It’s true. Think about it: Even small business owners need to call in some backup and collaborate with skilled creatives if they want to create and deploy a decent marketing campaign. Copywriters need to collaborate with graphic designers and web developers to launch an email marketing campaign. SEO strategists need to call for backup from video creators and bloggers to cater to the endless demand for content.
Then there’s the fact that sales and marketing need to work together instead of against each other if they want to help a company to attain its business goals. There’s no point in a marketing team gathering leads if the sales team can’t convert them because they’re not relevant to what the company wants to achieve.
In fact, the need to collaborate goes above and beyond just sales and marketing. Content teams need to have access to senior executives and other employees so that they can filter their expertise into blog posts or video interviews. And sales and marketing teams need to work closely with the C-suite to make sure that they’re always pushing the company in the right direction. Strategies change, and sales and marketing campaigns need to change with them.
Collaborating with others
So far, we’ve only talked about internal collaboration, but external collaboration is arguably just as important, if not more so. After all, this is what enables brands to work with bloggers and other influencers. Most marketers think of it as “influencer marketing” or some variation thereof, but when you go into it with this mindset, you do yourself a disservice.
That’s because influencer marketing is a short-term approach, while collaboration is long-term and can continue to add value to both parties over time. When you collaborate with someone, you can go out of your way to help them without expecting anything in return. This might mean giving them your products or access to your service with no expectation of a review or a response.
This might also mean collaborating with other brands, such as when GoPro and Red Bull partnered for their Stratos campaign in which Felix Baumgartner jumped from the edge of space and set three world records in a single skydive. By collaborating – not just with each other but also with Baumgartner – these two brands were able to achieve something much more memorable than they could have managed on their own.
Conclusion
Too many people think that marketing is all about individual artistic geniuses coming up with the perfect strategy or some kick-ass creative. It’s certainly true that there’s a place for these mythical geniuses, but it’s also true that you can get the best out of these employees if you encourage them to work as team players. Ultimately, marketing works best when people collaborate.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.