Last updated - August 4, 2023
Work isn’t what it used to be—and that can be a good thing. A study by BCG found that 89% of people are expected to be working remotely even after the pandemic ends. Another study by Buffer found that 97% of their two thousand respondents recommended remote working.
With more people embracing the remote working setup, new opportunities for your company’s growth are created. Now, your business can hire an entire team without needing them to step foot in the office. You can start with a certain department, such as a remote social media marketing team.
Starting a remote team from scratch can be challenging. If you’re unsure about growing your social media marketing team, now may be your chance to scout some talent and consider going remote.
Reasons For Building Your Remote Social Media Marketing Team
Having a social media marketing team allows you to meet your customers where they are: on social media.
According to Statista, the global number of social media users will reach almost four and a half billion by 2025. Therefore, without an effective social media marketing strategy, you’re allowing your competitors to get ahead of you.
But what if you’re busy managing your eCommerce business and can’t focus on growing your social media presence? That’s where hiring a remote social media marketing team can help you.
Delegating your social media marketing to a remote team helps you focus your efforts on managing your company and increasing your workforce without worrying about the cost of renting office space.
If you’re interested in building your team, below is a helpful step-by-step guide you can follow.
8 Steps to Building Your Remote Social Media Marketing Team
Understand Your Business Goals
Clarify your objectives before recruiting and hiring people for your social media marketing team.
Do you want to increase sales? Broaden your online presence? Cultivate a community among your customers? Return to what your brand stands for to clear up what you intend to do with your remote team. Reviewing and defining your company’s goal for yourself also keeps your eventual team on the same page.
Despite all the advantages of remote working, communication tends to pay the price of its convenience. It can be easy for different team members to miscommunicate through video calls and group chats. Clearly understanding your business goals will help you align with new members.
Know Which Roles You Need To Outsource
If you’re not knowledgeable enough to hire and build your own social media marketing team, you can outsource your social media management and let the experts do the job. But first, you need to determine who you’re looking for. Many roles make up a social media marketing team, and below are a few to consider:
Copywriter
They write the persuasive text seen in all your marketing efforts. These can range from the call-to-action text on promotional posters to scroll-stopping captions on Facebook or Instagram feeds.
Their words help drive customers to act, whether buying your products or sharing your posts. Therefore, hiring proficient writers is crucial to your marketing efforts’ success.
Visual Designer
This role includes your graphic designers and video editors.
Marketers understand that images play a crucial role in attracting customers online. In the sea of text and status updates on social media feeds, standing out with an eye-catching image for your ad can mean the difference between a sale and a potential customer.
Graphic designers are trained to communicate information as efficiently as possible. According to Facebook, people spend only 1.7 seconds, on average, looking at a Facebook post on their mobile phones and 2.5 seconds when on a desktop. That isn’t a lot of time. Hiring a designer who understands how to deliver vital information in such a short window of time is essential.
The demand for video content will only keep rising in 2023 and beyond. So, having a creative video editor can help your brand stay relevant for years to come.
Social Media Manager
Juggling your social media presence across different platforms can be complicated. To stay relevant, you have to spend time with your finger on the pulse of each app.
Since no two platforms generate the same trends, it takes someone with specialized skills to understand how to track these trends and communicate the right marketing approach/strategy to copywriters and visual designers.
Community Manager
Say your business has a membership feature where select customers join an exclusive group where they’re the first to receive discounts and hear about promotions. Who’s in charge of managing that pool of people?
Your community manager.
They’ll be the in-between person between your loyal customers and you. If your brand wants to cultivate a special group, community managers are a crucial hire.
Clarify the qualities you’re looking for
Most managers tend to overlook soft skills to hire the best talent around. But if you hire someone that causes friction among departments or has poor communication skills, the whole business suffers.
When you’re hiring, you can follow the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) method of interviewing; asking candidates to cite a specific example of when they exhibited certain qualities will help you gauge their expertise and experience.
Here are a few qualities you may want to consider looking for when hiring candidates.
Clear Communicator
Communicating with someone remotely can be hard enough. If you have trouble understanding the interviewee—if their answers are unclear or don’t reply to your emails—they may not be someone you want to have on your team.
Organized
Since you can’t physically be there to oversee your team’s performance and daily work, it’s crucial to hire someone who knows how to stay on top of their tasks and can work unsupervised.
