Saher Shohdan October 10, 2020 
Image credit: Unsplash
Entrepreneurs lay the utmost importance on effective marketing and for a good reason. Marketing is the core medium of communication between your startup and customers.
Through marketing, the needs and wants of customers are identified and reciprocated through appropriate branding and advertising to fulfill those demands. As COVID-19 takes its toll on businesses around the world, you need to use effective marketing strategies to not only stay afloat but to boost your revenue and generate higher sales.
Moreover, to comply with the novel workplace protocols put in place because of the pandemic, remote marketing is the critical way for your business to thrive.
This article expands on how you can implement processes to manage your marketing remotely, with 5 key recommendations to help your remote marketing team take off.
- Emphasize KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) alongside Empathetic Messaging
During this pandemic, you need to focus on building consumer confidence to alleviate uncertainty and to bolden customer relationships. Everything about your business’ marketing should espouse empathy.
You should focus your marketing messages to be relevant, empathetic to people’s circumstances, and be helpful.
All the details in your marketing should be geared towards providing your customers with value.
To this end, one process you should implement in your team is to encourage your members for FRT (First Time Response) as aiding customers readily will ensure higher customer retention.
Besides this, CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) scores should be monitored and incentivized to inculcate among employees the value of helping customers. Keep in mind that empathy should be extended towards your team members as well. Make sure you contemplate and review KPIs with the dual lenses of both business acumen and empathetic understanding.
- Use Appropriate Digital Marketing Tools to Work Efficiently
Ensure that your team’s working conditions contribute to optimum productivity while remote working. It is crucial for you as a business leader to wisely choose from an array of digital tools, many of which are free.
Some popular and effective tools are as follows:
- Slack is an excellent application for communication between employees. It is a simple to use interface that will keep your team members in touch through instant messaging. They can casually communicate queries, updates and suggestions to collaborate while staying in their homes.
- Zoom is a video sharing application that allows multiple people to join in virtually at the same time, and is optimal for employee meetings, as well as organizing formal appointments with customers and business partners.
- Asana can be used to plan your marketing processes, workflows, and deliverables. As a mission control, it will allow your team members to collaborate with each other so they can design marketing strategies and projects in a remote workplace.
- Create An Accountability Culture That Facilitates Remote Working
Company culture is the most critical factor for ensuring that employees are on the same page and rowing in the same direction.
Culture is a byproduct of the vision and purpose of your business.
For your company culture to flourish remotely, you will need to instil and uphold the values of autonomy, accountability and flexibility. This can be done by ensuring daily virtual check-ins, or “stand-ups”, which are short, rapid-fire meetings online on an app like Zoom, where each small team reports on their key wins, to-dos, and obstacles to their daily work.
Remote teams work across the country, and sometimes across time-zones.
As a manager, it is also your responsibility to hire the right team members who value autonomy, are accountable, and can adapt to a remote working environment.
For ease of success, consider hiring talent with experience in remote working.
Image Credit: Unsplash
- Build a Strong, Cohesive Social Team
A workplace runs smoothly only when all employees are communicative and trust one another. To ensure this in a remote environment can be daunting, but it is vital just as much as in a typical office set up.
Virtual hangouts and socials on apps such as Houseparty or Zoom can help to facilitate social integration and forge friendships between employees. Still, nothing can yet replace real-life social interaction.
Companies like Zapier, for example, has 200+ remote employees, but does their onboarding in the beginning with their head offices, allowing new hires to meet their managers and other team members in-person before they return to a remote working arrangement.
Another way to ensure a cohesive remote workforce is to implement a “buddy system”, where employees are grouped in informal buddy systems of 2 or 3, and are expected to check-in with one another during work-time and informally, off-work.
Findings of a detailed study showed that psychological safety and dependability were the top two reasons for team success. These outcomes can be achieved if employees can depend on and psychologically trust one another, which fuels better collaboration and daily communications.
Lastly, consider planning fun activities weekly to allow your employees to build friendships and bond on things besides work, this can be done virtually by sending remote members snacks, and also in-person where you facilitate meetups of team members living nearby in the same area.
Image credit: Unsplash
- Set up Standard Processes: Style Guide and Social Media Guidelines
Provide a standardised list of operating guidelines for your remote marketing team members, such as a style guide for branding and writing copy and social media guidelines.
Style guides are also helpful to ensure all your marketing communications are cohesive. A style guide is essentially a set of rules for writing. By using a standard format of text in emails, presentations, contracts and advertisements, your brand image is kept consistent professionally.
Style guides also ease friction between remote marketing team members in writing copy, call-to-actions, and test new marketing project. A style guide can clear out unwanted confusions and warrants a similar style of work from all team members.
Social media guidelines then work alongside your brand style guide for your social media team members to understand the tone to take with customers demanding answers, and how to engage with your most loyal patrons.
Conclusion
COVID-19 has made it tremendously challenging for businesses to succeed because of disruptions in supply channels and lack of availability of physically available staff.
As the new normal changes the way companies are conventionally run, marketing teams need to adapt to the unique circumstances and devise suitable digital modes of marketing. The uncertainty surrounding the pandemic requires agile marketing that is run on the values of empathy and helping customers rather than increasing sales. For efficient remote marketing, your team members should use tools like zoom and slack to stay connected and in sync with each other at all times.
In addition to that, a successful team is required to be socially integrated by work and bonded together by ties of friendship.
To ensure that your business thrives during this pandemic, ensure that the vision and purpose of your company are reflected in your remote company culture. Lastly, bring cohesion in your marketing team by adhering to a style guide, so that even in these testing times, your company’s work remains professional and is familiar to all your employees.
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