Like a lot of business departments, marketing teams are evolving in response to wider organisational demands, as well as those imposed by the end customer. With these changes manifesting themselves in both people and processes, it’s more important than ever to ensure team cohesion so that everything continues to work together like a well-oiled engine. It’s what interchangeable buzzwords like collaborative marketing, connected marketing and, more recently, synergistic marketing all aim to achieve. And with marketing teams becoming increasingly disparate through remote, virtual and multi-disciplinary working, this kind of team dynamic is taking on even greater relevance in 2017.
“The key challenge is, how do we make everyone work together?” asks Uri Baruchin, head of strategy at The Partners. “Even with unifying ideas, different channels and platforms have their own fundamental tendencies which pull things in different directions. Not to mention separate teams and agencies squabbling over the same budget pot. So the challenge is how do we make everyone play better together?”
Uri adds: “The biggest pitfall is that while chasing a perfectly optimised and interconnected team, agency roster and ecosystem, you could sacrifice a lot of agility, which is so essential in today’s light-speed media landscape of social-media-charged content delivery.”
So, how do synergistic marketing teams balance collaboration and connectedness with agility? What tools and technologies are they leveraging? And what does it take to become hyper-efficient in 2017?
Build an interconnected ecosystem
Creating an efficient marketing team necessitates a significant degree of synergy in which everyone works towards the same objectives. It’s the old adage ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’. A lot of teams pay lip service to it but stand-out brands can evidence it.
Relocation service provider Cartus was one of the brands nominated in B2B Marketing’s People Awards for ‘Marketing team of the year’ this year. Shelley Northrop, VP of marketing at Cartus, comments: “My team is most effective when they understand the company goals and strategies, and can clearly see the positive impact they’re having on driving business growth for our company. The more you can draw a clear line from the work the team is doing to the success of your company, the more motivated your employees will be.
“We’ve made a concerted effort to get our marketing team out working side-by-side with our business. Employees at every level in the marketing team attend meetings with our account managers, or sit with a salesperson, to better understand what their goals and challenges are. We’ve made it very clear that we exist to help our sales team and account managers win business and retain existing accounts. And our efforts are paying off.”
It’s clear the most effective marketing teams have this synergistic philosophy ingrained in everything they do. Every member understands the part they play within an interconnected ecosystem and how their role helps support not just marketing objectives but wider business goals too.
Top tips for running a slick marketing teamShelley Northrop, VP of marketing at Cartus, offers her top advice to help marketing teams achieve hyper-efficiency. Schedule top management from all areas of your business to speak to your marketing team about company goals at regular intervals.Make sure your team is regularly attending – and speaking to – company calls and meetings to enhance their own visibility, as well as better understand issues and ‘what’s going on’ in the field.Empower your team. Let – and encourage – team members to take the lead in planning team events and activities.Have team members actually working on the projects present on them, versus simply having management do the talking. It gives younger and/or newer employees experience and visibility, and showcases the breadth/depth of talent on your team.
Exploit collaborative technology
True team synergy relies on transparency, collaborative capabilities and creative thinking, and today’s technology landscape provides the perfect environment to foster all of this. The plethora of marketing tools available is pretty considerable, but there are a number of solutions that are particularly popular.
Carrie Mcllveen, US director of marketing at Metia, reveals her favourite apps are Trello Board, Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business, which her team uses to organise projects, assign tasks, view real-time status updates, host resources and facilitate virtual meetings. She explains there are challenges around collaborative working, but technology combined with specific marketing methodologies can help alleviate this.
“When getting multiple stakeholders aligned, it can be somewhat difficult to remain agile – even when using Agile marketing principles. But by implementing parts of the agile methodology it can benefit teams to change from a game of chance to a game of strategy. For example, incorporating a few Agile marketing tools (e.g. Kanban boards and Sprints) can support teams to remain nimble and help them deliver effectively on projects with controllable goals.
“Sprints help us identify availability for individual tasks, set assignments, and hold team members accountable. Teams can also create or improve their own Kanban board visual layouts based on how the teams work together – giving them the flexibility to use the methodology that works best for their needs.”
Online project management tools are unsurprisingly popular given the fact marketing teams increasingly work across different time zones and geographies. The ability to access information at any time and in any place promotes efficient workflow, but it also means marketing activity is visible to every stakeholder, which enables other business functions to step in and collaborate when appropriate.
A previous winner of ‘Marketer of the year’ at the B2B Marketing Awards, Justine Arthur, head of global campaign planning and programme management at BT, is another fan of Skype for Business, as well as Webex. “As my team are based in the UK, US, Hong Kong and Germany, it’s vital we use web conferencing tools with video,” she explains. “It really helps to get to know the team and build stronger relationships. Plus by calling via our PCs over Wifi (VoIP), our calls are free.”
Justine continues: “We [also] use Salesforce Chatter to collaborate and engage the teams, sharing updates, content, videos or in many instances reaching out to colleagues and starting discussions. We ‘like’ and share each other’s posts, and the teams share photos of events they’ve taken part in.”
Know your team
Technology is a valuable tool within synergistic marketing teams, but hyper efficiency is born out of really knowing and understanding team members.
Justine reveals: “Once a month we come together for ‘Watercooler Wednesdays’ where we meet at 1pm (7am in Dallas, 8pm in Hong Kong) and have a non-work related catch-up – one team member’s usually in their PJs and another in their party gear. Chats around a ‘virtual watercooler’ are our way of getting together instead of having team drinks.
“It’s a brand new team with new job roles, and we’re all still finding our feet with roles evolving by the week. It’s also a major change transformation role that requires challenging regional teams on campaign plans and strategy, which makes it a tough stakeholder management role too.
“I wanted to ensure we got to know and understand each other better, what makes us tick, our work environment and cultures. I wanted the team to reach out to each other for help and guidance, rather than me being the first point of call for everything. I needed a way of breaking down barriers and unifying the team, and [this approach] has been really well received.
“The team is now much more confident and engaged on our team calls, working together, collaborating to solve problems and coming up with new and improved ways of doing things, which ultimately is making them more effective and efficient in their roles.”
Shelley is also big believer in the idea that the better team members know each other, the more effective the whole team becomes. Not only do her marketing colleagues take part in lots of fun team-building activities, they buddy up in seemingly unlikely working partnerships.
“We have employees on our team who have been with the company over 35 years, and others with just a few months tenure, and the age range is just as wide,” she says. “We’ve paired more tenured employees with newer (and let’s face it, often younger) employees and the results have been remarkable. Our younger employees are fearless, and eager to try new approaches, and if you can harness that energy, and infuse it with the wisdom of someone who understands our industry and our clients, you can produce some pretty powerful campaigns.
