How a start-up approach will inject collaboration into your marketing team’s DNA
Can’t see the wood for the trees? Many marketing teams get so caught up with the small details — ensuring they keep delivering campaigns, assets or reports — that marketing strategy suffers. Sound familiar?
If so, the New Year could be time for you to take a step forward — think like a start-up, and inject new life into your marketing team. It might mean new ways of thinking, new ways of working, or new technology (such as embracing IoT, as I mentioned in my last article). Let’s have a closer look at three key characteristics of start-ups that you can bring to your marketing team in 2017.
Collaboration
Whether we’re talking Uber, Airbnb or Etsy, you can be sure that today’s disruptive start-ups don’t use legacy technology. But even if your enterprise does run on legacy systems, you still have the opportunity to keep up with the times by adopting cloud-based services that can help you work more productively across your teams.
One of the hallmarks of a start-up is close collaboration between team members. Start-ups need to compete with established businesses, ones that have built up market share and customer loyalty over the years. Consequently, for the start-up venture, every second counts. Each individual must pull their weight; and the business needs the capability to share information fluidly, and implement change at the speed of light.
Content
Most successful start-ups are media- and marketing-savvy, and understand the value of brand-focused content which stays on message. They will have a crystal-clear focus on their USP, and will communicate this through every single asset.
So, whether it’s a Tweet-length item or a longer product brochure, or even an internal web page, copy will be optimised to achieve effective communication and conversion.
The reality is that content is still king, particularly if it’s creative, informative and engaging. Customers are willing to invest time in consuming all flavours of content. Your job is to ensure your content is well formulated and easy to digest, and conveys the message of your brand consistently.
Interaction
Thirdly, digital disrupters are highly interactive and responsive to their customers. They live on social media, talking to customers and running interactive marketing campaigns that invite people to share their own content — photos, videos, reviews.
Start-ups work hard to build up a loyal following, and to energise their base of supporters. They do this in multiple ways: through frequent, consistent social media posts; by championing particular brand advocates; or by releasing content that engages with the hearts of their customers.
And because they are trying to win space in a crowded market, they will treat complaints as an opportunity to display their customer service capabilities: to turn a disgruntled customer into a fan.
Think like a start-up
These are the key strengths of today’s start-up companies. Collaboration, content and interaction are three ways they are disrupting their marketplaces. How could you think more like a start-up this New Year, so you can lift your head and see the bigger picture?
Well, an effective collaboration platform is good place to start. Centralising your files is the starting point, but today’s cloud platforms empower each member of the marketing team by enabling them to create, edit and review secure documents with others in real time from anywhere.
You can make marketing assets available to team members on any device, while effective version control allows everyone to keep a track of things. Attributes like this matter when it comes to producing high quality marketing assets cost and time-efficiently.
If your business could benefit from the sort of secure content and collaboration platform I described above, you can find more information here.
