5 Reasons Why Your Remote Marketing Team Fails At Deadlines

Having a remote marketing team can be a big advantage in today’s business world. You can save on overhead costs, increase employee happiness, and waste less time.

However, there are also several challenges — the big one being that your team can miss deadlines if you’re not careful.

Missed deadlines can slow down your revenue, alienate clients, and cause internal frustration in your company.

In this article, we are going to cover five reasons why your remote marketing team might be failing to meet deadlines and how to address them.

Let’s get started:

1. Poor Time Management Skills

One of the first things to look at is the time management abilities of your team. They might be lacking effective strategies to keep themselves on track, despite their best intentions. If this is the case, there are a few things you can do.

First, you can instill tracking sheets for their day. Schedule their tasks for the day, and each time they finish a task, they can check it off.

This also makes their work less intimidating. Instead of a mountain of work, they will have small bite-sized chunks that can be completed throughout the day and week.

2. Lack of Engagement

Lack of engagement is a common problem with distributed teams. Instead of being in a room full of other people, they are often alone at home or in a remote office. This produces challenges with feeling connected to the rest of the team or mission.

To combat that, use software like Slack, Trello, and other team management software. These allow you to have company-wide chats, specific department chats for marketing, and to share files like videos, text, links, and more.

It creates a casual yet professional atmosphere of constant chatting throughout the day so that engagement remains high.

3. Not Having the Right Tools

Sometimes, your team can miss deadlines because they lack the right tools or resources. Your employees could be working their hardest but simply can’t get their work delivered on time because something else is slowing them down.

Ask your team if there is anything they feel they need to be more productive and faster with their work results. There are certain marketing tools that can cut out a lot of minutiae and mundane busywork, such as:

• Email Automation – Software like MailChimp or Klaviyo can automatically send custom marketing emails to various segments of your list and provide in-depth analytics to your marketing team.
• Keyword Research – SEMRush or SpyFu are great apps that give you insights into competitors, keywords that are converting well, and potential costs of bidding on various terms.

4. Bad Leadership

One of the biggest reasons employees fail to meet deadlines is that they don’t have competent leadership. As a remote marketing team leader, you need to take full responsibility for keeping them on track.

Here are some signs that your leadership is lacking and needs to be improved:

No Clear Goals

If you don’t have clear goals set, you can’t expect your team to achieve your deadlines without issues. Vague goals leave room for confusion, errors, and ultimately result in missing deadlines.

Ensure that all of your goals are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Based. It’s an excellent framework to fix 90% of your goal-setting problems.

Ineffective Team Meetings

Running effective team meetings is a vital part of being a remote team leader. The first thing to do is to make sure that you are holding meetings often enough. When it comes to remote marketing teams, you should aim for meetings at least once per week.

Secondly, make sure that each meeting has a set start time, end time, and agenda. There should usually be no more than 3 to 5 items on the list. This ensures that you can focus and dig deeper into problem areas instead of bouncing around and wasting time.

Not Enough Information About a Project

If you don’t provide enough information to your team about the project, you might not even notice it. Consequently, employees will be afraid to look incompetent and just wing it without confronting you.

This creates a problem through a lack of transparency and poor results. Instead, foster a culture of transparent communication, a “no stupid questions” attitude. Always make sure to over-communicate rather than leave your team with question marks over their heads.

5. Not Enough Team Members

Business leaders can lose sight of the little things along the way. Sometimes, solutions to deadlines are easier than they appear. If you have tried everything else and your team is still behind, it could be a capacity issue.

Look into hiring additional team members to lighten the load across the board. You might find that the additional payroll more than pays for itself. It also allows your team to produce higher quality deliverables instead of rushing and delivering something that doesn’t meet your standards.

Alternatively, you can always outsource some tasks or hire freelancers if work has only increased temporarily.

Wrap Up

From lower costs to happier employees, it’s no secret that remote teams are one of the most promising ways to grow your business today. However, if you don’t keep productivity and deadlines in check, all of these benefits are wiped away.

By being proactive, you can implement the tips above to overcome the common reasons for missed deadlines in your remote marketing projects. That way, you can boost your bottom line, earn loyal customers, and reduce stress for the entire company.