5 Tips for Building Your Own Remote Digital Marketing Team

A key goal of many businesses is to build a strong online presence, whether it’s a blog, podcast, or startup. If your business website is fully optimized, your brand well developed, and blog set up properly to help you establish authority, it may be time to scale things up and bolster your online presence by hiring a remote digital marketing team.

Scale Your Business with a Digital Marketing Team

Businesses today use digital marketing channels such as Google search, social media, email, mobile apps, and websites to grow their brands online and connect with prospective customers. This is a daunting task to perform digital marketing on your own.

Digital marketing entails various activities for growing your brand and business online, including social media posting, online advertising, and video content creation. Because of all the tasks required in effective digital marketing, the strategy is most effective when it’s a collaborative process.

Some of the most successful digital marketing campaigns take a village to execute, which is where building a solid digital marketing team comes in to play. You can even employ a remote marketing team to help you implement effective digital marketing that grows your business.

Tips to Build a Remote Digital Marketing Team

The biggest benefits of using a remote employee or remote contractors to help with your digital marketing is not only the cost saving and productivity gains, but also the ability to hire the best person for the job. As Ross Tavendale of IdeasMadeDigital.com observes, “You get the best people in the world, not the best people in your geographic location.”

Here are some essential tips for building your own remote digital marketing team that will help you deploy a cohesive, well-oiled online marketing machine that brings results:

1. Lay Down the Challenges You are Facing

Start off by determining the challenges you are facing and how a remote marketer can help you tackle them successfully. Make a list of all the actions and projects you envision the remote marketer will be working on, such as promoting your new book or blog.

Outline the expected workload, time this work will take and whether the marketers need to be exclusively working with you. This relates to the compensation, so do not skip it.

If your projects do not require that much time, consider the possibility of hiring a freelancer on a short-term basis. You can find digital marketers for hire on Google search, social media, and remote job platforms like Hubstaff Talent, Toptal and Authentic.

2. Establish Personal Connection with Your Talents

51% to 79 % of virtual workers have reported that lack of a personal relationship/connection causes conflict and dissension within a team. Remove this obstacle by first establishing a cordial and professional relationship with remote workers you hire.

A personal connection can come in handy when pairing personalities to marketing tasks or platforms, thereby helping to launch more compelling marketing campaigns.

Encourage friendships to develop between your team members by allowing a little fun and random chats sometimes, depending on your business. This helps to relax, create good mood and foster bonding.

A team that understands each other’s personalities and is on the same page is more successful.

3. Create a Streamlined Mode of Communication

Your hired digital marketing talents need a means of contacting the owner or senior staff, and also accessing marketing instructions. Oftentimes marketers have to adjust a newsletter scheduled to go out in 20 minutes, a Google Adwords ad performance or A/B test a conversion page copy. Decisions need to be taken fast that may require contacting owners. You can achieve this using email, chat tools and task managing apps.

Team chat tools like Slack allow for effective communication channels to be created for both work-related and non-work-related discussions. Flow, Trello and Asana are other solid task managing apps allowing your team to stay on board at all times, communicate effectively so you can keep in touch, and track project progress no matter where you all are. Skype, Zoom, and Google Hangouts are favorite tools for quick video calls.

4. Deliberately Overcommunicate

Mandy Brown, the CEO of Editorially, a collaborative writing platform that was acquired by Vox Media, advocates that remote teams overcommunicate on purpose. She explains:

“On a remote team, opportunities for misunderstanding between teammates distributed across both time and geography magnify. The best way to avoid situations where one person says, 'Wait, I thought we agreed on X?' and the other replies, 'No, it was Y, wasn’t it?' is to communicate decisions and plans redundantly."

For example: a remote team may brainstorm ideas over a video call, then share notes from that brainstorm via email, then discuss it further amongst themselves over chat and instant message, then post revised and updated notes to an internal wiki,” Brown adds. “At each point of communication there’s opportunity for questions and clarification.”

5. Keep in the Loop Always

Grant your marketing team admin rights to the accounts you have on social media, advertising and analytical tools so they can do their job, but make sure you keep in the look and retain ownership.

Sign in and check the accounts from time to time. Discuss your expectations with each individual marketer, making sure you are clear on goals, milestones, and expected time needed to complete a task.

Set aside time each week for an online team catch-up, preferably via video, so that employees get the face-to-face interaction they’d enjoy in an office. Listen to your team’s views, and agree together on the way forward.

In addition, pay simple acts of kindness to individual marketers, such as surprise compliments. This will all come together to strengthen team spirit and instill a sense of belonging and efficacy.