Tools and Strategies Our Marketing Agency is Using to Work From Home
We’ve become a remote marketing agency. For now, anyway.
I was sitting in the conference room of the Blue Light Media headquarters the other day, staring at each of our teammate's vision boards on the wall. As I was staring at the intentions we had set for ourselves I broke what I could only describe as a nostalgic smile at the irony of our collages because, among the photos of family, dream cars, and affirmations, I realized that a few of us actually included photos of elaborate offices overlooking metropolitan skylines. And now, like many companies abiding by the order to shelter at home, we’ve made it a policy to work remotely until further notice.
Luckily the adjustment was relatively easy for us. Sure, we’re missing out on that extra “oomph” during our creative brain-storming meetings and I personally miss the ease of walking into someone's office for a quick 3-minute meeting. But with all that said, I believe we’re still producing great ideas for campaigns, and we’re still hitting every deliverable’s deadline. Even our product photography. I thought I’d share some of the tools and strategies we’re using to still make this happen.
We’re using Monday.com for Project Management
We’ve actually been using Monday.com for about 5 years now, back when they were called DaPulse.
If you’re unfamiliar with the platform, imagine the best parts of Asana, Trello, and Basecamp jumped into a jacuzzi together and somehow formed a new project management tool. It’s intuitive, beautifully designed, and after digging into it for about 5 minutes, you’re basically a pro. Even while we were working in the office we were able to create more efficiencies within our workflow because of the platform.
Our partners really love this platform too. In fact, a few of them even decided to use it within their own organizations. My pitch was always “you can see who’s working on what, when they’re working on it, and give feedback without ever having to open up your email”. If you’re looking for a new project management tool, check this one out.
We built photography studios in our homes.
One of the big benefits of having our own office was the easy access to the photo studio we built in it. All our props were neatly organized in 8 foot high shelves. Our roll-up backdrops mounted to the wall for each scene we wanted to produce. Our strobes and iMac were always set and ready to go if we needed to produce something on the spot.
Since we want to limit any potential risk of spreading the coronavirus, we decided that our photographer and stylist would take what they could, and build a mini-studio at their homes. Luckily we focused primarily on product photography meant for social media so there isn’t a noticeable gap between what we were producing at our office and in our home-studios.
We’re using Google Hangouts more than ever.
Okay, I know everyone is on the Zoom train, but I personally love Google Hangouts for our team. The biggest benefit to me is easily being able to create new conference rooms within a calendar-invite without having to leave the G-suite ecosystem. Sure, the PINs for conference calls are a little long but the hold music is a little more pleasant than the same acoustic guitar riff on FreeConferenceCall.
We’ve been using Google Hangouts to meet with our partners across the country for a while now, so there really wasn’t a huge learning curve once we decided to use it for all our in-person meetings. I personally find the Hangouts feed to be a lot less choppy than Zoom or GoToMeeting, so that’s a huge plus for us.
We created a new approach to creative meetings.
If you love the idea of wiping down a white-board and getting everyone in a room to throw any idea on a wall for a creative campaign, this probably isn’t for you. To be honest, I’ve always disliked this approach and I found it to be massively inefficient. It’s not hard to see that your team is not really taking notes, and they’re actually following up on emails or pushing deliverables while sitting at the table. But I’m doing it too, so it’s alright.
So here’s how we’re doing it now.
- We created a simple spreadsheet in Google Sheets and named it “The Idea Factory”.
- We put our partners from left to right at the top in their own columns and dedicated a row for each one of our team members.
- A few days before our creative meeting, we ask each one of the team members to jot down at least 2 ideas, no matter what it is, for each one of our partners.
- On the day of the meeting, we review it as a whole, brand by brand and we collectively choose 2–3 ideas per brand to put into production.
- The final ideas are delivered via Monday.com and circulated to the team.
I really like this approach, and I’ll likely keep it as such once we get back into the office.
We’re using iMessage instead of Slack.
Let me start off by saying that I have absolutely nothing against Slack and I actually use it for projects I’m working on outside of Blue Light Media. With that said, I didn’t think it made sense for us to implement a new tool for quick communication since we already had email and Monday.com. Not to mention, between Hubspot, Monday, Google Hangouts, Sprout Social, we really didn’t need another app for our small (but mighty) team. So instead, we used something that we were all familiar with — text messaging.
This has actually been really nice. Our team is pretty good about avoiding pointless banter so our phones aren’t blowing up with crap every day. And I actually think that it’s built a little more comradery within our group. The fact that we’re all involved in a text message — which seems to be one of the more intimate ways to communicate with someone else — reinforces a sense of family that we do miss from not being in the office every day.
Overall the adjustment from in-office to remote work has been relatively easy for us. Do I miss seeing my team every morning? Of course, I do. Do I miss my standup desk that I don’t have a place for at my apartment? Yes, I miss that too. But after a little evaluation, I do believe that this is actually a pretty efficient way for us to operate.
We will have to be a little more mindful about aspects of our business like review reports and giving feedback on creative development but I believe we can really get through that with the tools we already have in place.
Before we were ordered to work from home, I was actually pretty against it. Mainly because at the time we had multiple hourly employees and it was just easier to track time with everyone in the office. But now, as most of our team are on salary, this might be something I consider doing more often once we have the option of getting back into our office.
If you liked this article, please give it a clap and share it. If you’d like to talk to me about working with Blue Light Media, shoot an email to mikhail@bluelight.media.
