5 tips to getting everyone involved in your marketing efforts

Inspirational marketing campaigns can ignite growth by helping your audience find your product and better understand how it will make their lives better. But it isn’t easy to break through the noise and capture people’s attention. The pace of content creation and distribution means you’ll need more than just great messaging and creative. Winning campaigns run on the collaborative brain power of teams across the organization. In fact, aligning your marketing, sales, and product teams can deliver up to 19% faster revenue growth and 15% higher profitability. But they’re not the only teams you need on your side. To create impactful work and drive better business results, the strongest marketing teams set joint goals with many areas of the business and drive alignment early on. Here are five tips to help sync your departments for marketing success:

1. Know your customer: Partner with research and customer service

Collaborate with your research team to create comprehensive buyer personas. Personas help you learn more about your customers, hone your messaging, and expand your reach. Ask questions like: Who’s your ideal customer? What are their needs and interests? For a more detailed snapshot, shadow your customer service team—you’ll hear firsthand what keeps your customers up at night. Pro tip: Make valuable data, research, and personas accessible to your broader team. Often that research helps reinforce and guide product and sales decisions as well.

To learn more about how to collaborate on your campaigns, check out our eBook, “Team up for marketing success."

2. Agree on shared goals: Align with the product team early to define success

It’s useful to understand the thinking behind why your product was built. Partner with your product team to clearly define what differentiates your offering in the market and develop a clear value proposition. Then, once you’ve created a messaging framework and go-to-market plan, connect back to ensure everyone is aligned on the launch strategy. Pro tip: Store content and launch timelines in a central location where they can be easily accessed or shared.

3. Always improve: Create a feedback loop with your sales team

Your sales team has a wealth of intel on how previous campaigns were received by your existing customers and prospects. Before initiating your next endeavor, ask them to brief you on your last campaign’s reception. Start by asking the two most basic questions: What worked? What didn’t? This feedback will help you properly evaluate lead quality and campaign effectiveness to make your next one better than the last. Pro tip: Integrate sales and marketing systems to save time and boost your teams’ productivity.

4. Follow the money: Align with finance on budgets and goals

Keep budgets and ROI at the forefront of every marketing plan. Bring the finance team into the conversation early to secure reasonable goals that’ll satisfy the company and customers alike. This may seem obvious, but only 15% of marketing and finance teams collaborate on shared goals ¹. Talk to the finance team early and often to make sure the numbers are lining up for your tactics to deliver. Pro tip: Adjust sharing permissions on files to make sure the right people can view or edit sensitive information.

5. Enhance the way you work: Maximize your marketing systems with IT

Connect with IT to take your tools to the next level. Whether you’re looking to increase inbound traffic and leads, collaborate securely with agencies and freelancers, or streamline your team’s workflows—there’s an app for that. IT is the backbone of your organization, and they can help create the infrastructure to keep your campaigns going strong. Pro tip: Plug into the tools your team already knows and loves to make collaboration effortless. With different departments working toward the same goal of growing the business, why wouldn’t you do it together? Dropbox Business connects teams to create marketing campaigns that land with impact. To learn more about how to collaborate on your campaigns, check out our eBook, “ Team up for marketing success.” ¹“Winning In The Connected World: How Aligning Finance And Marketing Will Drive Business Success,” Forrester Consulting, November 2016