How to Make Collaborative Marketing Actually Work the Best Way

How to Make Collaborative Marketing Actually Work the Best Way Marketing managers want their teams to collaborate effectively. Facilitating collaborative processes between team members and across departments, however, is easier said than done. The more people are added to a project, the more potential for productivity snags. Increased complexity equals increased odds of project failure due to miscommunication, misalignment of resources, or general disorganization. However, when managers, sales, creatives, strategists, and analysts are all working in sync toward a common goal, teams can achieve results far beyond what they could on their own. In fact, maximizing success often requires this, and the complex needs of modern marketing make functioning optimally impossible without collaborating well across departments and disciplines. Download Your Free Marketing Collaboration Templates Before tackling any task, its useful to have the right tools for the job. To help implement more collaborative marketing strategies and processes in your own organization, download these three free resources: Marketing Strategy Guide (PDF): Plan an entire marketing strategy efficiently (with team collaboration in mind from the start). Marketing Project Calendar Template (Excel): Collaborate on project timelines with a single version of truth. Convincing Your Team to Use (PowerPoint): is marketing management software thats built to facilitate collaborative marketing teams. Before you decide to use it with your organization though, youll need buy-in from your team. This slide deck will help build the case for collaborating in one place with . How to Make Collaborative Marketing Actually Work the Best Way by @Ben_What Does Collaborative Marketing Mean? Here’s the definition this post will work with: Collaborative marketing describes the process of aligning multiple team members and resources, within one or multiple organizations, to achieve a goal that would otherwise be impossible without leveraging one another’s capabilities. That sounds simple enough, right? Why Does Effective Collaboration Matter? The payoff for investing in collaborative skill development, training, software, and processes can be powerful. But, not all companies feel like their teams are working together well enough. According to a survey from Visix, 39% of those surveyed â€Å"believe that people in their own organization don’t collaborate enough.† That’s a massive problem. Almost 40% of people think their organization doesn't collaborate well. Do you agree?What Are the Biggest Roadblocks to Effective Collaboration? So, if companies aren’t collaborating enough, what’s holding them up? Speaking in terms of newsrooms (chaotic, busy places- not unlike marketing departments), Poynter once broke down four Ds  that block creative collaboration: Distance: Too much physical distance between teams. Dominance: One team’s ego and need to be in charge, crushing collaborative culture. Dissonance: Competing priorities between teams leading to la ack of clear focus. Discomfort: Sometimes, it’s challenging to work with people you don’t know. That article was written back in 2008. But, with the possible exception of the first point (teleconferencing technology has come a long way since then), the other three issues are timeless barriers to getting people to work well with each other. Including marketers.