Things are quite different in the case of remote work, where everyone’s living at a distance. The immense value of remote team management can only be understood when you get to realize that remote employees take a few days to drift apart, not months or a year. This is more important in recent times because 40 percent of organizations offered full-time telecommunications in 2019 – a giant leap from just 5 percent in 2018. 

It doesn’t matter if your organization has ten or ten thousand remote employees, learning effective management tricks and preventing disengagement is equally necessary. 

If you want to attract the best candidates from across the globe and retain good people inside your team, implement and maintain the remote team management practices below and prove that your organization is a great place to work.

Use Remote Employee Monitoring Software

As an employer, you need to know your remote employees’ work progress on the go. You can’t meet them in person, but remote employee monitoring software can reduce that gap. It solves many issues involving remote employee monitoring, such as:

• It lets you know if the employees are working properly.
• It lets you find proactive and self-proven workers.
• It builds trust from both sides of the organizational structure.
• Its remote check-in system makes work attendance time visible.
• You can ensure the official data handling is done by actual employees with its face recognition system. 
• You can see the time an individual worker spends in a day or week with this software.

Overall, the software helps to decide which employees are productive at work.

Help to Build Personal Connections

If you can build positive relationships, it will work as a key element for establishing high employee engagement. In research done by Gallup, 63 percent of women agreed that they had a best friend at work and it made them more engaged to work. According to Gallup:

• When employees spend more of their waking hours at remote work, they do want to build a connection with team members.
• Remote employees want to feel like a worthy part of the team – the trust and support of coworkers helps to foster that feeling.
• The work might be enjoyable to workers, but they probably don’t feel fully energized or motivated to put their whole effort into their jobs.

To solve these issues, put in time and effort to foster relationships among remote employees. Create opportunities for casual interactions between colleagues and take the initiative to maintain those kinds of relationships. 

Deploy Employee an Engagement App

Employees need motivation when they work from home for a long time. As an employer, you need to keep them encouraged so that they don’t feel alone and isolated at home. With an employee engagement app, this responsibility becomes easier. It has benefits that will allow your employees to be productive.

• It helps to keep employees motivated at home.
• It encourages workers to go through tough times and beyond.
• It helps to achieve health goals by providing challenges.
• As an employer, you can also motivate the team to stay healthy with this app.
• It can help you to keep them engaged to work and increase their productivity.

Establish Team Collaboration

Employees need to feel a professional connection with the organization despite working from home. Collaborative work with the team can help. 

• Collaboration can happen in scheduled meetings or formal brainstorming sessions, but most will come from organic, casual conversations outside of formal meetings.
• Informal communication is directly linked to increased productivity within the group. As an employer, you need to make this sort of communication easier for the team.
• The effort to collaborate and communicate will prevent decisions or projects from moving forward without consultation with others, which is necessary to avoid incomplete, or poorly done, projects.

Prioritize Video and Phone Calls

• Make it mandatory to use a camera during team meetings and one on one meetings to foster closeness.
• Also, give priority to video calls rather than emails and messages whenever possible. Video calls are faster in communicating ideas and tone as well as reducing the possibility of missed content.

Ask Employees to be Responsive and Available

Lag in communication can result in distance between coworkers and can impact workflow. For example:

• If a worker lives hours away and doesn’t respond for several hours, the sender may feel uneasy and wish they were working in the same room.
• Getting responses immediately will make employees feel like they are all in the same room and working side by side at the same pace. So influence your team members to be responsive during office time.

Keep Remote Team Members Involved

Involve your team members in important decisions and actions, so that they feel like an important part of the family.

• Manage projects in a way that allows your remote employees to be easily involved. It helps prevent the feeling of missing out.
• Make an effort to initiate and encourage conversations with team members. This helps in creating team mental focus.

Strategies for Remote Team Management

Also, try these additional strategies as a part of strong remote team management:

• Allow team members to own or lead collaborative projects from time to time.
• Give importance to phone calls for emergency responses.
• Train your remote team members on giving recognition to everyone, both inside and outside the organization.
• Have executives hold Q&A sessions just for the remote team.
• Establish a remote work policy even before starting a remote team.
• Check on the team frequently and regularly.

Remote work is becoming more common and your organization can’t afford to wait for the right time – you have to take steps and make today the right time. Remote employee monitoring software is an important part of this process. Ensure great remote employee success with this tool and the other tactics discussed above. The results will surprise you!

The post Take Advantage of Remote Team Management – Read These 8 Tips appeared first on SiteProNews.

Over the last couple of years, influencer marketing has become an integral part of social media marketing strategy for many brands. Its ability to drive sales more effectively than other traditional marketing approaches has seen influencer marketing lauded by both B2C and B2B marketers.

