The Slack handbook for marketing teams

Introduction

The average company loses more than 20% of its productive power to organisational drag.

That includes all the time that teams spend digging for information, such as last year’s conference attendee list, or coordinating internally on the status of designs, copy, budget approvals and other factors that affect a campaign or programme’s success.

This handbook will show you and your marketing team how you can use Slack as your digital HQ – a shared place to brainstorm campaign ideas, manage creative and iterate on results faster. Work in channels, integrate apps and services that you already use and deploy various Slack features to find information in an instant, so people can devote their time and energy to what matters most: bringing in customers and making them happy.

1. Get access to information and internal experts company-wide

More than just a place to organise conversations, public channels automatically create a hub of knowledge that’s searchable by everyone in your organisation. If you commit to doing most of your work in public channels, when someone needs more insight to move a campaign forwards – such as the latest survey results or the status of a billboard design – all that information is readily accessible.

It’s best to reserve private channels for sensitive or confidential conversations and direct messages for quick back-and-forths.

2. Turn insights into action in a flash

Bringing real-time campaign data into Slack

Marketing teams need to draw from a wide set of data to make decisions and swiftly iterate campaigns. Rather than fritter away your time on spreadsheets and flipping between tools, use Slack apps and integrations to pull valuable real-time data from other platforms and services into channels where team discussions are already happening.

Relaying your data into public channels ensures that managers and other team members can stay updated on progress and results. And less juggling between apps and logins means that you’ll have fewer lags slowing you down.

Integrating your marketing tools with Slack

Connect these apps and services to your Slack workspace to bring more of your team’s workflows into one place.

Add these apps to your workspace and discover more in the Marketing category of the Slack App Directory.

Tip: Set up weekly reminders (/remind) for yourself, a user group (@marketing-team, for example) or an entire channel to remind team members to post status updates on campaign progress and keep records up to date.

3. Maintain momentum, get quick approvals and keep customers happy

Let’s bring these tips together with some examples of workflows that help you to more easily connect with internal experts, contributors and stakeholders.

Maintain momentum with fast feedback and approvals

No need to call a meeting: invite team members from across organisations into project channels to keep the production process going. Save even more time by using emoji to respond quickly while keeping chatter to a minimum and channels tidy.

Tip: Need to discuss a design in more detail? Launch a Slack call and use screen sharing or add your favourite video conferencing app to Slack to work on tweaks and improvements together.

Sync with sales teams to give customers the VIP treatment

If an event, conference or webinar is part of your campaign, make sure that your invitation and RSVP lists stay updated with the help of the sales team. Just connect the Salesforce app to your workspace to automatically relay and share customer contact information right within Slack.

Make an impression with real-time responses

Hooray! Your campaign is officially live and people are responding. Delight customers with your carefully crafted, well-timed responses: add the Twitter app to a channel so that you can funnel in customer comments and questions in real time, then invite writers and other creatives to help brainstorm supportive, witty and crowd-pleasing responses.

4. Shared channels: bring agencies, vendors and partners into the fold

Communicating with ad agencies, PR firms, vendors and other external partners through emails, calls and meetings can quickly create a lot of unnecessary stops and starts. Streamline your work and make external partners feel like part of the team by launching a shared channel to connect your Slack workspaces. You’ll be able to keep each other posted on progress more often, find and share data and drive results faster.

What’s next?

There’s lots to digest in this handbook, so here are a few things that your team can do at the outset to streamline your workflows, speed up your processes and make information more accessible across teams.

1. Do a little channel clean-up: maintaining good channel hygiene is essential for keeping communication between teams and departments crystal clear. Make sure that you periodically audit your channel list, archiving ones that are no longer relevant or useful. Take a look at these tips for reducing noise in Slack.
2. Rethink your channel names: is there a consistent naming convention across all your channels? Are they labelled in a way that makes their purpose obvious? Take some time to rename channels so that they’re easy to find and follow. Learn more about channel naming best practices.
3. Give some apps a whirl: connect a few key services that you use often (such as your analytics tools) to your team’s workspace and try sharing and updating data directly in Slack. Explore marketing apps for Slack.

For detailed tips and how-tos on organising channels, working with apps and more, visit our Help Centre. Or if you prefer to talk to a human, get in touch any time via feedback@slack.com or find us on Twitter @slackhq and we’ll be happy to help.