The State of Remote Marketing Teams in 2020
A snapshot of how marketing teams operated once offices closed in 2020: which tools filled the gap, what broke down and what turned out to work better remote.
Marketing teams that had never worked remotely at scale had days, not months, to figure it out once offices closed in March. What followed was a fast, uneven adjustment: some parts of the job translated to remote work easily, others broke down in ways that took most of the year to properly fix.
The tools that filled the gap
Slack, already common in tech-forward marketing teams, became the default communication layer almost everywhere else too, replacing the in-person quick questions and hallway check-ins that used to happen without anyone scheduling them. Zoom absorbed everything from client calls to internal stand-ups to creative reviews, and its daily meeting participants grew from roughly ten million in December 2019 to over 300 million by April, a scale of adoption that would have taken years under normal circumstances. Project management tools like Asana and Trello, which some teams had used loosely before, became the actual source of truth for who was doing what, since the informal tracking that happens by walking past someone’s desk simply wasn’t available anymore.
What broke down first
Creative collaboration took the biggest hit early on. Reviewing a campaign concept, a video edit or a design mockup over a screen share lost a lot of the nuance that happens when a small group looks at the same physical printout or monitor together, and creative teams spent real time in the spring figuring out substitutes: Figma’s collaborative features, annotated screen recordings using Loom and more structured written feedback processes to compensate for what was lost without in-person review sessions.
Content production that depended on physical shoots, product photography, video with real locations and people, also stalled. Teams leaned harder on stock photography and illustration, on user-generated content solicited directly from customers and on simplified home-based video setups using whatever equipment employees already owned. Quality took a visible dip for a lot of brands in the spring before teams adapted their standards and workflows to what was achievable.
What turned out to work better remote
Not everything got worse. Async communication, forcing decisions and updates into written form rather than a meeting, cut down on the number of unnecessary calls a lot of marketing teams had tolerated before, and several teams that measured it found they were shipping campaigns just as fast, sometimes faster, without the calendar constantly fragmented by meetings. Hiring also opened up: marketing roles that had previously required relocating to a specific city could now draw from a national, sometimes international, talent pool, and teams that leaned into that found stronger candidates than they’d been able to access under geographic constraints.
Where teams landed by the end of the year
By the second half of 2020, most marketing teams had settled into a rhythm that looked less like an emergency workaround and more like a different operating model: fewer, more focused meetings, heavier reliance on written documentation and creative processes rebuilt around remote-friendly tools rather than treated as a temporary substitute for the office. The teams that adjusted fastest weren’t necessarily the most tech-savvy ones going in. They were the ones willing to admit early that the old workflow simply wasn’t going to translate, and to rebuild it deliberately rather than trying to replicate the office over video calls.
