Boost Your Marketing Success with Cross-Team Collaboration

Many modern factors have impacted businesses and brought cross-team collaboration to the fore. While a surge in remote working has led to employees being physically further apart instant communication tools are bringing teams back together.

We see the progressive, ambitious companies across marketing and advertising using the latest tools, technologies, and connected workplaces to create, manage and innovate across their organization.

When it comes to creative output, it's essential that everyone is on the same page. We've all seen marketing campaigns that have fallen flat due to poor wording or outlandish claims. Website launches have failed because one part doesn't interact properly with another.

Cross-team collaboration software in the creative space means that these are minimise and often lead to faster results!

 

What is Cross-Team Collaboration?

Traditionally, specific teams come together within companies with a common goal. The marketing team is typically responsible for consistent messaging and branding, together with getting the company and its products in front of the correct audience.

Essentially, those with specific skills don't need to wait to be drawn to each other; they're placed together by traditional and perhaps outdated ideas surrounding corporate structure.

Cross-team collaboration shakes things up. With competition fierce and constant pressure to achieve something new, businesses have taken a more dynamic approach. So why pass a project from team to team when select individuals from different disciplines can work on something simultaneously. 

The concept works for businesses of all sizes. Any company with a variety of skills in the workforce can make use of it. One of the best deployments of collaboration software is in creative projects.

You might want to launch a new website. In days gone by, the CEO might make the decision and appoint a project lead, then pass it to the marketing team to sketch out new ideas. It would then go to various other parts of the business, then back to the marketing team for visuals. The legal department would have a say to ensure everything was up to scratch; then, it?s back to the project lead for approval.

The creative team might need to collaborate with the legal team on ensuring packaging is correct and meets all possible requirements. When the respective teams work separately, each minor revision can add days to your lead time.

It works both ways too. A department might have been hard at work on a new project and they need input from the marketing team to get it ready for launch and to start building buzz. Rather than working independently and then passing it over to the creative team for input, cross-team collaboration enables them to work alongside each other at an earlier stage. That way, those responsible for advertising the new product aren?t just going off documentation and meetings. Instead, they'll have had a stake in the journey towards launch.

Many internal processes can be convoluted, but they're easily solved through cross-team collaboration. Rather than deploying entire teams on a project and leaving it with them until they had done their bit, the project manager selects parts of each section and brings them together as a new, often temporary, project group.

This might involve a marketing manager working alongside a designer. Rather than them creating something and passing it on for approval, those responsible for approving their work are on the team with them. That means a more agile approach, with greater productivity and enhanced flexibility.

 

The Challenges You'll Face

Every business faces the challenge of using cross-team collaboration for the first time, and it can be a struggle to gain initial traction, although it does get easier.

A team leader may not take kindly to having one or two members reassigned to something else, even temporarily.

New teammates won't have the same rapport as with their long-term colleagues and will have to get used to a new way of working. It may also prove challenging to grasp the extent of another team member's role and experience when planning an upcoming project.

Some employees are natural doers rather than communicators, especially within creative roles. However, improved communication is key to making these collaborations work, and this may require some people to leave their comfort zone.

Fortunately, these challenges are often short-term bumps in the road and relatively easy to handle.

 

The Importance of Getting Collaboration Right

Perhaps the primary motivator for deploying and perfecting collaboration across different teams or departments is that your competition is most likely doing it. The first in a sector to get it right will benefit from the advantages of a dynamic approach.

The increase in remote work, and easy access to collaboration tools, means there has never been a better time to make it happen.

Do that and you'll:

• Benefit from different perspectives on a single project shared in real-time
• Encourage creativity and innovation with new solutions drawn from different backgrounds and priorities
• Cut the time it takes to get things right, from great visuals and working code to cost analysis and legal compliance

Optimizing Collaboration in Your Business

Like most new ideas, if you do it well you?ll only reap the true benefits of collaboration across teams and department. Of course, there might be a few teething problems, and there will always be room for improvement, but the potential benefits vastly outweigh the risks. There are several steps to take to ensure your business is set for success from the outset.

 

Define Workflow

Poor creative workflow design creates productivity bottlenecks. These occurrences are neither new nor exclusive to cross-team collaboration. However, it's vital to utilize the tools at hand to ensure that everyone understands what's required and when and receives timely, actionable feedback.

 

Empower Team Members

These collaborations allow employees to show what they can do when given the ball. Parts of each project will fall squarely on their shoulders and become their responsibility. Encourage them to assert themselves and trust their experience in a team full of leaders.

 

Put the Right Tools in Place

If you're attempting to run cross-team collaborations with email and phone calls, you're missing out. Purpose-built collaboration software takes many common headaches out of the equation, enabling even a brand new team to get off to a flying start.

 

Encourage All Stakeholders to Embrace This Way of Working

There will always be employees that preferred things how they were before. Not everyone is open to change. However, if you've decided to implement cross-team collaboration for the right reasons, they should be easy enough to convince. New ideas, greater personal responsibility, and the opportunity to play a significant role in the biggest projects in the company should be enough to convince even the biggest skeptics to buy-in.

 

How Admation Can Help

We mentioned the role of technology in making cross-team collaboration possible earlier. We have reached a point many of the conventional challenges associated with this way of working no longer matter because software can tackle them on your behalf.

Admation was designed with creative and collaborative project management in mind and tailored to ensure that every undertaking, from the first to the latest, goes off without a hitch. From advertising and marketing to content and design, it focuses on speed and flexibility to get even the most ambitious projects over the line.

Four core modules work in unison to keep projects on track:

• The Project Management module supports online project briefing, briefing templates, planning, and overall management
• The Resource Management module aids in scheduling, task overviews, and accountability
• The Approval Workflow module ensures that there are no unforeseen bottlenecks with feedback and approvals contained in one space
• Finally, the Asset Management module ensures that everything the team produces and all associated resources are held centrally and securely

Admation is built to promote teamwork and make everyone's lives easier no matter their role. It's an all-in-one solution that can help to ensure that even strangers with only the company they work for in common can become a cohesive, productive and creative unit that takes your business to new heights.