Inbound marketing costs less than 60% per lead than outbound marketing. It therefore should come as no surprise that organizations are ramping up marketing functions faster than ever.

But every time a team scales, a lot of folks begin feeling left behind. 

Information travels in grapevine, and from the 100% context that the head of marketing retains, only a fraction of it gets passed along. 

This dilution of context, vision, visibility, all seep into the culture till it mounts up frustration in the team and dissonance from the bigger picture. Poor documentation and gaps in information sharing lead to ambiguity, forgotten (read abandoned) projects, duplicate work, and a persistent feeling of “what in the world are we doing?” 

Here’s the big takeaway: securing you and your team access to the right information at all times is crucial to your success.

So if you are curious to know which ten resources you’ll need to deliver kickass marketing campaigns with your entire team, together, here is the tea. 

1. Create an actionable o/marketing-strategy that works

As a marketer, start by asking a few basic questions

• Who is buying what you have to offer
• What exactly motivates them to come to you in the first place
• How are you different from the alternatives out there
• How to reach these prospects before your competitors do
• What will prompt them to take a profitable action
• How to continue to retain and delight the existing customers
  

Without understanding how you can distinguish your brand from all others with a clear objective in mind, you run the risk of spinning your wheels and becoming irrelevant. 

Per a CoSchedule study, marketers with a documented strategy are 313% more likely to say their work is effective. 

No smart marketer would bet against those odds. Creating a marketing strategy is an exhausting process and a task that takes time. However, the benefits of having a clear-cut strategy with the objectives of every task mapped out far outweigh the effort.

If you want to deep-dive into how to create an actionable resource, this might prove helpful. 

You can create a marketing strategy on Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slide, Notion, Airtable but make sure to include everyone in it. To give everyone the room to collaborate and chime in where they feel they have fresh, often better ideas. 

2. Pen down your o/content-style and o/branding guidelines
   

One of the worst blunders you can make as a marketer is delivering a brilliant campaign that is so far removed from your brand’s voice and design that no one associates it with you. 

It is critical to make sure everything your brand says or does falls in line with its persona. A persona that you need to define. 

To create a content style, use any popular text editor and include the following: 

• A crisp description of your company, kind of like a boilerplate
• The answers to these questions: who you are, what are you trying to solve, and who is your audience
• Give your brand a persona or personality. You can be funny, serious, snappy, mystic, utterly hilarious, friendly, inspirational, whatever you would like the brand to be
• Jot down your writing goal and principles. For instance, our goal is to always package something of value for all the consumers of our content
• Define your voice, tone, and style
• Include the basic definition of some key terms used in your organization
  

We’ve created our content guide on Google Docs cause why not. It’s too simple. 

For your design team, o/branding would direct everyone to a link that lists the brand color codes, typography, branding assets, and logo in high resolution. 

3. Take charge of your brand’s social media presence in one place [o/social-media] 
   

Great social media teams move fast. They make the perfect use of moment marketing, trending topics, and are always in sync. 

Social media management generally involves shuffling among multiple documents that include details about what would go out on which days, a repository of great ideas, social media analytics, a calendar, and strategy. 

At OSlash, we decided to create one comprehensive Excel file to include all the abovementioned tabs that we’ve made easy to access with o/social-media. 

💡 Quick tip: You are constantly posting graphics on social media. And in the process create a great repository of digital assets that can be used across platforms and in blogs. Just put these assets in one place with o/digital-assets

4. Stick to the editorial calendar with o/content-calendar 
   

The best content calendars don’t just help everyone keep track of their deadlines; they streamline the entire content creation process. 

With a calendar, you can break your content production into phases, include links to references, allow everyone to pitch in ideas in the ideas column, and make sure your content team runs like a publication house. Fast, on time, and efficiently.  

This only happens by ensuring every channel is considered, every title is reviewed, and yes, everybody’s aware of their deadlines.

The ideal content calendar should include the following columns: Ideas, In progress, Under review, Published, Distributed

Each card would include the deadline, assignee, stage of the funnel, objective, and channel. 

We love Notion for creating content calendars, kanban style. The best part? Each card in the Notion doc is expandable and can include details about how you plan on distributing your content. 

