As a marketing professional, you may sometimes feel like you’re not on the same page with your development team. While your job is to ideate and strategize new campaigns, the development team is focused on bringing these ideas to life on your website. When friction arises between the teams, it can lead to major slowdowns.
In this guide, we’ll review effective strategies for improving collaboration between your marketing and development teams. The best websites and marketing campaigns are built by teams with effective collaboration, and these tips will help bring alignment to your interactions.
1. Clearly define cross-team goals.
Set a clear objective to work toward when kicking off any new marketing initiative or web project. This will help everyone determine the best course of action at each step of the process while keeping your overarching goals in mind.
Take a data-driven approach to goal setting. There is less room for subjective reasoning or hunches when you’re using concrete data to drive your goals. Use past campaign successes and metrics to set achievable, but ambitious, goals that drive growth.
Your goals should be SMART—Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant to your organization’s mission, and Time-bound.
Here are a few examples of collaborative goals you might set between your marketing and development teams:
- Successfully migrate your website from Drupal 9 to 10 while maintaining SEO rankings and a positive user experience.
- Update your website over the next three months to reflect your current branding.
- Streamline your data analysis to optimize your marketing and development decisions.
Assign clear metrics to your goals. For instance, you might track conversions, click-through rates, bounce rates, or pages per session. This gives both teams clear, quantifiable benchmarks to hit.
Be sure to also provide any supporting materials that the marketing and development teams may need, such as documentation or design specifications. The right documentation can make or break the execution of your goals, so share guidelines across all departments to ensure everyone is on the same page about deliverables.
2. Develop channels for open communication.
Track progress made toward shared goals using a variety of communication and project management tools. For example, you might use:
- A project management system, like Asana, Trello, or Monday.com, to keep goals organized and easily accessible
- Communication platforms, such as Slack or Microsoft Teams, to stay in touch on a daily basis
Set task owners, priorities, and deadlines for each task in your project management system. This provides a clear sense of accountability and ensures fewer activities fall through the cracks.
If necessary, host collaborative team meetings to share major updates that can’t be fully explained via email or instant messaging. Meet on a video call or in person in your office to align on current priorities and share progress reports.
3. Foster open-mindedness and understanding.
A common point of friction between marketing and development teams tends to be a lack of shared terminology between teams. That’s why it’s important to learn each others’ languages. Developers should learn a bit about the marketing team’s specific goals and terminology, and marketers should learn about the dev team’s processes.
For example, Kanopi’s Drupal migration guide recommends that marketing professionals familiarize themselves with the web development steps necessary to migrate a website from Drupal to WordPress. That way, they’ll understand how the migration could affect elements like the website’s branding.
As a marketing professional, you may sometimes find it challenging to describe the type of website functionality you’re looking for. Find creative ways to get your message across, whether that’s drawing a diagram of the type of web functionality you’re picturing or pulling examples from other websites.
4. Form personal connections.
Fostering personal relationships between coworkers is always helpful for better teamwork and communication. When you can get to know someone on a personal level, you can communicate with them more easily in a work setting.
Create opportunities for socializing between the marketing and development teams, such as:
- Fun breaks, like virtual happy hours or in-office coffee breaks
- Cross-team meetings in person so that team members can interact face-to-face
- Team-building activities, such as a company outing to an escape room
Also, celebrate successes as a full team. According to Double the Donation’s list of recognition program ideas, appropriately recognizing your team members can “encourage valuable collaboration among team members” and boost team morale.
Whether you’re recognizing a successful switch from Drupal to WordPress or an influx of new website visitors, involve both teams in commemorating your wins.
Seamless cross-team collaboration can turn your website into a more powerful digital marketing tool and increase the return on investment for your marketing campaigns. Be sure to recognize team members who are going above and beyond to foster cross-team collaboration. Share examples of successful teamwork with all team members so they know what effective partnerships look like.