Executing a successful campaign is not as simple as it used to be. Increasingly, we are marketing and communicating to our customers via different channels including: email, company websites, social media destinations like Facebook and Twitter, mobile, Web, and, yes, occasionally, even snail mail. While this multichannel environment provides marketers with more tools and ways to deliver relevant, personalized customer communication, there is the challenge of orchestrating dialogue across these channels in a cohesive way.
But the real question is: How do you integrate workflow so that your Web development, social media and creative teams are not working in silo units, but rather are functioning as one well-integrated group? How do you make sure the employee blog, executive tweets and email campaigns from the sales team are on-message and consistent? How do you ensure you have the right people on your team and project deliverables are on time?
Three ways marketers can organize a multichannel environment so that workflow and information are shared in a way that produces cohesive results are as follows:
1. Mandate (and Support) Collaboration
Find a way for your team members to communicate effectively and professionally with each other, and make them do it. There are many types of software tools in the marketplace, including wiki, bookmarking, work execution and enterprise social networks, which promote collaborative approaches to communication. For teams that rarely meet face-to-face because they are geographically dispersed or because they are brought together on a project-by-project basis, these types of software tools are important to allow informal communication to develop and build interpersonal levels of trust. They also offer a platform where people can come together and connect to solve problems, share ideas, set standards, build tools and develop relationships.
While technology can offer a place where co-workers, partners and consultants can work together seamlessly and efficiently, ultimately the team has to be held accountable for adopting an attitude of sharing and collaboration in order to be successful.
2. Promote Participation in Planning
Timelines, budgets, resource allocation and planning are significantly more accurate when it comes from the people actually doing the work. Find an approach to decentralize how you plan a project. For instance, in a traditional command-and-control hierarchical structure, a vice president of marketing might build a plan for a product launch outlining timing, resources and budget without consulting with his or her team. Because the marketer is not the one actually doing the work, he or she is essentially making estimates on how many resources and how much time are needed to complete the work. If the marketer then delivers that plan, the team is set up to work according to an unrealistic plan.
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