Building an Effective Marketing Campaign Through Interdepartmental Collaboration
Effective marketing campaigns can make or break your business. A well-strategized, coordinated campaign can bring new customers to your company, bolster your brand presence, and improve the ROI of every long-term project you commit to.
However, building an effective marketing campaign can take time and effort. You have to consider the needs and motivations of all external stakeholders to create content that is relevant to your customers.
Fortunately, you can lean on the insights and expertise of other departments to guide your next campaign. Interdepartmental collaboration speeds up the planning phase and ensures that you have all of the qualitative and quantitative data you need to create marketing materials that inspire potential customers.
Gathering Key Insights
As a marketing professional, you should be able to reach out to any department to gather their insights. The data you gather from finance, HR, customer service, and sales will form the backbone of your approach and ensure that you’re working with objective facts rather than second-guessing market trends. At a minimum ask for insights like:
Changes in cost-per-lead
Percentage of revenue in new or existing customers
Common queries and complaints
Noteworthy employees and their accomplishments
Current budgets for the upcoming quarter
These inter-departmental insights will give you a “top-down” understanding of the business. This will ensure that your next campaign relates to long-term business goals, current market trends, and the day-to-day lives of your fellow employees.
Cross-Department Communication
When reaching out to peers in other departments, it’s important to remember that your campaign isn’t their priority. Do not expect folks to take time out of their day whenever you ask them for their insights and make collaboration as pain-free as possible.
Start by finding a mutually agreeable time to meet every month. Scheduling out marketing tactic meetings in advance is a great way to improve your time management at work. Keep the agenda of these meetings tight and let folks leave when they’ve had a chance to share their key insights. Allow team members to meet remotely, too, so they can minimize wasted time navigating to and from your meeting.
If you can’t find a mutually agreeable time to meet, consider leveraging emails and cloud technology to improve collaboration. As the marketing manager for your business, you can gain access to the data that sales, customer service, and finance use and should survey them independently to gather your own insights.
Retaining Efficiency
Interdepartmental collaboration is a great way to gather insights and improve the accuracy of your next marketing campaign. However, you may find that inviting others to the table causes a nose-dive in productivity and causes analysis paralysis in your marketing team.
Retain a high level of productivity and efficiency by leaning on collaborative technologies. In today’s digital age, you do not have to call a physical meeting every time you want to touch base with other teams. Instead, use instant messaging services like Slack or Microsoft Teams to touch base, share collaborative files, and meet remotely.
Leveraging the power of remote tech is particularly important if you have adopted a hybrid work schedule. 5G makes hybrid work possible by ensuring that folks can work from home or while on the road. This means you and your team can maintain a better work-life balance while contributing positively to the current marketing campaign.
Conclusion
Interdepartmental collaboration should be central to your next campaign. Gathering insights from different departments ensures that your content is relevant to the needs of today’s consumers. Leaning on peers in departments like sales and customer service will save you time, too, as sales reps and customer service agents can point you in the right direction and help you proactively answer consumers' questions.