Remote marketing management is nothing new these days. In fact, it’s steadily becoming the new norm. While working remotely offers loads of benefits to your business, it also comes with its challenges.
Are you struggling to stay organised while managing your marketing remotely? Adjusting to a new remote routine can be difficult if you aren’t properly prepared.
We’ve put together a guide with the most effective processes and tips for managing marketing remotely. Follow these steps, and remote marketing will be easy.
Marketing Your Business Remotely
Businesses all around the world, in all kinds of industries, are starting to adopt a more remote approach to the way they manage their operations. And when it comes to remote work, marketing is one of the most popular areas to remove from the office.
Today, marketing is focused on the digital space. This makes it a lot easier to create and run campaigns from anywhere in the world. Digital marketing also allows you to work and collaborate with people based all over the world. A lot of companies are hiring teams spread out across the globe because of this.
Even if you’re a small local business, you can manage your local marketing strategy remotely too. This isn’t something that has to be kept for companies with a global audience.
While digital marketing can be done entirely remotely, there are still certain challenges that come with it. The biggest one is managing your marketing team and staying on top of the progress of your coworkers. When your team is possibly on the other side of the world to you, this can seem tough.
Luckily, this is easily manageable in today’s world. With the right digital tools and protocols in place, managing marketing remotely can be easy.
12 Most Effective Remote Marketing Tips and Processes
Here are 12 of the best strategies and tips to follow to make sure that your remote marketing team still performs at the absolute highest level.
1. Use Easy Communication Software
If you’re working with a team, then your first priority for remote work needs to be figuring out your communications. You just can’t work properly without being able to easily connect with your team.
Back and forth emails are just not practical in these situations. This is why you need to have the right team messaging and video meeting platform to make life easier. This is critical for any type of remote marketing operation.
Make sure that the communication platform you choose is quick, easy, and all available in one place. This will make team meetings and instant updates a whole lot more efficient. Successful remote marketing starts with strong and easy communication.
2. Use The Right Marketing Software
One of the most important steps to remote marketing management is having the right software. Relying on software is essential for remote work, and your marketing team needs to make sure it’s using tools that are easy and efficient to manage.
Marketing teams often have a load of different software tools. This includes things like email marketing tools, social media management tools, design tools, your CRM, web publishing tools, and more. Yes, this software makes it easier to manage your marketing, but you also need to make sure that you don’t overcomplicate things with your software choices.
Remote marketing teams should try to use fully integrated marketing solutions to make it easier to manage their different tools. If your different marketing tools and apps work with each other on a single platform, managing your work remotely will be so much easier.
This reduces the need for technical support, and it allows your entire marketing team to be on the same page at all times. Integrated marketing solutions save time, and they make running campaigns much easier. This is something that’s important when you’re managing marketing remotely.
3. Automate Your Marketing
When you’re working in an office space, it’s easy to quickly get your team together and send out an important email or publish something on social media. When you’re working remotely, this can be difficult—especially if you’re communicating over different time zones.
Automated marketing will make running remote campaigns way easier. With the right automated marketing tool, you can set up things like email drip campaigns that trigger from certain actions. This will save you loads of time and effort, which is really important when you’re disconnected from your marketing team.
Simple processes, like scheduling social media posts and newsletters in advance will also make a big difference. The more you can set up for automatic publishing later on, the easier it will be to stay on top of your marketing remotely.
4. Overshare Your Progress
When you’re working with a team in an office, everyone is always up to date with what everyone around them is doing. Even if you’re not having constant meetings and updates, it’s much easier to know where everyone’s at when you’re in the same physical space. Keeping up with work progress can be challenging with remote marketing management.
This is why marketing teams should pay extra attention to sharing their progress. Instead of just focusing on regular updates, always try to overshare. Explain in detail what you’re busy with to your coworkers to make sure you’re always on the same page. If you’re in charge of a team, then make sure that your team is consistently sending you updates on all of their progress.
Oversharing work progress will make it a lot easier to work efficiently and ensure that everyone is on the right track.
5. Regularly Schedule Calls With Your Team
Don’t just organise a call when you’ve got a specific task or campaign to discuss. When managing marketing remotely, you should have regular calls scheduled for consistent updates. Set up a time each day, every second day, or each week, to discuss progress and catch up on anything that you might have missed.
