The current pandemic caused severe economic effects. Businesses of all sizes suffered and some had no choice but to declare bankruptcy and close their doors permanently. Or, they had their workers work from home.
Amidst this unfortunate situation, one of the businesses that continues to thrive is digital marketing. And perhaps one of the main reasons why is because of the flexibility involved in the work processes.
Marketing teams are well-suited to run and thrive off-site since marketers are natural communicators with most of their work taking place in the digital landscape. However, if your team is used to working onsite, remote work may feel strange and result in lower productivity. After all, remote teams require a particular approach in order to be effective and productive.
How Digital Marketers Can Work More Productively From Home
With that said, here are the best tips and practices you can implement in creating and maintaining a productive work-from-home digital agency.
1. The Right Tools Make a Big Difference
Having the right tools is a key component of any world-class digital marketing team. Unfortunately, with hundreds of marketing tools available today, choosing the right ones can be outright confusing.
Below is a simple guide on the types of tools you need and a recommended software for each tool.
Communication Tools
Perhaps the most critical element of any collaborative effort when working from home is proper communication. From instant messaging to video calls, you’ll need to find a communication tool that suits your team’s needs.
One of the best tools for instant messaging is Slack. For video calls, Skype still has your back along with the more popular software nowadays, Zoom.
Task Allocation Tools
It’s very important to ensure that every member of your marketing team knows and understands their responsibilities. Missed deadlines push back projects and can have ripple effects within the teams working on the project. However, having organized task management in place, you can make sure that your staff knows who’s working on what.
For this reason, you can use task-allocation tools such as Teamwork, Trello, and ClickUp. These tools allow you to assign tasks with due dates and instructions to each member of your team.
Productivity Tools
Employees who work from home are far more productive than those working in an office setting. Still, you may want to use software that can organize and track your team’s workload.
Some of the best productivity and time-tracking tools are HubSpot, DeskTime, TimeCamp, and Hours.
Collaborative Working Tools
The most popular and free software used by marketing teams is from Google. Google’s suite of softwares lets 10 or more people from different countries use the same sheet or doc at the same time. Changes happen in real-time so each member can work on always updated information.
Pro Tip: Providing the best tools isn’t the end. You also need to make sure that everyone is on the same page. Everyone should be using the same software. Otherwise, it can be difficult for you to assess performance and track projects.
2. Document It All
Since your team isn’t gathered in the same place, it’s important that all your procedures, policies, and processes are documented.
During your weekly meetings, document the accomplishments of your remote marketers. Always provide special recognition to the top performers and explain how their work contributed to the team’s goals and mission.
Also, make sure to create metrics to measure the results of your marketing efforts. This way, you can better manage your team or use the documents later on.
In addition, have each marketer document their own daily processes so that other team members or even future employees can seamlessly step in as needed.
3. Plan and Prepare for Meetings
In an office setting, colleagues could easily walk over to a teammate’s desk to resolve a problem or ask a quick question. When employees work from home, this is not as easily done.
This results in increased meetings scheduled on the calendar, ensuring that everyone is in sync. A study revealed that the frequency or number of meetings per individual has increased by about 13 percent due to the increase in remote workers. Meanwhile, the length of meetings has dropped by 11 percent. Meaning, remote teams are more likely to have frequent, quick meetings.
With the frequency of meetings increasing, it’s best that you plan out your meetings during the ideal times and dates aside from the recurring monthly, bi-weekly, and weekly status meetings.
In addition, your marketers need to take some time to familiarize themselves with the meeting platform the day before the meeting. This ensures that everyone gets started on time and maintains a steady collaboration throughout the meeting.
4. Stay Secure
Managing remote marketing can increase the threat to information security. Mitigate potential cybersecurity risks by having your remote team use remote-access such as VPNs in order to create secure connections wherever and whenever they use the internet.
There are hundreds of VPN providers available, but some of the best include NordVPN, Surfshank, ExpressVPN, and IPVanish.
Also, you need to be careful about sharing credentials across various web-based services that your team uses. In addition, it’s crucial that you use proper etiquette when handling devices so that work data is kept secure.
- Don’t save personal documents on your work computer.
- Don’t shop online. Ad popups and cookies from shopping sites can slow down your work computer.
- Don’t browse websites that you wouldn’t show your boss. You shouldn’t do it in an office space, but even more so on a work computer.
- Only use your work email. Phishing emails and viruses can wind up in your work device through personal emails.
Working from home requires a specific approach and practices in order to be effective. However, if done correctly, you can create an effective and productive remote digital marketing team.
