Now, we don’t like jumping on the old bandwagon, but with the unprecedented change in the way companies need to work while we are under measures to stop the spread of COVID-19, our founder Victoria wanted to share some of her insights from working remotely, internationally and onsite with teams over the past few years. We hope this helps you, as a marketing team, if you suddenly find yourself working from home..

“I’ve worked on projects where the team, having never met IRL, been scattered across Western Europe, Australia and up and down the UK. And it’s very possible to deliver great work, when the team has the tools they need to communicate, and you all sign up to communicating in a more structured way. In some ways the enforced distance can give you some time to ruminate on things a little more, so you get to refine your thinking before you sit in front of others.

This new way of working will be an adjustment for some, so if anything, sharing my learnings might be a little helpful to any teams navigating this ‘new normal’, no matter how short term.”

Marketing Planning

Your marketing plan is the roadmap and direction for marketing teams and key stakeholders.

But it is a constantly changing, fluid document. You just need to evolve it to make sure that it is still useable when you, your stakeholders, and your clients, are working from home.

Have you considered changing up your software? So, rather than relying on version control for a spreadsheet, consider moving to project management software like Trello or Notion.

Software like this also lets you upload visuals and set up a calendar view, so you can track what goes live, on what day, and assign owners, so that each of your team can keep on top of who’s doing what, and what they need to do next.

Also you could consider setting up approval labels so you can mark campaigns through different phases.

Clarity of ownership, SLAs for feedback and approvals (set up ahead of time) will help you to stay on track to deliver your campaigns on time when everyone is remote.

You might need to get a little ahead of your planning, so you have adequate time to get the feedback (and buy in) from your senior management, finance team or product teams for delivery, but a sketched out forward plan can be firmed up closer to the dates.

Media Planning

Consider how the platforms mentioned above could also help you to show your different planned media weights, alongside narratives for clear cast clearance, and more.

Where you might have usually expected meetings in person as a media brief response develops, consider how these developing responses might be shared - either as a live, ‘work in progress’ with notes to your stakeholders (or client) as or as static snapshots that you capture at key points as you proceed.

For the short-term, you might consider switching out some media channels in your plan to adjust for the changes in your consumer behaviour - investing more in digital rather than on public transport, for example, as more of your audience start to spend more time at home.

Creative

Platforms like Figma allow for creative feedback to be collaborated on directly within a document. This means that you avoid that rather painful trying-to-signpost-to-the-thing-you’re-feeding-back-on as well as writing out the actual feedback in a document where images aren’t easily embedded (hello Word and Powerpoint) suddenly can disappear.

You’ll still need a feedback owner, someone in charge of collating such feedback and keeping everyone on track, but you can distil this into actions for your design team pretty easily.

Figma also embeds into Notion - so you can create something like this example of a pre-made board.

Content & Copy

For your content strategy, you’ll probably have a way of showing all of your content in plan, but your visuals might be somewhere separate.

Why not use this as an opportunity to move away from sheets and sheets of info, and move to a platform that lets you view and approve in one place? Social scheduling tools like Sprout Social and Planable let you do this - and are, in my view, much better for team collaboration than Hootsuite, but if migrating is a step too far at this stage, then perhaps carving out a separate place to manage your content approvals from your overall marketing plan is a good idea. It could be a mirror Trello board, for example.

Chances are you’ll be using the 80:20 rule for your planned vs reactive content, so it’s probably a good idea to review, and make sure everyone is familiar with your social media policy.

Over-processing social can be the killer of creativity for some teams. Rather than making your team wait on approvals (while some big news breaks, something goes viral that you want to jump on or while you clarify the context of a meme), make sure the whole organisation is signed up to your social media terms and apply, a little bit of trust and flexibility.

It is also a good idea to make sure that your social media teams know how to be reflective of your brand tone, and ensure senior management is aware of how this will work going forward.

Over-communicate

From C-Suite, to marketing heads, to product marketing managers, to marketing assistants, this new way of working will be weird. If you’re a manager, it can be hard to balance the feeling of being able to check in with your team without feeling like you’re losing sight of what’s happening - and, on the other side of the coin, making sure that you’re not micro managing.

Working from home for marketing teams can feel quite daunting, especially if the rest of the organisation needs clarity on what you’re doing at the moment.

So if in doubt, over-communicate.

You might forget how much those little conversations with your team can shape the direction of what you’re working on, when you’re physically all in the same room, so creating space to talk, share ideas and collaborate is really important to keeping a happy team, while working from home.

And use tech to help you - perhaps it’s Slack, perhaps it’s Microsoft Teams, perhaps it’s regular updates on Whatsapp and group video conference calls.

Explain what you’re up to, maybe you could provide a brief update to your leadership team on what’s happened that day, or that week, as everyone adjusts to being less visible.

If you’re managing a team, actually having everything down in writing can be useful too, so you and they know exactly what ‘s expected, and what they need to be focussing on.

And while we’re on the subject, video calling

Make time for video check ins and catch ups, but while you do it:

Be on time
Be ‘in the room’ - put your phone on silent and close other browser windows
Pop yourself on mute when you’re not talking - if you’re taking notes the sound of typing could be pretty annoying for the rest of the callers
Find your lighting: you know the rules you have when it comes to selfies? Apply them to video calling too - pop a light behind your camera, not behind you, so you’re not a big old blur for the rest of your attendees
Send a quick text, slack message or email beforehand checking with the person they’re good to jump into video. Avoid the ‘X is trying to call you’ panic search for headphones, brushing crumbs off yourself, putting something presentable on, frantically brushing your hair if you’ve added another dry shampoo day…
Agree where you’re going to video call from and share a link with the group, there are SO many options these days: Zoom, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, Skype, GoToMeeting, BlueJeans…give them a go and see which works best for you and your clients.

Keep up with your non-colleagues too

Keep up with your network - if you’re not going to see them so much for a drink after work, at events, conferences or meetings, then keeping up with each other online is super important too.

Humans are sociable creatures - and us marketers are especially geared towards being people-people, as it’s part of our job. We know that social interaction can be so important for wellbeing, happiness which both impact your ability to work for your team, your busines, brand or clients - so make sure you take the time to reach out and chat.

Talking things through with someone in a similar boat to you can make a challenge that did feel monstrous, suddenly feel achieveable, so reach out, we guarantee it’ll help.

We’ve created a Slack just for this, just for marketers, so fill in this form to join.