Post-pandemic, organizations are by large split into three camps – Fully Remote, Hybrid, and Fully On-site. Despite the apparent advantages offered by remote work, a lot of employers have mandated a “Return To Office” (RTO) policy in order to have a better grip on what and how work gets done.
While not fully established, RTO policies are drafted with the assumption that employees are more productive in an office environment. However, this assumption may not hold true for all job functions.
In this article, we discuss the marketing function to understand the different roles, the tools required to operate these roles, and the benefits and challenges that come with working remotely. We will also discuss the future trends of ‘work from home’ policies with respect to the marketing function.
Understanding Marketing Roles and Their Requirements
The marketing function is broadly split into two major categories – traditional marketing, and digital marketing.
Traditional marketing encompasses the conventional offline activities that a business does in order to attract customers. This includes event marketing, retail partnerships, print and OOH (Out of Home) advertising, direct mail, sponsorships, to mention a few. The objective of these marketing strategies is to build awareness and reach broad audiences.
Traditional marketing, for the most part, is one-way communication aimed at building a narrative, and is particularly effective when your product targets broad communities.
Digital marketing is the newer form of marketing that has emerged and evolved in the last three decades. This includes Search Engine Optimization, Paid Advertising (Performance Marketing), Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Product Marketing, and Content Marketing to list down a few.
One reason digital marketing is so popular is because it allows businesses to monitor performance and track every new customer down to its marketing source quite effectively. These activities are performed by analysts, analytics and operations staff that typically are not required in traditional marketing.
Broadly speaking, marketing jobs can be classified into strategy roles and execution roles. Since there are dozens of different ways to get the word out about your business (search engines, social media, blogs, webinars, etc.), there really is not one person who can be an expert in, or have the bandwidth to work on all these different tasks.
As such, in many organizations, the strategy roles are staffed with in-house full time employees while the execution roles are outsourced to agencies that specialize in these particular tasks.
It is also common to pick a few of the execution roles that are critical to the business functions and have them in-house while outsourcing the rest.
The Rise of Remote Work in Marketing
Remote marketing has been a growing trend in the past several years. However, while the pandemic surely accelerated the switch to remote work, marketing job functions have been async and remote for long before that.
According to various studies, nearly 70-80% of marketers work remotely at least part-time. This is not necessarily because of the ‘work from home’ trend that caught on during the Covid pandemic.
Rather, it is due to the fact that a vast majority of execution-focused marketing activities have always been outsourced to agencies and freelancers. This has been a trend since the dotcom boom, and the emergence of digital marketing as a function.
However, in-house marketing activities have pivoted to the hybrid or fully remote mode only in the past few years. Given the RTO mandates that have prevailed in most large organizations, it is safe to say that onsite marketing roles are not going away anytime soon.
Tools & Technology Enabling Remote Work In Marketing
Can marketing jobs be done remotely? Yes. It is the same reason why a lot of marketing jobs can be easily outsourced to a third-party agency or to a freelancer. A lot of marketing tasks are independent of each other. Also, these activities can be performed asynchronously. As such, there is no real need for marketers – at least those in digital marketing – to meet and collaborate.
However, the ease of remote working in marketing has been amplified thanks to the various tools and technology available today.
Communication platforms like Slack, Zoom, and project management tools like Hubbion make it possible for teams to collaborate with each other.
While traditional marketing requires field visits and physical meetings to strategize and execute, a lot of digital marketing activities are performed with the help of third-party tools. Here is a list of various popular tools that help marketers execute their tasks flawlessly without having to leave their room:
SEO: RankTracker helps track search engine marketing performance
PPC: The most essential tools like Adwords Manager and Meta are completely online and can be executed remotely
Content marketing: Tools like Hubspot and WordPress help with content management
Social media marketing: Hootsuite and Buffer are ideal to schedule social media campaigns
Content creation: Popular tools like Canva, and Veo can help generate visuals and content necessary for various marketing activities.
As such, most marketing activities are carried online and do not require physical presence to get done. In addition to this, the emergence of AI has made marketing more interesting and remote-friendly. According to one study, more than 40% of businesses use AI for content and document creation, making an onsite presence unnecessary for such activities.
