Trends we can expect
The post-covid world is a topic that was widely covered. In the meantime, there were plenty of other influences on supply chains, customer behaviour and more parts of the business. But one part of the work-life impact is still in development and that’s the final situation around remote work. And fully or partially remote marketing teams.
Companies are just now entering the phase of returning completely to normal mode.
And it seems that remote work is here to stay. Even one of the most rigid businesses as banks are in many cases not return to on-site full staff.
Statistics for remote work in 2022
During last year the expectations regarding remote work were high. 97% of employees did not want to go back to the office full-time, with 61% expecting to be fully remote. That opened options to increase pool HR with remote hiring.
In 2022 the trend seems to be unchanged. 85% of managers believe that having teams with remote workers will become a new norm. With a potentially positive impact on employee fluctuation, as 74% of the workers say, the possibility of remote work would make them less likely to leave.
What impact would this have on marketing teams?
Marketing operations will be crucial
For any company that hasn’t solved its marketing processes, this will mean growing inefficiency, which doesn’t necessarily mean losing money. But definitely will mean not grabbing new opportunities fast enough.
And we’ve seen that more than 37% of companies haven’t even started to solve the organization of their marketing team in a more sophisticated way.
You can expect your marketing team to:
- spend more time preparing reports and updates
- lose a certain portion of calendar capacity for syncs between people and teams
- create more files for collaboration, putting higher strain on navigation between them
That can easily lead to 8 hours per month for each marketer lost to operations.
Role of the kitchen for your marketing team
It was either kitchen, a place with a coffee machine or a chill-out zone you had in your office, but whatever it was it was single-handedly the most important place in your office for the effectiveness of your employees.
There are multiple factors for this, that were helping all departments within your company:
- the social aspect and recharging time
- spread of news
- knowledge sharing
But it is not an overstatement that it will most hardly impact the marketing team:
- visibility of activities within other channels
- fast checking on structural information as UTMs
- a request for collaboration between different specializations
- updates on the newest trends
- the freshest results on any A/B tests
- immediate feedback on any drafts
- creative brainstormings
- mouth-to-mouth reporting
Even though this might have consumed some time, it easily saved multiple hours of calls or waiting for a response on any messaging service you are using. Assuring undisturbed focus on what needed to be done.
The marketing team vs. other departments
The marketing team has one unique challenge, due to the growing complexity of activities and specializations within, you can easily experience silos within a single department/team.
Other teams tend to focus on the same type of work and have much fewer differences between their activities, whereas marketers are more likely to do different things, that are just leading towards the same direction (hopefully).
Get your marketing team a new kitchen
With the trend of remote work probably never leaving again completely, it will become crucial to create a new virtual place for your marketing team.
Place where they cannot sadly socialize, but you will lose an as small part of the benefits of the “kitchen” as possible. Single source of truth that will assure that even a fully remote marketing team will stay on the same page and will easily come up or spot new opportunities for growth.
Isn’t your Slack or internal chat enough?
Sadly it isn’t. The issue with any messaging service is that it will solve one request at the moment and after a few days once somebody will forget it will be hard to find anything again. Also most likely you will get solutions on a one-to-one basis and not the needed visibility for the whole team.
The same goes for calls, as the notes in a personal notebook (online or off-line) that will be in that other backpack or other software will just pile up time that your marketer will spend looking for it.
So what about project management tools?
Now that’s a step in the right direction. Project management is a big part of the marketing process and a single place for the whole team can do a lot for effectiveness.
You will just need to make sure, that you will pick the right tool as each of them is good for a certain thing. Do you need rather task tracking or visibility or information sharing? Will it be Monday, Asana or Notion?
In the end, you will most likely run into a situation, where any project management will simply miss on other needs and nearly all of them on the marketing needs of your team. Dashboards with data, Gant charts with a marketing plan and use of the channels, pacing and performance of the campaign.
The marketing team needs a marketing operations platform
Simply, anything built for a general-purpose will always be a compromise. That’s why you will need something created for marketing and able to accommodate all specializations and strategic overviews as well.
Check with your team what they need and if they were not already looking for some solution.
We think that Storymkrs is exactly what they need as we are building with marketers for marketers.
But disregarding that – get your marketing team a new “virtual kitchen!”
