With the widespread quarantines and lockdowns, it’s more a blessing than ever that current tech lets us remain connected to one another. The modern age brings with it affordances that are impossible to count on one hand. Virtually any information can be summoned with a few keystrokes, anywhere at any time. It’s come to the point where we can completely live our lives through digital means—Hungry? Order food online! Need to file your taxes? You can do that on the web too! Need to perform heart surgery? There are step-by-step web pages just for that too (though we suggest you find a doctor that doesn’t need that).
The fact that our portable devices hold all this information means that even traditional office work can be completed entirely online. This is great if your team works globally, if you need a change of scenery, or in the event that you find yourself stuck away from the office for an extended period of time. No matter the reason, work can always come to you whenever you need. We understand, though; it’s certainly a daunting thing to work remotely, especially if you haven’t done it before, so we’ve looked into how other teams are taking their work remote with the help of video! Here are some tips for working from home:
Conference Calling
Text-based messages can be a hit-or-miss; you can send something and not receive a response for an extended period of time, not to mention the loss of visual communication (which accounts for between 70-93% of human communication). Those issues are completely stripped away when it comes to video calls, and are a great way to keep in touch with your team members, or to connect with your customers. Tools like Zoom or WebEx are great additions to your team’s digital toolset when it comes to communication.
The Wibbitz teams use video conferencing for multiple reasons. The marketing team uses it extensively to communicate with team members who work in different parts of the globe, thereby ensuring everyone on the marketing team is completely aligned. On the sales side, the ability to conference call while screen-sharing is a great way for us to demo our products, since Wibbitz is almost exclusively a visual product. Our customer support team also uses video calls to deepen our connection with our clients; by putting a face to a name, your product becomes a bit more humanized, and allows for customers to relate to you a bit more.
Learn more about how to use video calls for your internal marketing team.
Online Video Creation
Online-based video creation tools, including an enterprise video platform, are also great if you still want to collaborate with your content team from the comfort of your own home. Larger industry tools can be limited to only the few team members who own the software and hold all the files, leaving others without an ability to lighten the workload, or even provide valuable insight to the piece of content being created. Having an online content creation tool ensures that content projects can be worked on regardless of whether or not they hold every single media asset on their hard drives.
Even before this time of crisis, our in-house editorial team has worked almost exclusively remote, and our head of editorial, Sam Valorose, is able to effectively scale content creation with the help of the Wibbitz Studio. Our enterprise video solutions gives him and his team the ability to create hundreds of videos each month, all while easily being able to review and edit the videos that his team works on. Effectively scaling top stories allows for our customers of any vertical to quickly and effectively inform their audiences about the virus.
As of March 20th, 2020, Sam’s team was able to produce 175 Top Stories around COVID-19, which received over 1100 rebrands total. Here’s an example of one of those Top Stories videos that Mashable’s team published with their own logo and branding:
Webinars
Webinars are a great way to co-market with another company who shares a similar vision to you, and the best part is they’re significantly easier to put together than a panel or conference. It’s also easier for audiences who may not be able to physically attend, but still want to learn about the webinar’s topic. Extending your co-marketing efforts to webinars is extremely worthwhile, as it allows for audience crossover, and opens up new opportunities for future partnerships.
After being avid users of their product, we reached out to SEMRush about the possibility for a co-marketing campaign. We both felt that our audiences could hold interest in both our products and share common desires to improve their own marketing campaigns. From that, we held a webinar with SEMRush about boosting website performance with video, and had great results from it. Both SEMRush and Wibbitz were able to gather a few leads from it, and fortified our relationships. Should another opportunity rise again, we’ll be sure to use webinars as a go-to co-marketing effort.
Virtual Happy Hours
Though external efforts are what drive more customers, it’s also important to maintain internal happiness within the team. Due to the COVID-19 crisis, many teams find themselves working from home. Humans are social creatures, and despite quarantines, physical isolation doesn’t have to be the only choice. Being able to connect with one another via social media, FaceTime, and even through video calls is a great way to keep in touch with the friends you made at work.
The Wibbitz team too is bearing the effects of the crisis, though we still keep our spirits high through our new modes of socialization. Using Zoom’s conference call feature, mixed with free online games, we are able to host interactive virtual happy hours, thereby keeping the positive spirit of Wibbitz alive and well despite the worries of the current day.
We also realized a lot of marketing and content teams were dealing with similar challenges during this time, so we hosted a town hall with leaders from Ceros, Bizzabo, and Cincopa to address those issues and discuss the solutions that have worked for each of us. And we ended up with a 35% attendance rate (the highest we’ve seen from our webinars thus far).
With these strategies in mind, it’s important for us to understand that working remotely shouldn’t be a frightening thing. The tools we have available to us make it significantly easier to keep our teams happy and working at their 100%. With these tips for working from home, you won’t need to worry about your productivity. And whenever the extenuating circumstances subside and you’re able to work next to your team, your productivity will be as if nothing ever happened in the first place.