What makes your marketing team tick? Are they driven by analytics, or do they prefer group brainstorming sessions? However they prefer to operate, many marketing teams have hit a slump recently, as everyone has shifted from remote work, but it doesn’t have to be that way. As many companies have realized, by providing their marketing teams with better communication infrastructure through a social intranet platform, they can get a productivity and performance boost, even in remote settings. Even better, your business may already have an intranet system – and if it doesn’t, it’s time to invest in one.
What Is Intranet?
An intranet is an in-house computer network that shares traits with several different systems. From a social perspective, it includes features like instant messaging, email integration, and video chat, but it also includes document storage and task management. In this way, it combines elements of many public internet programs, as well as typical business software, but it’s all based in the cloud. It centralizes all of these elements, acting as the foundation for remote work.
As a leader, your job is to help your marketing team use these tools for maximum productivity, but you’ll also likely find that these tools boost employee satisfaction by building community. Here are 5 ways to get the most out of your intranet – and take your business to the next level, too.
Constant Communication
One of the main ways that using a social intranet can increase your marketing team’s productivity is by providing a means of constant communication. Communication is always a major concern for businesses, but it’s a much more significant issue when there are remote workers involved. In fact, many companies have previously seen serious problems when remote workers felt excluded from key communications. Historically, businesses have tried to solve this problem with email memos and Slack channels, but these are comparatively poor solutions.
What social intranet offers marketing teams that other platforms don’t are well organized, multimodal communication options. Want to have a real-time video meeting and brainstorm together? No problem. Need to dig through the chat archives to find an old idea? It’s all in one place, and further supplemented by screen sharing and presentation tools – and that’s how teams get things done.
Finally, don’t forget that a strong social intranet also enables some of the same community-building elements of traditional social media, without the uncomfortable boundary crossing of traditional social media. Particularly for remote workers, the ability to talk casually with teammates and get to know them in a less formal way can really boost morale.
Clear Task Management
Whether your marketing team is remote, in the office, or a hybrid, one of the best ways to boost productivity is by providing clear structure for all tasks. That includes offering structured goals and deadlines and pairing tasks with the best person for the job – and the social intranet lets you do just that. You can organize tasks within the platform, follow up with marketing team members about client feedback, and share documents, but the most important element is just the transparency and the resultant clear expectations.
Setting clear goals and deadlines for your marketing team isn’t just about meeting deadlines. Especially with more people operating remotely, goal setting via intranet helps empower employees by giving them all the tools they need to take control of their work. People perform best with well-defined guidelines, but they also don’t like to be micromanaged, which makes such project management strategies a good way of boosting both productivity and morale.
Document Organization
Marketing teams generate a lot of documents, and they also bring in a lot of materials from clients. That can be overwhelming, and hard to manage, especially when materials are stored across multiple platforms – email, in databases, on desktops, and various drives. Social intranet platforms, however, offer document management tools to help organize these otherwise disparate sources. And since they integrate with other cloud systems, they also make it much easier to funnel all incoming documents directly into the system.
Your marketing team obviously needs access to all applicable documents in order to maximize productivity, but document management via social intranet also moves projects along by reducing the amount of time staff spend getting organized. When everything is in one place, rather than distributed across multiple business service platforms, team members can get down to business quickly. Often, increasing productivity starts with making small changes
The Data Angle
If you’re not an analytics specialist, data isn’t necessarily very exciting, but marketing professionals can’t do their jobs without the data from their campaigns. And, like other documentation, no one wants to shuffle through multiple dashboards in an attempt to find the information they need. That’s why social intranet includes analytics as part of its streamlined system. It’s a simple principle: the social intranet is designed specifically so that everything a given employee needs is in the same system.
From an analytics perspective, your company’s intranet can also help you evaluate and support your marketing team by providing insights into staff’s on-platform behavior. Some might view it as tracking, and it’s true that overzealous or micromanaging may use it as a tool to control their staff. However, good managers can use this information to help workers optimize their time use and avoid burnout. Data can be invasive or it can be strategic, and access to it won’t fundamentally change the nature of any given manager – it can only support team members when done right.
Expansion Ready
If your marketing team is doing their job well, then they’re not only helping your clients succeed, but they’re going to grow your business by drawing in new clients – and that means you’ll need to onboard new staff. The good news is that intranet can help with that too, and it can allow you to seek out the best people for your company, wherever they’re located. Unless you’re highly committed to synchronous work, intranet makes it easier for your company to take a global view of the potential candidate pool. Many other businesses have already done this, and your company is at a disadvantage if you only hire locally.
Of course, if you do end up in a position to hire, your intranet can provide additional support to your marketing team by housing your onboarding program. Other team members can help get them up to speed, but compared to individually training new hires, intranet-based onboarding prepares new team members more quickly without slowing down existing staff.
Making A System Change
Based on all these functions and components, you may be thinking that intranet simply consolidates a number of systems your business already uses, and in some ways you’re probably right. Your business already needs to do all of these tasks to run successfully, but if you’re using multiple programs, you could be operating with greater efficiency. Yes, it’s frustrating to switch to a new platform, but sometimes it’s worth the effort – and when it comes to intranet adoption, that’s undeniably the case.
The good news about intranet adoption is that the platforms are generally intuitive compared to many of the other platforms businesses use, so making the transition shouldn’t be too hard, and you’ll make up for the effort in time saved. So, stop juggling programs and make the move. Every expert predicts that intranet will increase in importance in the next few years as more businesses shift to remote or split office operations. By switching now, you can be on the front end of an important competitive shift and set your marketing team up for long-term success.