Collaborating for Successful Marketing Across Clients, Teams, & Time-Zones

A quote that never goes out of style is “Teamwork makes the dreamwork!” This is what comes to mind for me when thinking about collaboration for successful marketing. When collaborating, you must consider the many moving pieces and each individual person in order to make things work seamlessly. Below are a few points to take into consideration when working with teams in a virtual world:

• Clear Communication of expectations across clients, teams, and time zones

  • This is the number one way to ensure that you and your team can create the most successful collaboration in building your marketing plans. Knowing availability in advance and planning for each job to be done (i.e., deadlines, meeting times, etc.). Be respectful of team designated work hours and remember everyone has a life outside of work. With clear communication it can create a sense of inclusion and respect when working with multiple teams. Setting healthy working boundaries across each team from the beginning that then can be carried on throughout the collaborating journey.

• Have a plan for successful execution of the marketing strategy/goals

  • Create a plan for execution and lay out clear steps to get to completion of this plan. Make it very clear who oversees what and make sure deadlines are set to ensure the team can successfully complete the jobs to be done. Creating an all-team tracker can be extremely helpful, no matter what the responsibilities of each party may be. Having visibility to all open jobs to be done helps the team to work in a seamless manner and can keep tasks from falling through the cracks. When working across different time zones or with different teams, it can be easy to miss things. It’s great to build out an all-encompassing tracking system to ensure that the collaboration across teams is being communicated for the success of the marketing strategy.

• Utilize the virtual tools available to track projects and team/client’s availabilities

  • Being that we are living in the age of virtual everything, utilizing chats, video calls, email, etc. to stay connected as a team is the way to go. This allows for everyone to stay on top of their individual jobs to be done while also having a view into what everyone else across the team is working on. This also allows for every member to work together and brainstorm the best way to execute the tasks at hand. It’s always nice to have another brain to bounce ideas off of. Utilizing these tools that we have so readily available to us can help to create continuous collaboration across the country or even the globe. How great is it that you no longer need to be in the same place at the same time to successfully create a marketing campaign or strategy?

• Time-Zone Etiquette

  • Being respectful of people’s time creates a healthy means for cross team and/or global collaboration. Meeting as a team is so important because it allows for creative diversity and contributions from great minds across all teams involved in your marketing projects. Because working across time-zones is now more relevant than ever, you must keep the timing factor in mind and create a sense of empathy and respect for each individual team member. Showing the team that each person’s time is valuable ends up being invaluable to the creative process and keeps the team excited to be a part of the collaboration.

These are just a few things to think of to successfully collaborate across clients, teams, and time zones. These examples can be utilized to strategically create expectations to create a healthy working environment for every person who is a part of making things work as they should no matter where in the world they may be!