As the popularity of influencer marketing continues to grow, some brands remain unsure about the smartest ways of adopting the influence of social media personalities to boost their business. While there are many benefits of influencer marketing, it can be a confusing and rather complex strategy to launch and manage. 

A successful influencer marketing strategy enables you to increase brand exposure while building authority in your industry. It also drives traffic to your site, getting new leads to purchase your products and services. However, for this to succeed, you ought to have an excellent hosting platform for your website. Checking out the features of Kinsta and WP engine would be a good start. 

What is Influencer Marketing?

At a fundamental level, influencer marketing is a strategy that identifies social media users with a strong influence on a brand’s target audience. A brand forms a partnership with the influencer wherein the latter agrees to expose their audience to the company’s message or content. 

This type of marketing works because of the high levels of trust that the influencers have built with their following. The recommendations from them act as a form of social proof for their followers to love your brand. Such social media influencers often have a large and engaged audience. Businesses benefit a lot as they get in front of their target market in a natural, positive, and meaningful way.

Take a look at these statistics, which will give you a clearer picture of why influencer marketing is a popular tactic to drive up sales:

• Only 1% of millennials trust advertisements, while 33% trust blog reviews before making a purchase.
• 40% of people reported having purchased a product or service after seeing an influencer they follow on social platforms use it.
• 71% of social media influencers believe that their audience gets engaged through an honest and authentic voice.
• According to research by Tomoson, influencer marketing yields up to $6.50 in returns for every dollar invested, 

Getting Started with Influencer Marketing

It is easy to understand why influencer marketing is a red-hot topic right now. But how do you capitalize on it?

Here are five tactics, based on current influencer marketing trends, to help you create and launch a successful influencer marketing campaign:

1. Set your goals and key performance indicators 

As with any other smart marketing plan, always start by documenting your goals. What do you intend to achieve with such a campaign? Having your goals clearly defined in your early stages enables you to develop a consistent, winning strategy throughout the campaign.

Moreover, setting your goals before taking any marketing action helps you to come up with the metrics you should track and monitor to assess the performance of the strategy. 

Some of the key performance indicators (KPIs) to consider when running an influencer marketing campaign are:

• Brand Awareness – more people recognize and like your brand.
• Audience Building – getting more followers and subscribers to your social platforms.
• Engagement – getting more likes, comments, and shares on your content.
• Lead Generation – having more people signing up for your offers.
• Sales – more people are purchasing your products/services.
• Customer Loyalty – having many more people remaining interested in and connected with your brand.
• Link building – getting more backlinks to your website.

2. Understand the influencer landscape

Once your goals are well-defined, another critical component of influencer marketing is finding a relevant and trusted influencer. There are a lot of factors to consider when choosing a social media influencer for your brand. However, the right candidate has to be in tune with your audience’s desire and needs. 

For some years now, Instagram has been the only platform that comes to mind when influencer marketing is mentioned. In fact, this site accounted for 92% of all influencer marketing in 2017. However, as time went by, other platforms came up. As a smart marketer, it would be prudent to incorporate other platforms where your target audience might be found. 

According to CEO World, there are about 16 types of influencer marketers to choose from. As you consider your options, try to explore the following:

• Bloggers
• Social media stars
• Celebrities
• Industry experts
• Thought leaders, etc.

3. Determine fair compensation

Influencer marketing costs vary and often depend on the status and reach of the influencer. There is always room for negotiation on the price (except for some well-established and successful influencers). However, the cost should always be viewed from the lenses of ROI while taking into account the specific KPIs you set.

Overall, influencer marketing is a much lower investment with a larger return on investment than other forms of marketing. Some influencers might even consider striking a mutually-acceptable deal, especially if they fall in love with your products or services.

4. Give the influencers creative freedom

Influencers have built their following thanks to their creativity and personality. It would be prudent to allow them to exercise creative control of the campaign when promoting your brand. You should know that people are uninterested and tired of being bombarded with ads every other time. This is precisely why you should market content and stay away from traditional advertisements. 

5. Continuous tracking and assessment

It might feel like a victory seeing your brand mentioned on social media. However, just getting an influencer to promote your business isn’t a sign of marketing success. This will only get determined if you’ve reached your influencer marketing goals.

Take Away

The digital landscape is rapidly shifting and those not keeping up with the trends are still losing customers, wasting their ad budgets, and continuously shrinking their market share. Luckily, influencer marketing has been extremely successful in driving brand awareness. 

A well-executed marketing strategy will help you achieve the majority (if not all) of your initial goals. By following the five tips outlined above, your brand stands to nurture a deeper and more organic relationship with the target audience. Elevate your brand’s visibility, awareness, and outreach naturally and effectively by trying out influencer marketing.

The post The Ultimate Guide for Growing Your Business with Influencer Marketing appeared first on SiteProNews.