Proactive
Like the previous point, hiring someone who can work unsupervised and takes the initiative on projects will make your job more manageable.
Settle your budget
How much are you willing to spend on hiring a remote team? Your budget will determine the size of your team and how skilled the people you intend to hire are; more experienced freelancers will naturally cost much more than those with only a few years under their belt.
If you want your remote team to do their best work, part of your budget should include the tools and subscriptions you plan on letting them use.
Develop an Effective Onboarding process
Once you’ve decided to hire new employees, the next natural step is integrating them with the team. Here’s where having clear business goals help: they help smoothly align the latest members to get them on the same page as the rest of the team. Onboarding is also the stage where you’ll communicate your expectations with the team.
To lessen the pressure, encourage your existing employees to interact with your new team members and show the new hires that you’re always open to answering any of their questions.
According to MyHub, several studies have shown that isolation, anxiety, and loneliness take their toll. So, developing an enjoyable and welcoming onboarding process can help your new members get comfortable in their roles faster. To facilitate this, implementing a new hire onboarding software might be useful.
You can also encourage conversations that are non-work-related to help your team members bond more with each other. Suggest fun prompts or questions of the day to lift their spirits.
Use the right marketing tools
Marketing tools help your team perform their job better. While you may have hired the best of the best for your marketing team, you can hinder their abilities without the proper tools.
For instance, Grammarly is a helpful tool for your copywriters. It’s been tried and tested by millions of users worldwide. By using Grammarly, they can write content clearer and more concisely.
There are tools for your visual designers as well. Since they’ll be working with many images, it’s right that you provide them with resources. Envato Elements and Adobe Stock are sites that offer stock photo subscriptions. Alternatively, Pexels and Unsplash are available for free if you have a tight budget.
Social media or community managers will benefit from subscriptions to sites like HootSuite or Agorapulse. These tools help them manage all social media profiles from different social media platforms.
Before incorporating these tools into your team’s workflow, remember that you need to make room for them in your budget.
Track marketing performance
Data is crucial to creating effective marketing campaigns. Without knowing who’s clicking your ads, buying your products, or sharing your posts, creating marketing campaigns will feel like shooting wildly in the dark.
The question isn’t how to gather data but instead how to use the data collected.
That will ultimately depend on your campaign objectives.
If your objective is awareness, tracking your reach metrics can be a good indicator of how well the campaign performed. If you want to increase sales, store traffic can be a metric to pay attention to.
Develop open lines of communication with your remote team
Communication is important when coordinating with your team, especially with members you haven’t met in person. Apps like Slack, Zoom, Asana, and Trello are designed to improve internal communication. Take advantage of these apps to keep everyone in the loop of what’s going on in the company.
Consider Outsourcing the Hiring Process
If you feel that you don’t have the time to go through the entire process of hiring your remote social media marketing team, outsourcing the task can save you both time and hassle.
Outsourcing companies can take care of all your hiring needs, giving you more time to focus on managing your business. They have assembled expert recruiters and administrators to help you accelerate your business’s growth. Collaborating with them can even speed up the entire hiring process.
Best Practices for Managing Your Remote Team
Regularly share relevant marketing tools
You know your business more than anyone else. It doesn’t matter how experienced your marketing team might be. Providing your team with your insights and recommendations will always be helpful.
Share relevant case studies and reports you found interesting with the social media marketing team. It can help them improve their marketing efforts and try innovative strategies.
Ask for feedback
You might not be communicating as clearly as you thought you were, or you could’ve delegated tasks much more efficiently.
With clear communication being vital to a business’s success, especially with remote working, asking for feedback will help improve internal processes. Admitting your faults can also be a way to build trust with your remote workers, which is even more essential given how physically disconnected everyone is.
Celebrate small wins
Find creative ways to show your appreciation for your team’s hard work and dedication. Maybe you can create fun and simple videos congratulating the team for their milestones and achievements. This will boost their morale and improve their already stellar performance.
Wrapping Up
Cultivating a solid social media presence is essential if you want your business to thrive. With work-from-home setups becoming more common throughout the pandemic, building a remote social media marketing team is possible now more than ever.
If you don’t have the resources or the time to focus on hiring an entire social media marketing team, outsourcing the task to a BPO can benefit you. It allows you to grow your company without taking you away from your managerial duties.
