Being part of a dynamic marketing team is extremely exciting but at times can be very overwhelming. This is most evident when working at a software company that aims to gain market share in a highly competitive landscape. As our marketing team continued to deliver results in an ever-changing environment, we realized that although our overall goals are the same, each member of the marketing team has his/her own targets to achieve. Without a clear structure and unified environment, it became extremely difficult to progress; hence, we were faced with a dilemma how to effectively reach both our own goals as well as the company targets.
Where we were
Our Marketing team consists of 3 key directions – SEO, PR and Online Marketing. Below is a brief description of what the team member’s responsibilities are and what they try to achieve.
- PR team is responsible for communicating with top tier media and hence needs a clear understanding of what websites to target and what topics are currently “hot” to have a clear understanding of what to pitch to each particular resource.
- Online Marketing team needs to continually search for new lead generation opportunities by developing pay per click campaigns, finding new partners and searching for new portals and ratings for company/product placement
- SEO team is responsible for the websites organic growth and hence needs to be constantly aware of new links to the company’s website while monitoring backlinks and optimizing the overall website content.
Meanwhile, all of this activity is overseen by the Marketing Director who manages the overall market outreach and needs to be able to continually assess the progress of his colleagues to quickly make changes if needed.
What we Used
From the start we began by using the most simple and available resources: Excel and Google Docs.
Although Excel enabled us to gather all the information in one place, we were unable to do many modifications with the resources available. Also, the Excel document seemed to be extremely cumbersome.
Google Docs was definitely a step up as it provided us with a much clearer visibility of team activities. However, this was not a sustainable solution for a collaborative environment. We required a more robust solution that tracked history as well as current activities.
Finally, we tried to use our own workflow management solution – Comindware Tracker to organize and manage our projects. We quickly realized that we needed a different solution to solve the issues that we were faced with.
What we achieved with BuzzStream
After a brief learning curve BuzzStream became an invaluable source of efficiency and productivity improvements within our team.
The “Filters” tab in BuzzStream was one of the features directly responsible for getting our team on the same page.
This feature enabled us to assign each team member the resources that they should monitor and be responsible for. More importantly, it prompted collaboration among team members. For example, when someone from the Online Marketing team identified an appropriate resource he/she reassigned it to the PR team and vice-versa.
As previously mentioned, seeing progress and visibility in real time was crucial for our success. The ability to open the history tab and see all the communication that has taken place gives everyone on the team a clear picture of what exactly is going on and where we are with each particular project. BuzzStream’s ability to add contacts and people to each resource also allows the marketing team members to communicate with the most directly relevant individuals.
Among other key features of BuzzStream that significantly improved Comindware’s productivity include:
- Ability to receive different reports for various activity when needed
- Have a real time visibility and set up follow-up times for certain activities from communication with journalist to new articles on different blogs
- Organize distribution of content to various resources and authors
Instead of a Conclusion
With BuzzStream we save enormous amounts of time as we no longer have to call or e-mail each other to understand the status of a particular project, or where our relationship currently stands with a journalist or blogger. Each team member has their favorite BuzzStream feature, which range from the ability to add tags to analyzing a website’s social engagement. We are able to focus our efforts on promoting our brand rather than getting everyone on the same page.
Artem Kulik
Artem Kulik is responsible for PR & Communications at Comindware Inc. Apart from overseeing press outreach, social media and industry analysis, Artem enjoys traveling and playing classical guitar.Disclaimer: The author's views are entirely their own, and don't necessarily reflect the opinions of BuzzStream.
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