How to work with your Digital Marketing and Communications colleagues

and how to keep them happy

This is a blog which will resonate with digital marketing and communications professionals and be useful for everyone else. Often your Digital Marketer, whether they are internal, external or a bit of both, will be a little removed from your day job. In my experience teams in a business sometimes don’t know how to best work with their Digital Marketer or Communications Professional and might make a few faux pas. Here’s a guide about how to work with your Digital Marketer, and how to keep them happy.

1. We want realistic deadlines

Digital Marketers might seem like magicians, but those brilliant texts, impressive graphics and perfect emails actually take quite a bit of work behind the scenes. If you tell your Digital Marketer that a task is urgent, it has to be needed within the next couple of days. Our lists are loaded, so if you can’t provide a deadline, your task will be at the bottom of the list.

2. Consider timescales

Some campaigns might be larger than you imagine, some might be smaller. If you want bells and whistles, please factor in that we might need more time, or that we might have other large jobs on the go.

3. We want labels

To you, it’s one photo. To us, it could be one of 50, and when they are filed together, we have no hope of matching them. Please label your images so that they can be clearly matched to your content, and so we are not spending time labelling them for you.

4. We want the correct document in the correct format

If you are handing us a final document - Word, or PDF please. If you want us to make changes, please send the raw file. A raw file is anything we can edit, this can be Word, PowerPoint, Adobe InDesign (which you are likely not using, but your source might be) or something else. Check the instructions regarding what is required – they will exist.

5. Don’t over-format documents for web uploads

Formatting in documents can create additional code for content management systems (CMS’ – things like WordPress or Drupal), so if you make the document look too fancy it’s going to take us extra time to take it out.

6. No, we don’t use PowerPoint to do graphic design

PowerPoint was not created as a design tool, so we only use it as it was intended – to produce slides. More on that in another blog.

7. Read our content

We spend a lot of time putting together quality content because it is useful for you and contains the things that you need to know or action. Familiarise yourself with your company’s internet, intranet, emails, blog posts, app posts, social media etc. – it will save you writing emails to ask us questions about information that we have provided you already.

8. Please proof your content properly

So many times I have taken a lot of time and care on a piece, only to have an amended item back that is full of errors. This then takes up time as I correct both my errors and yours. There are some useful proofing tips in this blog post.

9. Write for dummies

Us Digital Marketers and Communications Professionals might have a good knowledge of the business, but we are not specialists in your area. Provide all the details in the most easily understandable way, with as few abbreviations as possible, so that we can understand it and your colleagues in other areas of the business can understand it too.

10. Consider if we need to be copied into emails

Please copy us in when there is an action for us or something we really have to know. Numerous times I have had an inbox full of email chains about teams discussing between them what they intend to do, or about a task that I passed onto someone else because it isn’t something I am involved with anyway.

Finally - Talk to us

Your digital marketing or communications person or team is always more than happy to explain what we do and how we can work with you to create some great content to promote your product, team, area, or goal. It is what we are here for.

I hope that was useful. To any fellow Digital Marketers or Communications Professionals, do you have any other tips on how to work with you, and keep you happy?

Image credit: magnet-me-LDcC7aCWVlo-unsplash - from unsplash.com