While many 1-to-2-person marketing teams dream of having a few extra people on board to help them execute their marketing efforts, having more people in the mix often leads to many challenges. Unless they have a very clear structure and protocols in place, companies with larger teams often find it difficult to determine which efforts to prioritize and encounter major roadblocks throughout the project management process.
These challenges become even more difficult when you’re dealing with distributed marketing teams that are spread across multiple offices, marketing to different regions, and often doing so in different languages. Because of these added factors, distributed marketing teams can also find it more difficult to collaborate, ensure brand consistency, and report on their collective success.
Unfortunately, when companies fail to address and resolve these challenges, the consequences can be devastating. For example, you might find that some marketing units have no trouble achieving their goals while others are struggling to implement a multi-channel marketing strategy that works. Lack of control over these efforts can also result in campaigns and efforts that are all over the place and not on brand, which can severely damage your brand reputation.
Effective and efficient organizations have systems in place to help their teams work together regardless of where they are in the world. Successful organizations have found a way to centralize their efforts, improve visibility and communication, and equip their teams with the tools they need to launch effective marketing efforts.
Today, we’re going to walk you through a few tips and tools to help you implement a system that will empower your distributed marketing team to collaborate and improve results across the board.
Improve Visibility and Collaboration by Adopting a Solution With Parent/Child Account Capabilities
You need to have a good foundation in place before you can improve efficiency and collaboration across your distributed marketing team. That means you need the right processes and tools to help facilitate communication, consolidate data and insights, and empower your team with the tools they need to execute your campaigns to the fullest.
While many companies let each marketing unit choose their marketing automation platform , this offers subteams little-to-no visibility of what their peers are doing. It also opens the door for them to surpass any type of approval process before launching their marketing efforts, leading to disjointed and off-brand marketing efforts. (Our friends at Sharp Europe actually came to us in an effort to solve this problem, which you can learn more about here.)
Adopting a marketing automation platform that supports a marketing network (also known as parent/child account capabilities) allows you to get your entire team on the same page. Marketing networks allow you to assign a “parent” or central account to manage the “child” accounts across your organization. The parent account is responsible for specifying which users have access to certain accounts, campaigns, and templates — as well as managing the approval process.
This model allows you to centralize your efforts, providing key stakeholders with improved visibility into your marketing initiatives and results across the organization. Using one platform also enables team members to collaborate on projects even if they’re working miles away from each other and paves the way for your team to share best practices and improve processes across the board.
Leverage Templates to Streamline Marketing Processes and Ensure Brand Consistency
One of the biggest challenges for large and distributed marketing teams is maintaining brand consistency. When your different marketing units are working on distinct projects with different priorities and deadlines, it can be easy to bypass an established approval process in an effort to get things out the door as soon as possible.
The problem with this approach is that it often results in messaging and design that don’t accurately represent your brand and do very little to build your trust and credibility. As a result, many of your leads will lose interest early on, even if your product or services are superior to those of your competitors.
Creating pre-approved templates for emails, forms, and landing pages to share across your distributed marketing team helps you eliminate this challenge and streamline processes — especially since it saves so much extra work for your team while also eliminating the potential for human error.
The right marketing automation platform should equip you with the tools you need to easily build, store, and share these templates with your team. Act-On has easy-to-use drag-and-drop tools that enable you to build professional and eye-catching templates that your distributed marketing team can leverage without having to know HTML.
Consolidate Your Data to Enhance Your Strategy Across the Board
Consolidating your data and then analyzing it into actionable insights is a challenge for many companies, especially those using multiple platforms and dealing with disconnected systems. But to improve collaboration and work with your entire distributed marketing team to enhance your marketing strategy, you need to gain visibility into your collective results.
Knowing which of your efforts are working and which need improvement enables you to come together to share best practices and identify what you can do to strengthen your marketing strategy. Tracking and consolidating your results in real-time also allows you to take immediate action to remediate any efforts that aren’t generating results. All of this allows your team to spend their time and effort on tasks that will yield the best results for your organization.
The right marketing automation platform should equip you with the tools you need to measure your marketing ROI and analyze performance. Act-On’s Data Studio, for example, allows you to consolidate your data from across your organization in one place and provides you with tools to easily dissect your results.
Our platform also integrates with leading CRMs and BI tools to make it easy for you to share data with other distributed marketing teams across your organization.
Choose a Tool That Enables Your Distributed Marketing Team to Implement an Effective Multi-Channel Strategy
In addition to searching for a solution with parent/child capabilities, you should look for a tool that allows you to streamline processes and enhance your marketing.
Act-On is designed to empower teams of all sizes with the resources they need understand their customers’ pain points, anticipate their needs, deliver targeted and effective multi-channel campaigns, and measure their marketing progress for consistent improvement and great ROI.
If you’d like to see our platform in action and learn how it can help your distributed marketing team achieve their goals, please schedule a demo with one of our marketing automation experts.