10 Keys for Better Marketing Collaboration

Marketing collaboration can be incredibly powerful, enabling your business to generate creative new ideas, work on more complex campaigns, and execute your strategic vision more consistently. That said, marketing collaboration isn’t always easy or straightforward.

So what are the most important keys for better marketing collaboration overall?

Why Is Marketing Collaboration So Important?

Why is it that marketing collaboration is so important in the first place?

Collaboration can be valuable in a wide variety of business contexts, but it’s especially important in the realm of marketing because it demands so much creativity and teamwork. If you want to come up with truly unique, relevant ideas, you need a diverse team of people who can put their heads together, challenge each other, and collaboratively brainstorm.

Additionally, marketing effectively requires in-depth knowledge of your target audience and familiarity with a range of different concepts, such as who your customer base is, who your competitors are, what your finances look like, and more. Being able to collaborate allows you to tap into expertise of other people and incorporate those insights into your work.

Marketing is also a demanding field, and working closely with other people lessens the pressure. If you have a dozen or more people on a project, no one is going to feel unduly burdened – and you’ll be able to scale your efforts much easier.

Keys for Better Marketing Collaboration

Optimizing for marketing collaboration can be challenging, but it’s much easier with these strategies:

1.   Appoint great leaders. Culture, work ethic, and collaborative potential tends to flow from the top down in most marketing departments and in most businesses. Accordingly, you need to have the best possible leaders in place, to set a great example and lead your team to success. If your CMO leaves or is temporarily overburdened, you should appoint an interim CMO in their stead. And if you notice any issues with your leaders, consider working with them or replacing them to make sure you have the best possible fit.

2.   Get everyone aligned with the overarching vision. Collaboration is easier when everyone has a shared overarching vision. If you have two or three people each pursuing slightly different versions of the same goal, they aren’t going to be in alignment when brainstorming or working together. Make it clear to your marketing department, but also your entire organization, what the vision is.

3.   Use the right tools and technologies. Access to the right tools and technologies can make collaboration much easier. When teams can consistently and easily get in contact with each other, communication barriers break down.

4.   Maintain an open, collaborative culture. Strive to keep an open, collaborative culture in your organization. If people feel like they always have the opportunity to be heard, and if your environment rewards people for speaking openly, you’re going to have a much easier time sharing ideas, resolving conflicts, and working as a team generally.

5.   Hire exceptional talent. Some people are better collaborators than others. Some people are more competent than others. Marketing collaboration gets much easier when you have a full team of people who are both competent and good collaborators. That requires you to recruit, hire, and train wisely.

6.   Break down silos. The silo mentality in business is extremely limiting. It prevents departments from communicating effectively, and sometimes it stops them from reaching out to each other altogether. You can work to bring down these silos by encouraging more cross training and development, creating hybrid roles, and rewarding people for reaching across departmental lines.

7.   Encourage spontaneous meetings. Meetings aren’t always fun, and they can sometimes waste time, but they can also bring people together. Spontaneous meetings, especially, can break people from the rigidity of their routines and allow for more effective, direct communication.

8.   Recognize individual strengths and weaknesses. The marketing collaboration requires you to harness the full strengths of your individual team members, while compensating for their weaknesses. You need to recognize those individual strengths and weaknesses if you want to balance this correctly.

9.   Provide ample feedback. Both positive and negative feedback are essential for getting the performances you require. Make sure you provide ample feedback to your marketing team members at every opportunity.

10.   Celebrate wins together. Celebrate together, even for relatively small wins. It’s a way to foster camaraderie and help people understand that they’re working together to achieve something greater. This is especially important for cross-departmental collaborations, as it’s an opportunity for bonding and teambuilding to occur.

Finding a way to collaborate more easily and smoothly in your marketing department is going to pay off in spades in the future. With your teams and departments working more closely together, you’ll be able to milk more value out of your investments and ultimately help your marketing department thrive.