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Three Golden Guidelines of Advertising and marketing Collaboration

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In our fast-changing digital landscape, creating attention-grabbing marketing campaigns requires a wide range of expertise and skills. Building a cross-functional marketing team that draws talent from across your company can improve your marketing strategy and execution.

It has been shown that bringing employees together from a company releases creativity and innovation and produces results. Individual employees can also benefit from being part of a company-wide team. Their participation can help them develop their management or leadership skills, foster their creativity, and become more engaged with their colleagues.

A collaborative approach to marketing starts with identifying the right people to join the team, developing processes to make members work together smoothly, and continuously improving to ensure your team delivers quality storytelling over time. Below are three golden rules for optimizing collaboration inside and outside your marketing team.

Marketing Collaboration Golden Rule # 1: Build a Cross-Functional Team

Social media and digital marketing are no longer a one-person task and are no longer the sole responsibility of the marketing department. Digital marketing teams today need expertise from their product, sales, legal and HR departments as well as creative inspiration. If you routinely work with contractors, agencies, or freelancers, don’t overlook them as potential members of your team. Anyone with knowledge can help your team achieve their goals and has the potential to be a great addition.

Even a team of highly motivated and committed members will not be successful without common goals. Employees in all departments of a company have their own goals, responsibilities and deadlines. Cross-functional team members who have a bias towards their own department’s goals can create friction and affect the marketing team’s ability to find a way forward.

To minimize conflict, develop clearly defined goals that all team members can work toward regardless of their other goals. For example, instead of trying to get a product specialist with a development deadline to share the same goal as a social media producer who has to fill out a content calendar, set a stand-alone goal that involves both – and the rest of the team – as Publication of six visual product-related content per month.

Marketing Collaboration Golden Rule # 2: Design a workflow that works

A robust workflow is critical to the ability of cross-functional marketing teams to produce content quickly and creatively. You can also publish campaigns efficiently and with less chance of errors.

Setting up your marketing team’s workflow begins with defining each task, including the main tasks of asset management, idea generation, content planning, production, approval, publishing, community management, and reporting. Then decide who will do each task and when. For example, someone on your product team can provide information about upcoming releases or review product information on social media posts. A member of your legal team may approve certain types of messages or posts as the final step before they are published. In a large company, these tasks can be spread across different departments, while some employees do them all in a smaller company.

The implementation of your workflow is possible with a patchwork system of e-mails, spreadsheets and file sharing. However, collaboration tools are a far more reliable solution. With the help of online tools, you can set up, consolidate and automate workflows so that employees can efficiently coordinate their work regardless of their location.

Marketing Collaboration Golden Rule # 3: Tell a Consistent Story

People love to talk about viral posts, but good marketers know this is a short-term strategy at best. The truth is, brand building is about showing up day in and day out and doing the work that it takes to create compelling stories that lead to bigger narratives and nurture relationships with your dedicated community. Consistency beats creativity every time.

To tell your brand story over time, your cross-functional team needs to continuously improve the process. Make sure your team members are constantly listening to qualitative feedback, including comments, @mentions, direct messages, and quantitative feedback in the form of analytics. By converting feedback into insights that can be incorporated into each content release cycle, your team will see continuous improvement in the quality and relevance of the content they produce.

Conclusion

By bringing together people with different skills and perspectives, your company can create broader and more relevant marketing content. Following a few best practices, including identifying the right team members, defining common goals, and investing in tools to make collaboration easier, can help businesses of all sizes consistently create marketing campaigns that get online attention and increase bottom line results.

Author: Thibaud Clement

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