The COVID-19 global pandemic caused many drastic societal shifts: the switch to a primarily remote workforce.
While hundreds of thousands of employees joined the work-from-home (WFH) initiative, remote work gained popularity well before the mandated lockdowns.
Before the global health crisis, approximately 164.6 million employees worked from home in the United States in February 2020. Major companies such as Buffer, Basecamp, and Salesforce already implemented telecommuting policies that allow their workforce to work from home either part-time or fully.
While the number of remote workers skyrocketed in 2020 and 2021, businesses did not anticipate this shift’s impact on their marketing strategies and campaigns.
Two Marketing Strategy Perspectives
The transition to a majority remote workforce has two sides:
- Internal effects: Impacts on your marketing team, processes, tools, and company as a whole.
- External effects: Customer-facing or behavior impacts.
Understanding both impacts will help you determine the next best course of action for your marketing strategy.
Remote Work Internal Effects
What was once a tight-knit group of creatives and strategic minds is now a distributed team—perhaps across multiple time zones, states, or countries.
The switch to remote work has had several internal impacts on marketing teams:
Adapting to New Forms of Collaboration
For many marketing teams, collaboration was as easy as walking over to the next desk or cubicle and spitballing some new ideas. Or, it was a ritual of a weekly meeting crowded around the conference room whiteboard.
Well, for remote workers, those days are long gone.
Instead, marketers today must find new ways to collaborate through tools such as Slack, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams. And your marketing strategy must accommodate this new form of brainstorming and working together.
Adopting New Marketing Strategy Processes
As we adapt to new styles of collaboration, our typical marketing strategy processes will change too.
Perhaps your weekly conference room meeting included real-time campaign approval processes or a review of upcoming strategy tasks.
To accommodate different time zones, varying home schedules, and other at-home obstacles, you’ll need to rethink the processes associated with your marketing strategy. Consider implementing changes such as:
- Reworking approval processes
- Implementing a new task scheduling system
- Reorganizing project teams
Identify which processes to alter first by finding where your existing processes are bottlenecking or causing delays while your team works from home. Tools like Asana, Zoho, Trello, and more can help streamline marketing processes, too.
Rethinking Marketing Channels
The COVID-19 pandemic caused a shift in our work location and the marketing channels we interact with most.
Let’s take a company with a large outdoor advertising and billboard budget, for example. As more and more people turn to remote work, fewer drivers will commute to the office, meaning fewer eyes on your billboards and outdoor/transportation ads.
That doesn’t mean you’ll have to give up these channels entirely. Just rethink them!
For instance, all businesses need to have a Google Maps listing for local SEO purposes. But, with fewer people going out and searching for directions on Google, perhaps transition your focus to a social media advertising or email marketing campaign to drive e-commerce purchases.
Adopt new channels and phase out low-performing ones as needed.
Remote Work External Effects
Working from home also impacts how we interact with marketing campaigns as consumers. So be sure to consider these customer effects on your marketing strategy, too.
Viewership Changes
Marketers continually scour analytics reports for the best time to post on social media, send an email campaign, or publish a blog post. But, without the fast-paced nature of an office commute, customers can spend more time interacting with online content throughout the day.
With this in mind, the times, durations, and locations of content viewership have drastically changed. Take time to review your campaign reports and marketing analytics to identify what viewership shifts are happening (if any) with your audience.
Remote Workers Want Value, Not Ads
When you’re on your laptop or tablet all day, the last thing you want is to get inundated with yet another piece of promotional content.
Instead, make sure your marketing strategy focuses on providing and creating value for remote workers. Ask yourself, “What can my content/product/service do to make their day better, more productive, or fun?”
There’s no correct answer. So, be creative!
Add Call Tracking to Your Marketing Strategy
An unexpected benefit of the remote work transition is society’s longing for personal connection. Rather than hiding behind a screen all day, we’re calling our friends and family to chat. This change transfers over to contacting brands too.
Customers are reaching for their phones to call brands and companies like yours with questions or to place an order. Make sure your business is set up with a toll-free or vanity number so you can take advantage of call tracking!
With call tracking capabilities enabled, you’ll be able to see the complete picture and understand where your adapted marketing strategy is working and where it’s failing. Get your call tracking number today.