5. Finetune the individual heads in your strategy with o/marketing-analytics
   

Every marketing effort is a shot in the dark. Unlike engineering, that’s kind of binary in function, marketing is just a bunch of creative people coming together to predict (often quite unsuccessfully) what will make an impression in 1.5 seconds in the easily-distractible minds of the people. 

While there’s luck involved, the right analytics help in pointing you in the right direction. To test waters, acquisition channels, social media platform, the success of an email, etc. 

We at OSlash use Google Analytics and Amplitude to get all our analytics on one simple dashboard. Want to check how your content or a marketing campaign is performing, go to o/marketing-analytics. Pretty easy. 

6. Write, update, repurpose, and review content with this collection o/blogs

This is our favorite collection that helps everyone in the company keep a track of all the blogs that have ever been written under the brand’s name. 

I say favorite because we return to it all the time. It helps everyone keep track of all the drafts regardless of whether the writer was comfortable writing it on Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or Notion. Each link gets neatly stacked in this collection and allows the whole team/company (depending on how big your workplace is) to check progress, give feedback, and read for leisure all while never asking or scrambling for a link. 

It also greatly helps organizations repurpose content or update the old ones.  Definitely, one of the toughest things a content marketing team has to deal with. 

7. Build the snazziest website using o/website-copy
   

There’s no better and low-cost advertisement for a brand than its website. The copy needs to be succinct, clear, and written for the target audience. 

As a content head, it can be tremendously helpful to have one doc that contains the entire website copy. It helps save hours of time for the designer or website expert you are collaborating with. 

For this purpose, we use Google Slides for www.oslash.com. That’s because, with greater editing capabilities, it’s easier for the writer to show the placement of text in each fold. 

That’s how neat it is to use Google Slides to write all your landing pages content. 

It is also easier to demarcate and design each fold of the website as you go. Something that is impossible to do in the rest of the text editors. Believe me, we’ve tried. 

Quick Tip: Create another doc, Notion or Word, to allow everyone in the team to chime in with website feedback (o/website-feedback). The layout looks off, the colors too gaudy, the copy too much like marketing drivel, jot it down on o/website-feedback. 

8. Convert more leads into paid customers using o/product-emails 
   

Regardless of how many avenues for marketing open, emails would always remain the most successful lead converter. It’s personal, conversational, and opens doors to a one-on-one conversation. 

If you are a product-led company, expect to write multiple transactional emails earmarked for each stakeholder to improve their product experience. 

Make sure transaction emails follow the same template, are short, to the point, and are sent only to the people it concerns. Because the last thing you’d want to do is send your users irrelevant emails. 

It’s super easy to keep track of all the product and marketing emails in two docs OSlashed o/product-emails and o/marketing-emails. 

At OSlash we use Google Docs to write these emails, get feedback from the team, and ensure the emails go out with appropriate intervals in between. 

9. Create innovative and appealing o/campaigns across social media
   

For each campaign, your team delivers to generate a new lead, sale, or other favorable outcomes, everyone from content to design to digital marketing needs to get on the same page.

A great way to do that is to have a single sheet where you can track all your previous campaigns, repurpose the ones that worked well, and get everyone from content to design to collaborate easily. 

To know how to deliver high-performing campaigns time and again, here’s a comprehensive guide. 

The best way to track all the campaigns, goals, spends, funnel stage, and content would be to use the Airtable campaign template. 

10. Get noticed with o/press-release-kit ‍
    

To create a buzz for the brand, it is vital that your press release kit is thorough, and one that spins a narrative fascinating enough for journalists to stand up and take notice. 

Here is a list of everything that your press release should contain: 

• Press release (ideally it should be 400-700 words long) with a boilerplate at the bottom
• Quotes from the customer, investor, and founder
• Photos of your product, team, and founders
• A company write-up that succinctly describes what your organization does
• An FAQ sheet with answers to the most commonly asked questions 
• High-resolution logo in JPEG or PNG format
• Founder profiles
• Contact information in case the journalists have additional questions 
  

You can create a Google Drive folder or share it in Notion/Dropbox to package it better.

Quick Tip: Create an excel/Google Sheet file [call it o/coverage] to keep a track of all the coverage your brand has ever received. This would be the best way to gauge the performance of your PR team over time.