How Slack can streamline your marketing channels – rather than being just another headache

Marketing has changed forever. Your customers now own your brand experience, not your marketing department. And, with a multitude of touchpoints at play, gone are the days when marketing and sales could map out a clear path to reach customers. Instead, ever-changing technology trends are opening up new possibilities, enabling customers to engage with brands in ways that would have been unimaginable, even a decade ago. Today, instant customer interaction is the new gold for marketers.

But, how can they be everywhere their customers are at once? This is where communication platforms like Slack become mission-critical. With Slack, marketing teams can keep a constant pulse check on what customers are up to, wherever or however they engage with their business.

But, with a typical enterprise already juggling close to 2000 different tools, surely adding another one to the mix will increase information overload, not ease it? The fact is, with any tool you use for your business, you only get out of it what you put into it. So, it’s about implementing tools like Slack in a thoughtful way to help you solve challenges, not create more.

Here are a few top tips on how Slack can help you align your marketing efforts and take a more customer-focused approach:

Instant sharing and collaboration

To keep pace in a constantly changing environment, marketing teams need to work in a more agile and fluid way. Slack makes real-time collaboration with teams and customers a breeze. You can use it to share files (via Google Docs), manage tasks, calendars and notifications, and join calls via apps like Zoom. All you need to do is map out the tools your team relies on every day and bring them into the Slack platform – creating one central hub of activity for everything marketing related.

Solve customer issues in real-time

A glitch on your online shopping cart can cost your business millions in minutes. Slack can help you manage these critical incidents. When a customer issue is identified, you can spin up a Slack room connecting the right people from across departments like web development, customer support, marketing, and the executive team to ensure you take a consistent and coordinated approach.

You can use automated bots to update channel members as you work towards a resolution. Slack rooms like this can then be muted when people no longer need to be involved and archived for future reference.

Manage, track, and measure campaigns

Perhaps you want a daily update on what your customers are saying on social media, be notified when a blog goes live on your website, or receive an alert when your webinar reaches maximum registrations. You can automate any of these alerts using customised bots in Slack. Start by automating your marketing analytics and then automating your update notifications via Slack.

Keep a radar on culture

We’ve seen plenty of examples of how team members, and worse still, business leaders use collaboration tools to breed toxic cultures at work. It’s important to remember that Slack will only amplify the culture you have established; it will never create what is not there.

Use Slack to keep a close radar on the tone of discussions that go on across your team’s channels, and encourage positive, supportive, and team-focused interactions.  Call out great behaviours and make them something the team feels proud of – even throw a Gif or emoji in to show your appreciation. The ‘virtual’ culture you develop on Slack should be respected and nurtured just as you would in your physical office.

Technology continues to transform everything from the way customers interact with brands to how teams work every day. Slack can ease the ‘always-on’ burden facing modern marketers by making collaboration seamless, automating everyday tasks, and keeping track of performance. And, crucially, Slack can help marketing teams keep pace with ever-changing customer expectations, without trying to be everywhere at once.

source:https://www.marketingtechnews.net/