Make yourself shown to clients and your employees
Whenever you have to make a call with a client or employee, it shows a great deal of enthusiasm and focus if you show your face and have your video turned on. The person on the other end can then see you are fully engaged with the conversation and not distracted doing something else.
Having regularly scheduled calls with the rest of the marketing team
If you’re not sharing the same space in an office, the kind of fluid interactions that can occur when someone has a problem won’t always happen. Most people work well with regular feedback, but this can be forgotten about if you have to make the effort of scheduling a call or seeing if someone is online and available to help. Instead you should have scheduled times to talk with your team, as well as being available when they need on the fly.
Figure out the toolset you and your team need
You may have lots of experience with a particular tool like MailChimp or Jira, but all your team might not! Get opinions and feedback on the current tools you’re using, along with suggestions for what the team might like to use. Experiment and don’t get too set in stone. It’s never good for you to make a decision without consulting other people who might end up having to use a tool they don’t look or aren’t familiar with.
Keep up to date with all the new best practices
If you’re isolated from the rest of the marketing world and community, it’s a challenge to keep up to date with all the best practices and techniques. Working in an office takes away the effort needed to research to some degree, but remote work will require constant learning to really keep up to scratch. Set aside time and resources for you and your team to learn either from each other, or attend webinars and courses to get the latest marketing strategies.
Concentrate on the deliverables of your team
With most marketing tasks, the hours put in aren’t that important but the results are. So long as work is finished and is of the quality that is required, this is all that should matter. Unless you need to spend a certain amount of time in your marketing activities reaching out to clients, time spent working shouldn’t be one of the key measures of your teams productivity. Keep this in mind when assessing the progress of your remote marketing team.
Make your hiring process into a funnel for great candidates
If you need to expand your marketing team, you’ll find that you have access to some of the best candidate in the world as a fixed location isn’t needed! There is some more work to do though, as not every great skilled marketing expert will fit into the remote lifestyle. Lay out clearly in your job advertisement the remote skills you require, the company culture that someone needs to fit into and any other important info (scheduled hours, remote training etc.). This saves lots of precious time finding out whether your possible hiree could work effectively while remote or would fit into your team easily.
Set communications guidelines and boundaries
If you need to discuss something quickly regarding your latest email campaign or social media strategy, what’s the best way to get in contact with the right people? Should it be an email? What about if the whole team needs to be involved? Answers to questions like this should all be laid out clearly in a communications policy or with guidelines. This saves so much confusion, time, and money being needlessly spent on fixing misunderstandings and communication errors.
Overshare your progress with the team
In an office, you subconsciously can keep track of what everyone is up to and how they are getting on. This isn’t so in the remote world! Make a habit to let people know the latest piece of work you’ve been doing and encourage them to do the same. You may find that people are overlapping or have not quite grasped what they should be up to or completing. This can feel a bit strange at first as it’s not something we’re used to doing in an office. But online this is absolutely key.
Thinking about becoming a remote Marketing Manager?
Think you’ve got what it takes to be a great remote marketing manager? You have the marketing skills but you’re not sure if you are able to manage remote teams?
Check out Remote-how Academy to learn all the strategies, and tips you’ll need to become a fully prepared remote manager. It’s comprehensive and even suitable for people with absolutely no previous remote experience. At the end, you’ll get a certification to prove your skills as a remote worker.
