motivated team to do their best and a strong culture of transparency and trust.

10. Document and share the culture and benefits

Your company may provide various professional development and career advancement opportunities, training, competitive salaries and benefits, and tuition reimbursement. However, not all employees may be aware.

One way to ensure your team performs well is to share your company culture and provide life insurance and benefits such as time off and learning programs so they are aware and motivated to perform well.

11. Allow a flexible working schedule

Create a culture of flexible working in your company, especially if you lead distributed teams. You can skip the traditional 9-to-5 office timing constraints and let employees work only when there are tasks or when they feel productive. Of course, this can be promoted if they follow set deadlines.

Encourage your remote staff to tweak their schedule and work in the best way for them. You can provide them with flexibility so they may do their errands, keep up with medical appointments, etc., without feeling stressed out. For this, team leaders need to be flexible and have an open mind.

From a productivity standpoint, it's a no-brainer. You get to work from the comfort of your own home, on your own time. Many remote workers report they are more productive and get more done than they did in a traditional office setting.

Final thoughts

To deliver your message to the audience you're targeting, you need to have a great team you can rely on to do the legwork for you. It's also crucial to have the correct systems in place.

To build a remote marketing team, you must invest in the right marketing tools. You limit your team’s growth opportunities and the company’s ability to scale without them.