As a manager of a remote marketing team, you have multiple roles, such as developing and executing marketing strategies, managing internal teams, analyzing customer insights, etc. 

However, marketing strategies are not the only thing you should consider. You should also plan team bonding activities, engage each team member, and ensure everyone has the right tools to collaborate and stay safe while working.

To help you build a remote marketing team, we compiled four tried and tested tips.

1. Communicate your Company Culture and Build a Style Guide

Consistency is the backbone of any marketing strategy. Schedule a virtual meeting with your marketing team members and talk to them about your brand’s values, goals, missions, and target audiences. Based on these insights, create a unique style guide for your brand. Whether it is a whitepaper, an Instagram page, or an email newsletter, your digital content should be easily memorable, consistent, and recognizable in the competitive digital landscape. 

A style guide includes a wide range of factors, such as your brand’s messaging, tone of voice, typography, punctuation, use of visual content, image sizes, types of content, capitalization, etc. It eliminates guesswork from your marketing strategies and helps your marketing team communicate your brand consistently. 

2. Use Digital Productivity Tools

On top of video conferencing solutions, there is a wide range of helpful productivity tools you can use to maximize your team’s performance. Here are some of them:

Scheduling and rostering tools

A scheduling tool is crucial for managing a remote marketing team. It allows you to schedule employees at the right times and across multiple locations.

For example, say you are running a Sydney-based marketing agency that has shifted to hybrid or remote work due to Coronavirus. To free up the workplace capacity and ensure employee well-being, you may want to adopt shift patterns, rotas, and rosters. By investing in scheduling software in Australia, you can manage shifts and the availability of employees faster. These tools also offer calendars, where each employee can track their rosters and know what their daily tasks and roles are.

Task management tools

With task management systems, you can assign and follow tasks across your remote team. Basecamp, for example, offers a simple and decluttered interface, where you can organize different clients and tasks into separate projects. You can invite employees, assign to-dos, set deadlines, and share files within each project. 

Calendar tools

With these tools, your remote team can create shared editorial calendars and manage content publication and deadlines effortlessly.

For example, CoSchedule lets you centralize all of your blog and social content in a single location. Your remote team will spend less time jumping between Chrome tabs, calendar apps, and different tools. 

Automation tools

You can automate almost any aspect of your digital marketing strategy.

For example, you can use social media management tools to publish and curate relevant social media content automatically. That improves the consistency of your digital marketing practices and improves the overall communication of your remote team.

Client reporting is another essential factor to consider when building a remote marketing team. A reporting tool integrates with most of your digital marketing tools and lets you set relevant KPIs and metrics for each client. Based on the data it collects, it creates automated client reports and sends them out.

3. Enhance your Marketing Team’s Communication

Effective communication is the greatest challenge in any remote team. Apart from talking about clients, projects, and goals, the members of your marketing team should also get to know each other. 

Now, there is a wide range of team collaboration tools to use.

Start by investing in reliable video conferencing software, such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or GoToMeeting. Choose a tool depending on your budget, needs, and the size of your team. 

Use instant messaging tools like Slack, as well. It allows you to create various channels and offers both team chat and private messaging options. As such, it is perfect for handling non urgent matters, as well as enhancing employee communication.

To get the most out of these channels, you should set clear communication rules. For example, you should:

• Create regular communication schedules.
• Schedule flexible meeting times that work in your remote employees’ different time zones.
• Define what communication and collaboration tools your team should use and make sure everyone has installed them.
• Host virtual team-building events, such as online pizza parties or team escape rooms. Utilizing sites like www.escapely.com makes the process of connecting your team extremely easy.

4. Stay Secure in the Online Landscape

From email accounts, social networks, and website logins to team collaboration tools, cloud storage platforms, and reporting software, your marketing team manages a wide range of sensitive data. To protect your company and client’s data, you need to improve your remote team’s security.

For starters, invest in a remote-access VPN solution for your distributed team to use. A VPN masks your remote employees’ IP addresses and encrypts their traffic, making them inaccessible to sophisticated hackers. 

Encourage employees to create stronger passwords. Educate your remote team members about the risks of sharing passwords online. Tools like LastPass that use encryption will make password management simpler and safer.

Most importantly, keep in mind that your remote marketing staff uses personal devices to access company and clients’ accounts. To protect this data, create a straightforward guide on using personal tech for work, such as using antimalware software or clicking on suspicious links, sites, or PDF files.

Conclusions

Managing a remote marketing team is not all about investing in digital marketing tools, building marketing strategies, and measuring their performance. Be strategic, organized, and empathetic. You need to understand your team members, make them feel included, and empower them to collaborate effectively. I hope these tips will help you.