If your marketing efforts are feeling stale and unoriginal, one likely reason is the lack of unique ideas coming from you (yes, you) and your team. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Being consistently creative is hard. In these instances, the old adage of working smarter — not harder — is true. And if you are looking to work smarter, jumping into the world of teamlancing may be the best way to give your marketing efforts the kick in the pants it needs.
But how exactly will teamlancing help? Check out these seven important ways using teamlancers will transform your marketing efforts for the better with little effort on your part:
1. Teamlancing helps you avoid overburdening your marketing team.
An overworked marketing team is an underperforming marketing team. If you are expecting more from your marketing team, but your organization is not increasing the marketing budget, then you can expect burnout among your employees. A 2018 Gallup report documented that at least 70 percent of millennials are facing some burnout at work, while 30 percent say they are very often or always burned out on the job.
By incorporating teamlancing into your work environment, those marketers who you have hired to focus on developing strategy can spend their time working on strategic projects while teamlancers focus on the tactical implementation. This will lead to an improved work-life balance among your full-time employees, making it more likely they will be happy with their positions and be willing to stay at your organization for longer. Because nearly two-thirds of employees do not strongly believe they have a good work-life balance, any changes you make in your organization to facilitate this balance will be felt and appreciated.By incorporating teamlancing into your work environment, those marketers who you have hired to focus on developing strategy can spend their time working on strategic projects while teamlancers focus on the tactical implementation. #contentmarketing Click To Tweet
2. Teamlancing allows you to save money for ads and media development.
Teamlancing is a cost-effective option for your organization when you think about the amount of money you will save from needing to allocate funds to pay for a full-time employee — including the benefits you need to pay that come along with employing somebody full-time. Using a teamlancer model allows your organization to be flexible with your budget in lean and heavy times without needing to worry about hiring or laying off employees.
Likewise, you can utilize some of the funds you are saving for media buying to promote the content your teamlancers are developing. If you are anxious to get your content in front of larger audiences, remember the following when developing a paid advertising plan:
Look for ways to improve your Google Quality Score.
Target your content to specific audiences.
Use more than one social platform to promote your content.
Seek ways to remarket your social media content.
3. Working with teamlancers forces you to better define your brand voice and tone.
In order for you to have teamlancers develop content for you that suits your brand voice and tone, you must make sure you have a developed voice and tone for your brand. It’s a simple concept — but not always easy to achieve. This voice and tone guide is important because you can’t expect a group of teamlancers to hit a target that you can’t find yourself. Though it is important to have a brand guide to share with teamlancers, it is also true that teamlancers can help your company further develop your brand guide. Any aspect of the brand guide that is not well defined is sure to spark questions from your teamlancing group — thus you can use their questions to further develop your guidelines.
Consider these seven steps to develop your brand voice:
Review your brand promise.
Audit — and purge — your existing content.
Ask your audience.
Describe your brand in three words.
Develop a brand voice chart.
Look for inspiration.
Document everything.
4. Teamlancing allows for fresh perspectives in ideation and finalization of content.
You may have heard the saying that “every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” The same is true of your marketing organization. If you are looking for anything beyond incremental improvements, you are going to need to make major adjustments. By utilizing teamlancers to help with your marketing efforts, you will have an opportunity to hear new and fresh perspectives about ways to resolve your marketing problems. This is true when ideating content as well as when teamlancers are putting the final touches on content.
Teamlancers have opportunities to creatively solve marketing problems in unique ways because they are not full-time employees who are worried about upsetting the status quo. Some of the tactics teamlancers may employ to foster creativity include:
Changing routines
Pitching good — and bad — ideas
Getting diverse feedback
Borrowing ideas from others
Doing creative activities
Practicing mindfulness
Seeking new experiences
Being spontaneous
Exercising
No one of the above-mentioned items is a tactic better than the others, but when you have a group of teamlancers who are utilizing several of these tactics, fresh perspectives are sure to arise. The end result of this focus on creativity will be content and ideas that are far from being cookie-cutter which allow you to solve your marketing problems in unique ways.
5. Teamlancing brings improved creation, testing, and adaptation techniques.
Whereas your internal marketing team is limited by the lack of time it has to devote to projects and other responsibilities, teamlancers are not limited in the same ways because you can have one or more teamlancing groups working on a project — including creating, testing, adapting, and ideating.
Part of the beauty of having more than one group of teamlancers working on a project is that you can compare proposals and content and decide which content will best fit your brand in the long term. Testing the content is an important part of utilizing the content the teamlance groups are working on. Some of the types of content that you may want to test on your digital channels include:
Ad headlines: Test two or more options to see which better drives the click-through rate.
Ad copy: The ad copy gives you another opportunity to capture your audience after the headline.
Call to action: A unique call to action may be all that your marketing efforts need to raise to the next level.
Graphics and imagery: Your group of teamlancers can provide multiple image/graphic/video options to drive home your message. Go with the one that consistently proves to resonate best.
6. Teamlancers bring a significant amount of collective experience regarding what has worked best for other brands.
Another of the advantages associated with utilizing teamlancers is the fact that they often have years and years of experience working for a variety of brands. In fact, due to the nature of freelance work, teamlancers likely will have worked for many brands over the course of their careers, giving them a well-rounded experience working in many industries and creating many types of content for a variety of platforms.
Because of this experience, teamlancers also will have a solid understanding of what has worked well for other organizations. When you utilize help from teamlancers, you are able to take their collective knowledge and years of experience and use it for your own benefit, meaning you can build on the successes of others and learn from others’ mistakes.
Likewise — and this is important —even though you may not see any issues with your company culture, it is possible that the environment in which you work may be stifling to new processes and ideas. Because teamlancers are not full-time employees who are embedded in your organization, they won’t be adversely influenced by a less-than-positive company culture in their ideation and creation processes.The environment in which you work may be stifling to new processes and ideas. Because #teamlancers are not full-time employees embedded in your organization, they won't be adversely influenced by a less-than-positive company culture in their ideation… Click To Tweet
7. A group of teamlancers can quickly turn around complex projects for various audiences.
If you have a small marketing or creative department, getting work done can be time-consuming —particularly when nuanced content for audiences needs to be created. Your regular marketing team will be unable to effectively develop multiple options and multiple creative elements for various audiences — but your teamlancers can do so. This means that instead of receiving a single creative solution designed to speak to all audiences, teamlancers will be more likely to provide audience-specific creative solutions.
Some of the concepts that may be helpful to your teamlancers when creating audience-specific content include:
Use web and social analytics to hone in on your audience’s interests.
Ask audiences what they want.
See what works for others who are speaking to the same audience.
Develop marketing personas.
Find more information about teamlancing and how you can utilize this practice in your organization.
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