Benefits of Remote Work for Marketing Teams
Most discussions around remote work center around the apparent benefits it offers employees in terms of saved costs and higher productivity. When it comes to marketing, however, remote work is not just a perk offered to employees, but it can truly provide organizations with a competitive advantage over other organizations that do not offer remote work opportunities.
Higher expertise
Remote work allows marketing teams to outsource tasks to subject matter experts, regardless of which part of the world they are in. For instance, if you are someone trying to take your product global through social media marketing, then you need marketers who understand various apps like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, VKontakte, and WeChat very well.
Of course, some of these apps are popular in only certain parts of the world. Remote work allows businesses to hire experts from across the world to help with task management across these different platforms without having to report to the office.
Cost Efficiency
Depending on which part of the world you operate in, costs can really eat up into your cash flow. One way to cut down on these costs is by limiting your onsite workforce primarily to build the strategy while hiring remote workers to manage these projects. These remote workers could be based offshore where the cost of living is lower thereby saving your companies several thousands of dollars each year.
Higher bandwidth
Managing resources is a perennial challenge in most organizations. As already noted previously, remote work allows organizations to operate at higher cost efficiency. This also means these marketing teams can now afford to hire more resources to ease bandwidth constraints, thereby making it possible to run a wider range of campaigns to bring new customers in.
While higher productivity through remote work is still a contentious issue, it is quite evident that the higher bandwidth that organizations secure with the help of remote work means they see higher output for the same cost.
Challenges with Remote Work for Marketing teams
Yes, we have the tools necessary to operate remotely. But that does not mean remote work is a bed of roses.
Collaboration issues
While Google Meet and Zoom do a good job of ensuring workers get to meet and greet their colleagues virtually, they are often inadequate for certain kinds of collaboration. A dispersed workforce makes it impossible to gather teams to brainstorm on a campaign at short notice. It lacks the creative feedback loops for marketing campaigns that need an inter-disciplinary input.
For instance, let’s take the example of a small business launching its first billboard campaign. An onsite workforce makes it possible for the team to make an impromptu visit to the billboard location to assess the impact and execution of the campaign. A dispersed workforce cannot do equal justice to this project.
Communication barriers
According to renowned psychologist Albert Mehrabian, 55% of human communication is nonverbal, while 38% is vocal, and 7% are words. In an asynchronous and text-based environment, it is possible that teams often miss out on what makes human communication truly remarkable – the ability to communicate thoughts and ideas through expressions and gestures that words do not capture.
Remote work relies heavily on textual communication that makes it impossible to capture nuances that in-face physical meetings offer. As such, teams operate at a lower efficiency than they do in a physical environment.
Project management complexities
Marketing projects typically include dozens of stakeholders and collaborators. While most organizations – including those who operate completely in-office – use project management tools to delegate, and manage projects, remote work can exacerbate the challenges that come with running a project.
This is because a lot of project management is essentially human relationship management. In the absence of physical meetings, workers in a team rarely build the bonds that make it possible to run a project successfully. The poor interpersonal relationships in a completely remote workplace can make handling projects more difficult than it is in an office space.
Is Hybrid Work the future?
There are plenty of successful fully-remote businesses today that invalidate any claim that remote work makes running a business impossible. While marketing is perhaps one of the most remote-friendly functions available, it is also true that there are certain challenges that make operating a remote work difficult.
However, these challenges are not unsurmountable. One of the easiest fixes a lot of businesses have is to offer hybrid work policies that mandate that employees turn up to an office certain days of the week. This provides teams an opportunity to build the bonds and iron out issues that may have cropped up during the course of the project.
Hybrid work also means employees have to be located within or close to the office which makes it possible to ensure real-time collaboration whenever required. At the same time, the flexibility of remote work means workers could choose to live in the suburbs or in cheaper neighborhoods and only commute to work once a week.
However, businesses may miss out on the cost efficiency and expertise that comes with a fully remote setup.
The answer to this is to evaluate each role independently and assess the need for the role to be in-office, hybrid, or fully remote. This way, businesses get to keep the best of both worlds while ensuring any challenges that come with the work setup can be minimized.
