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I’ve always believed that building a powerful team accounts for 90% of any business success. One of the best ways to achieve that happens through collaboration.

As a result, collaboration keeps your team motivated and turns your employees and co-workers into brand advocates.

I believe in Helen Keller’s mantra:

Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much…

No wonder about 80% of businesses use collaboration tools for enhancing business processes. Any company is as strong as its team behind it, so investing time and effort into setting up active collaboration routine is key to a company success.

Here are two steps to setting up an effective marketing collaboration to boost productivity and build a happier team.

1. Set Up an Effective Cross-team Communication

Communication is key to a company’s success:

• Utilize your teams for market research by enabling them to contribute their feedback on your marketing initiatives
• Save money on usability testing by encouraging your team to share bug reports and comments on a re-design or new landing pages
• Come up with a much more effective ad copy by having your non-marketing teams contribute their ideas

Start with Company Structure

Depending on your unique company structure, there are various tools that can overcome organizational silos and encourage departments and management groups to share information, tools, goals, priorities and processes among one another.

For example, Trello and Zenkit help managers build shared to-do lists and mindmaps.

Use Duda, a web design platform, to build new landing pages and introduce new functionality while collecting feedback from across your company:

• Get any of your team members access to your design assets, templates and widgets
• Let co-workers leave comments all over your site — even while it’s still being built!
• Save and share comment threads allowing you to effectively track changes and updates

With Duda, usability testing and creativity sharing can be brought in-house and unite your whole company!

For remote team collaboration, take a look at Slack (especially with apps like Standuply) and Typetalk.

You can try several tools before you stick with the core solution. Sometimes it is hard to tell why one specific tool has worked better for a specific company then another one.

2. Organize and Share your Content Assets

There’s often an organizational disconnect between sales and content teams. As a result, salespeople are not aware of brand-owned content assets that can help them in nurturing and validating leads.

Sales teams are often left trying to leverage generic pieces of content or struggle to find easily find relevant content: spending as much as 40% of their time locating and adapting relevant sales content.

On the other hand, sales people seldom – if ever – inform content writers of customers’ struggles and challenges which should be addressed in brand-owned content that will ultimately drive targeted leads to the site.

And this gap exists across the board, not just between sales and content teams. Imagine how much more effective a social media advertising team might be if they could access your past assets and analytics reports? Think about how much faster your customer support team may get if they can easily find and point a customer to a relevant article answering their specific question in much details.

How do you organize your content strategy to make it more efficient as well as easier to access and ultimately evaluate?

Find the right content marketing platform. You will find it’s the key to bridging the gap between multiple teams. It empowers your marketing strategy. And fosters content planning and collaboration.

Currently, half of B2B organizations say they create content on an ad-hoc basis. Separate departments and new hires frequently spend money creating similar assets. This means spending time and money on creating duplicate or similar content. Instead, allocate those budgets to effective distribution of existing content.

A digital content repository aims at overcoming one of the most common content marketing problems: Lack of planning.

A Look at ContentCal

For example, ContentCal is the content marketing platform that helps cross-team collaboration:

• Store and share your marketing to-do list, ideas, or briefs on a Calendar-wide basis.
• Save and share commonly used phrases or hashtags as a Snippet for other team members to use
• Keep and share past and future content assets in one location, easy to re-use and add to the Calendar.

With ContentCal, you can create a centralized system of governance that oversees both content creation and content distribution can help marketers achieve higher content marketing efficiency.

How to Consolidate Content

Consolidate content assets inside a single all-in-one content repository. This helps eliminate organizational silos and make sense of the endless content folders, docs, and tools.

Apart from organizing brand-owned content for higher content marketing efficiency, a content repository promotes cross-team content discoverability and collaboration. Ensuring the content assets are visible to all teams will supercharge marketing efforts by speeding up content production and ensuring everyone is aligned throughout the process.

Maintaining an organized content library enables and encourages the marketing team to share information, goals, priorities and processes with other departments, including the sales reps.

Conclusion

Allow everyone in a company to contribute their ideas and participate in the marketing strategy. As a result, you foster creativity and boosts motivation.

Image: Depositphotos.com

This article, “How to Set up An Effective Cross-Team Marketing Collaboration Routine” was first published on Small Business Trends