Even if you don’t think you have a specific agenda to cover, regular calls can help you uncover any potential issues or reveal unknown challenges. Hosting regular meetings is also a good way to become more used to remote work practices.
6. Have a Clear Marketing Strategy in Place
Keeping up with your team’s marketing progress can be challenging, especially when everyone’s working on different projects at different times. It’s seriously important to have a clear marketing strategy in place to make sure that all remote team members are working towards the same goals.
This will help to produce consistency across your marketing channels and ensure that everyone is working towards the same common goals. Make your goals and marketing documents clearly visible so that everyone follows the same approach.
7. Host Virtual Events
Just because you’re not able to gather in a physical location, it doesn’t mean you can’t host amazing marketing events. Virtual events and webinars are fantastic marketing tactics to generate new leads, boost brand awareness, and reach more customers. When you’re managing your marketing remotely, you should definitely consider hosting virtual events.
This is especially useful if you have an international target audience because virtual events can be attended by people from all over the world. Webinars are a fantastic way to bring people together even though your marketing efforts are remote. This could include an event hosted by people in your company, or with guest speakers.
8. Keep Your Learning Resources up to Date
Any good marketing team should always be learning, growing, and improving. When you’re working in an office, it’s easy to share new information with each other, go over training sessions, and learn new things. When your team is split up remotely, this can become challenging.
This is why it’s so important to keep all of your learning resources up to date. Have a communication channel that is dedicated to learning and sharing knowledge. Host regular training sessions, and share documents with best practices and marketing tips to follow.
An important part of this is having a clear set of shared documents with your team that is always updated. These documents should include things like SOPs, templates, and any other helpful marketing resources. This will help team members to always access the correct information on certain tasks, which makes remote work management a whole lot easier.
9. Focus on the Deliverables
Doing marketing remotely isn’t just about a shift in the location of your marketing, it’s also a shift in the way you work. Remote marketing teams shouldn’t be too worried about when they’re working or how many hours they’re putting in. This isn’t an important metric for success. Instead, marketing teams should be focused on the deliverables, or what they’re able to achieve.
Focusing on tasks instead of work hours will help to keep your remote marketing strategies on track. It’s challenging to manage remote teams. You don’t know if your marketing coworkers are watching a YouTube video or swiping through Instagram. If you’re focused on deliverables, then this doesn’t really matter that much.
Make sure that you know what your team needs to deliver each day, and focus on this progress first and foremost. This will help to keep your marketing efforts operating smoothly.
10. Use the Right Project Management Tools
We’ve established that remote marketing management should look towards tasks and deliverables above hours. To do this properly, you should be using a great task-tracking, or project management tool. There are loads of different remote work management solutions. These apps will help your team to stay on top of their workflow and keep up to date with what the most important deliverables are.
Make sure that you use a suitable tool, and that everyone in your team is up to date with the processes you use. Ensuring that everyone approaches tasks and deliverables the same way will help to streamline the work process.
When you’re running a marketing team remotely, everyone is probably working on various tasks at different times. This can be a total headache to keep up with. Having a tool that keeps all tasks in one place, with a clear status of each task, makes this a whole lot easier to manage.
11. Set Communication Guidelines
This may sound silly, but it’s so important that your entire marketing team follows the same communication procedures. Keeping in contact with everyone and staying on top of their progress becomes easier this way.
Have a clear system in place on how you contact each other and what platforms you use for communications and meetings. Set times when you’re available to talk and figure out the best way to get information from somebody quickly. Having a clear communication guideline will prevent confusion and miscommunications.
12. Make it Easy to Set Up Appointments
This applies to both your clients and your coworkers. Remote marketing management relies on a lot of meetings and video calls, so it’s important that these are easy to schedule. Use an appointment app to help you publish calendars where people can schedule a time with you. These calendars could be sent out to clients that you’re working with, or to coworkers who need to set up meeting times with you.
This will make staying on top of your meetings and appointments a whole lot easier. If you use an appointments tool that integrates with your landing pages and email marketing lists, then you can also use your calendar to generate new leads.
Conclusion
Remote marketing management doesn’t have to be a headache. With the right tools and processes in place, managing your team remotely can be a breeze. Just follow the steps listed above, equip your business with the right apps, and you’ll see just how effective remote marketing can be. Once you invest in the right software and get these processes firmly in place, you will never need an office again.
Originally published Aug 15, 2021, updated Jan 17, 2023