How to Build and Manage a Successful Team of Remote Marketers

There are substantial benefits associated with hiring a remote workforce, such as keeping in-house operating costs to a minimum and improving the job satisfaction rating of your remote workers. These benefits are particularly advantageous for smaller businesses and startups that may need the skills and experience of professional marketers while having budgetary limitations.

However, managing a remote team can often be challenging. Considering hiring a remote marketing team to assist with your leads generation efforts? You can take considerable steps to improve your management efforts for ultimate productivity and results.

How to Build and Manage a Successful Team of Remote Marketers

1. Communicate Effectively

In order to properly manage and guide your remote marketing team, you need to find effective channels of communication. This way, you and your team can reach each other throughout the business day as needed.

Analyzing effective methods of communication is an important first step to take. But you also must ensure that everyone on your remote marketing team is comfortable with using these technologies.

Encourage daily communications related to daily tasks, group collaboration, sharing content or notes in your Sales PlayBook, and more. Some of the many communication tools available to you are instant messaging chat, Skype, and others. You must have the right communication platforms used across all employees. Whether they are working from home or are in-house, ensure that everyone can communicate as needed without hindrance.

2. Plan and Schedule

You also need to create a marketing schedule that gives structure to your team’s efforts.

For example, use your Sales PlayBook to create a content calendar. You can create a regular schedule when your blog should be updated with new posts.

Just remember that a blog should have regular posts. But it is more important to focus on quality, content, and consistency than on frequency.

You also need to automate your marketing as much as possible. Be aware that your marketing team will not have ample time to deal with mundane or repetitive tasks. These tasks can be automated so that your skilled and experienced remote workers can more effectively handle the tasks that require their attention, such as email marketing, social media marketing and more.

As your ability to automate their routine marketing tasks increases, you may find that your team can spend more time focusing on the creative aspects of their positions. Through their creativity and attention, you may notice that your business enjoys substantial results from marketing efforts.

3. Track Performance

You understandably want to ensure that your marketing team is as productive as possible. And the best way to accomplish this task is to track performance on a regular basis. You should ask your remote marketing team to create a spreadsheet of their activities and to submit this spreadsheet to you weekly. Or, you might also choose to have your remote marketers log this information in the “My Weekly Goals” page of your company Sales PlayBook.

You can also hold weekly meetings so that each marketing professional is held accountable for their work. Without taking these steps, you may find it difficult to stay attuned to the efforts of your remote team.

4. Use the Right Tools

When you begin exploring the different remote team management, communication, and collaboration tools available to choose from, you may be astounded by the many options available to you.

You certainly cannot use all of the programs and apps available to choose from. Instead, you may need to explore the options and even try several of them out before you find the right combination to use for maximum efficiency.

Remember that the right tools need to be easy for everyone to use and will be affordable for your budget. Some tools are even free to use. However, there are times when it is more important to pay a reasonable amount of money for the right tools.

Some of the tools that you could use include:

• Sales PlayBook – an online platform that allows teams to share best practices, processes, templates, schedules, plans, forums, and more.
• Slack – an effective communication program that allows individuals in remote locations to communicate, share files and make notes.
• Trello and Basecamp – simplified applications that take the hassle and time out of project management when remote teams need to collaborate.
• Sprout Social or Hootsuite – time-saving applications that let you create, plan and manage social media marketing campaigns.
• Google Docs – provides the ability to save and share files in a remote yet centralized location.
• Box, DropBox, and Google Drive – file-sharing and saving platforms that eliminate the possibility of redundancy and duplication among teams.

Regardless of whether you are launching a startup or your business is larger and more established, you understandably want to take full advantage of the benefits associated with hiring a remote marketing team. However, as beneficial as a remote marketing team can be for your organization, there are managerial challenges that you may face with a remote team. When you use the right combination of tools and resources, you can more easily manage your team and enjoy the incredible results they can provide in the process.

About the Author

Jen McKenzie is an up-and-coming author from NY. She usually writes on business, marketing and HR subjects. When not at her desk, you can find her taking long strolls in the countryside or enjoying her free time brushing up on photo editing. You can reach Jennifer @jenmcknzie.

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