Collaborate Successfully with Your Marketing Team with These 7 Techniques

The goal for the marketing division is pretty much the same in every company: Work faster and more effectively to increase reach, the numbers of leads generated, and revenues for the company.

Online services have made it possible to move more swiftly than ever with promotions. Yet hundreds of marketing teams still aren’t reaching their full potential, and that could be the result of poor collaboration.

When it comes to the success of your business, you should never underestimate the power and potential of collaborating with others. If you’re looking to raise the level of collaboration among the creative members of your marketing team, ask yourself honestly how well they observe the following tips:

1. Break Down Virtual Walls

Marketing in 2015 often features several barriers that prevent teams from staying on the same page, especially if telecommuting is involved. According to Forbes, examples of the major walls that collaborators should overcome include:

• Unclear goals
• Poor communication between managers and team members
• Indecisive management

In order to leap over these barriers and create open interactions among all the players, both the employees and employers must master the proper forms of communication. This includes circulating clear policies and goals, and sending a copy to every collaborator, then observing those policies and goals to the letter unless a majority consensus calls for change.

In short, keeping all parties informed and giving each a voice is the best way to knock down any barriers during collaboration.

2. Establish Clear Leadership

An uncertain leader will inevitably create distrust and resistance in your employees, who most likely accepted the job with the anticipation of a clear chain of command they could respect and work with. If that command chain is missing at the collaborating stage, the result will be disastrous.

Sometimes more than one person will attempt to take charge, leading to contention and likely very little progress. During other, arguably worse situations, no one will take charge, and nothing gets accomplished.

Every project needs a clear leader as well as a transparent decision-making process that collaborators can respect and won’t question.

3. Use the Right Software

Use of the best software for collaboration purposes is crucial and cannot be underestimated. Email and telephone services are useful tools, but they’re extremely limited for their sharing capabilities.

You need a marketing-friendly project management platform with which you can both assign tasks and gather the content associated with each of them. According to Andrew Filev, CEO of Wrike, a collaboration software company, “As a marketing manager, it’s vital that you choose a collaboration software that gives you visibility into everything your team is working on. At the same time, it needs to be easy for team members to plan campaigns, assign tasks, collaborate in real time, and stay updated without having to schedule status meetings.”

4. Motivate Employees

Employees motivated with other incentives will usually work harder, faster, and at a higher level of quality than those who receive only a paycheck. Similarly, teams who face the prospect of earning extra perks for a job well done typically work better together.

For example, you could offer incentives such as a free group lunch, prime parking passes, or small bonuses to the team that generates the most page views with its marketing campaign. Such perks for extra motivation will likely result in hikes in efficiency and general collaborative quality.

5. Encourage Creativity

Giving every team member a voice and applauding new ideas rather than stifling them is one of the most productive things you can do in a collaboration. When members of your marketing team come up with ideas, don’t shoot them down, even if they initially sound crazy.

Praise your people for presenting their ideas, then search for the logical reasons why they might or might not work. This should encourage all your collaborators to generate further ideas rather than keep them to themselves.

6. Prove Your Trust

Employees are much more likely to work harder and better if they can be certain you trust them to perform the job. Prove to them that you trust them by allowing decision-making capability at every level of the marketing team.

For instance, let the content specialists choose the topic and then have the project manager approve the content that gets generated out of that topic. Giving some decision-making power to each party helps to develop a sense of project ownership among everyone—and that almost always yields more satisfying results.

7. Define Perspectives

Collaboration among marketers is easier if everyone shares the right perspective. There are four kinds of perspective that your team members should develop together:

• Enterprise Perspective: Each member has a comprehensive understanding of the main goals and purposes of the company.
• Cross-Functional Perspective: Each member understands the needs, metrics, incentives, and deliverables mandatory for each project he or she is working on.
• Customer Perspective: Each member understands not only the customer’s desires, but also the processes necessary to deliver what the customer wants.
• Self-Management Perspective: Each member takes responsibility for his or her own actions and exhibits self-control if challenged.

Instilling each of the foregoing perspectives in all of your team members is integral to a successful collaboration on every project. Let your employees know your expectations for every aspect, so collaborative teams will understand and share the goals and policies that will keep their actions focused on the big picture.