How to Unlock Teamwork with Marketing

Create Streamlined Collaboration with the Marketing Team

Brand manufacturers contain multiple departments working in action all at once. Product development creates products that are on-brand with the mission of the company. Marketing decides how to promote them. Sales builds relationships in the market and ensures conversions. Customer service tends to whatever comes up before and after the sale. And leadership always has to know who’s working on what.

The nature of collaboration today is more complex. There are new departments and sub-departments as brands spread their wings on new channels. Teams have physically spread out, too, with virtual and hybrid offices in every industry.

To keep getting work done efficiently, new physical realities and market demands have created a growing drag on collaboration. Imagine a marketing team that misses key features of a product that should be its selling point, or picture product listings that include data that’s incomplete or inaccurate. Purchases roll in, and then just as many returns and angry customers.

That situation isn’t hard to imagine, unfortunately. It is, however, easy to fix.

The marketing department is the team that pushes product information out to the world. That information has to be polished and true to the product and the design behind it. How, then, do you collaborate more efficiently and nurture the best marketing with a team that’s sometimes removed from every other department?

Get the marketing team excited about the right product features at the right time with the right language to wow the world. Here’s how to create streamlined cross-team collaboration with the marketing team.

Is cross-team collaboration new?

Cross-team collaboration is nothing new. There are higher demands, however, to collaborate in better ways today. First, teams have to align for a hyper-competitive market. Second, more departments are dreamed up as brands sell on more channels and build more partnerships than ever with other sellers and stakeholders. Brand leadership also wants more transparency into what’s going on as companies grow.

Cross-team collaboration is defined as any collection of different groups or individuals in a company who efficiently work together toward a common goal. Their skills and outcome are greater than the sum of all parts.

Collaboration done right leads to exponential creativity and effectiveness. Your teams will be brilliant together if you’ll just let them. Here’s how.

Top Business Practices for Better Cross-Team Collaboration

Product engineering and design, marketing, sales, web development… your brand might have a few people wearing multiple hats, or it might have multiple people in each department. Either way, there are a lot of moving parts (nay, hats) that are required for a single product launch.

There are certain business practices that support collaboration from every player. It all starts with clear and effective communication.

Follow the Leader

Multiple departments working together means multiple leaders will be involved. Everyone on the marketing team has to answer to the marketing director, and everyone in customer service has to answer to the customer service supervisor, etc.

That said, there must be a hierarchy of who calls the shots when departments collide. If there’s a big product launch coming up, product development will probably lead because they’ll have the timelines and specifications that marketing needs before they pull the trigger on campaigns.

Create these hierarchy guidelines to remind everyone what the linchpin items are and what all decisions depend on. This also helps keep teams from blowing other departments off because everyone is aligned with one key objective.

Designate the Tools of Choice

Specific types of team collaboration tools are listed in the following section, but first, know this: if you don’t designate the chosen tools in collaboration, then multiple tools will be in use and all of them will lose effectiveness.

For example, if you don’t set the standard for which app or platform is used for communications, then you’ll have strings of emails and threads of Slack chats and random text messages, all on related work topics. This is enormously inefficient, especially when collaborating with a marketing department that deals with huge volumes of digital collateral that has to be designed, reviewed, approved, and stored.

Team Collaboration Tools for Better Marketing

Streamlined collaboration always touches the marketing team. Can you imagine a marketing campaign that doesn’t align with a new product and its technical competitive edge? Can you imagine the duplication of work if product imagery isn’t organized and stored for use by marketing, sales, web development, and beyond?

Worst of all, can you imagine product listings littered all over the internet through a dozen sellers and sales channels without accurate product information listed?

Marketing is that first moment a product reaches the rest of the world. The marketing department is the team that pulls back the curtain. That moment is critical, and the marketing team is often at the center of a lot of cross-team collaboration to ensure that products are presented right.

There are the essential tools that brand manufacturers need today to make sure cross-team collaboration with the marketing department is successful.

Collaboration Tool #1: Product Information Management (PIM)

The marketing team works with a bigger marketing strategy as well as individual product listings, seller relationships, and marketing campaigns. All those activities require easy access to accurate and complete product data, especially as that data is updated, optimized, or otherwise improved.

Product data has to be stored in the cloud for that reason. It also has to link text-based product data (like product titles, specifications, etc.) and product imagery. This is done in next-gen product information management (PIM) software. Brand manufacturers base most of their collaboration around that very catalog of data, so it won’t just be the marketing team that needs access.

This single-source-of-truth library of product data and product imagery also gets huge buy-in from the marketing department. They get to know products better and they can see the unique selling points that the product design team worked so hard to develop.

In today’s market environment, there are huge implications for brand marketing (and the bottom line) if you don’t manage product data well.

Collaboration Tool #2: The Right Communication Channel

It was said that one single communication tool must be identified as the go-to channel for collaboration, but choosing the best tool requires a hard look at your brand and business. Maybe your teams use so many shared documents that Microsoft Teams is best because of the integration with Microsoft 365 documents. Or maybe Slack makes more sense because of the countless bot integrations for custom reminders, chat thread types, and more.

There are plenty of collaboration tools that allow for chats through comments, too, while the app itself is more of a digital whiteboard.

Which communication channel makes the most sense for you? Think about it, ask the other collaborating teams for their thoughts, and commit to one designated communication app.

Collaboration Tool #3: Processes in the Cloud

Of all the documents stored in the cloud, perhaps the most important are those processes and procedures that guide collaborations. As teams collaborate they can build on past experiences and create processes that help the team work better next time. These processes set expectations and avoid confusion and bottlenecks with multiple departments working on the same project.

These documents also help reinforce each team’s role in the bigger brand ecosystem.

You might not have your collaborative processes documented yet, but as you do put them on proverbial paper, build them as living documents. In the cloud, your processes can see more edits and improvements as each collaboration yields more lessons learned. Storing these processes in the cloud also ensures total transparency and visibility for all the collaborators on the playing field.

Key process documents include:

• Workflows for collaborations
• Standard operating procedures (SOPs)
• Project launch timelines
• Documenting dependencies
• Documenting which channels are used for what
• Reiterating the objective for each project or collaboration

Brand manufacturers are built on collaboration across teams because the puck doesn’t stop with a great product. Marketing teams launch that puck to the public — and support sales teams and customer service teams after that. Marketing messages have to be aligned with each product’s unique competitive edge as well as the bigger brand vision and the technical specifications that consumers need to make a final purchase decision.

Cross team collaboration is the source of most growing pains as a business builds momentum. Collaboration can be the source of exponential efficiency, too, with the right business practices and team collaboration tools.

Implementing everything above for your brand, the marketing team can be amply supported to create brilliant marketing that shows the world what your brand is really made of.