Whether you like it or not, hybrid workplaces are the future.

From a knee-jerk reaction to the new norm, remote working became the preferred setup of B2B and B2C organizations for optimal productivity, employee satisfaction, and business performance.

Statistics show that 74% of companies in the US implement (or plan to implement) a hybrid workplace model permanently.

However, a hybrid work model isn’t a magic bullet that instantly cures all your growing pains—especially if you’re in an industry as complex and results-driven as marketing.

Several pitfalls of hybrid work exist, like:

• Difficulty in fostering solidarity and tightly-knit culture
• High employee burnout rate
• Lack of time management skills for remote team members

If your marketing team is experiencing any of hybrid work’s side effects, here are six collaboration tips to help everyone gel together:

1. Encourage mutual respect for downtimes

Just like how internet users develop “banner blindness,” remote team members can acquire the habit of ignoring work-related messages. This is especially the case if they receive a constant stream of work-related updates even during non-working hours.

Avoid this at all costs by encouraging your remote team to respect each other’s downtimes.

One way to enforce this is to use enterprise messaging apps like Slack, which allows members to be aware of each other’s status. Members can also adjust their app’s settings on mobile and desktops separately—giving them granular control over how they receive notifications.

If a member needs to communicate something urgently, designate someone who possesses everyone’s contact information (outside of Slack) and let them decide whether it’s worth relaying or not.

2. Make employee engagement a priority

Just because employees are working from home, doesn’t mean you can pay less attention to employee engagement.

Remote employees are capable of forming close bonds with their teammates even if they only see each other once or twice (or never) per week. You can also make them feel more invested in and loyal to your organization with the right incentives.

They just need opportunities to understand each other on a deeper level and get to know the person behind the position.

Consider investing in top-tier HR software with built-in employee engagement tools, like:

• Reward-based programs for top performers
• Open idea boards
• Virtual coffee chats
• Employee surveys
• Performance-based perks and benefits
• Remote team-building exercises

3. Prepare reusable resources to make their work easier

Content marketing is obviously wrapped in several layers of complexity.

Marketers need to look at keywords, audience personas, content topics, SEO, and more just to produce a single piece of content. These can be time-consuming, tedious, and creatively draining to a content marketer—particularly a content creator.

To ensure your remote staff’s productivity, help them through these repetitive tasks by preparing reusable sources before assigning tasks.

Building a master list of target keywords and topic ideas beforehand is a step in the right direction. But you also need to provide resources that are more specific to the tasks you need to delegate.

Before making assignments, build a rough outline or creative brief of the piece you want your remote-based team members to create.

You should also share clear guidelines on how to create effective marketing content based on your organization’s marketing goals. Mention details like:

• The brand’s identity, voice, and writing style
• Audience personas that highlight the target audience’s pain points, goals, and reading level (education, age, etc.)
• Potential internal links (content from the same website) to include
• SEO goals (target word count, focus keyword, links to competitor articles, etc.) Help your remote marketing team find these resources using a project management app with file-sharing features, like Trello and Notion.

4. Use marketing platforms with collaborative features baked in

Aside from project management apps, explore marketing platforms that come with team collaboration tools. CoSchedule, for example, allows you to set task deadlines and implement a review/approval process.

You can also use CoSchedule’s discussions area to create an open marketplace of ideas. Your team can brainstorm anything from prospective LinkedIn influencers to Instagram Reels hashtags that can further your marketing goals.

Apart from CoSchedule, here are other marketing platforms with collaboration features you can try:

• Sharelov
• HubSpot
• ActiveCampaign
• ClickUp
• Vista Social
• Zoho Marketing

5. Outsource to fill skill gaps

In-house or remote, no marketing team is perfect.

Unless you’re a big company with a fully-stacked content marketing department, there will always be talent gaps preventing you from expanding your strategies.

That’s where outsourcing steps in.

Put simply, outsourcing reinforces your team’s talent pool without going through the tedious recruitment and hiring process. Within a few hours, you can enlist SEO content writers, graphic designers, voiceover artists, video editors, ad specialists—anyone that can help you achieve your marketing goals.

Outsourcing also enables your team members to focus on what they do best. After all, it’s common for undermanned marketing teams to offload additional work to team members who have some degree of skill and experience that are relevant to the task at hand.

6. Foster a culture of growth

To build a sense of camaraderie that overcomes the distance barrier, make each team member’s growth an organizational goal.

Schedule regular huddles wherein everyone gets a chance to share what they’ve learned recently.

During these sessions, it is everyone’s job to help someone who’s struggling with a particular task.

Just be sure to have a marketing performance and content tracking system in place to help your team identify their own weaknesses. Tools like Google Analytics and generated reports from your marketing platforms will tell you which strategies work and which doesn’t.

Tracking performance is the first step toward making data-driven decisions. Use the numbers to make adjustments and solve problems as a team.

Conclusion

Successful marketing teams aren’t hindered by distance.

There are several tools and proven strategies that enable marketing teams to launch winning campaigns even when dealing with distance barriers.

Use the six strategies above to unlock the full potential of your remote team and give your organization the marketing success it deserves.

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