How Diversity Produces Digital Marketing Performance: The 5 Secrets to Building a High-Performance Team

Are you tasked with building a start-up marketing team or a brand-new digital performance team?

Walking into boardrooms throughout the world—from the U.S. to Southeast Asia, China and beyond—there’s one thing that strikes me as a common denominator in these companies. Whether in the States, Shanghai or Mexico, companies tend to make hiring decisions based on what they’re comfortable and familiar with.

While international companies are bursting with cultural diversity, it’s a rare experience where I find a company that’s diverse from top to bottom.

What I mean when I say this is diverse in cultures, generations, professional experience and mindsets—not just ethnicity or gender.

Full transparency, these days, I find myself sitting in Zoom meetings with partners and vendors and in boardrooms across from multiple versions of the same employees.

There’s a Word For This. Homogenous.

The definition of homogenous is of the same kind or nature; essentially, all alike.

A homogeneous team includes members who have a lot in common, such as their racial, cultural, marital, generational and educational status. Is it a coincidence on how some members of the same team previously come from the same company, hometown and B school?

Sound familiar?

Let’s face it: it’s human nature to seek out team members and candidates, and even consultants who are familiar to us—people who share the same experiences, behaviors, opinions and sometimes even political views. Whether it’s a creative team or financial group you’re building, we look for commonalities that draw us together. 

It’s not a surprise or a coincidence that some companies have team members who went to the same schools, attend the same religious organizations or are from a certain cultural background.

There are positive things about familiarity. But there are also negative things.

I’ve found that when I come across homogenous companies, more often than not, their similarities result in similar problem-solving methods.

It’s for this reason that—while it’s nice to have shared interests and the same educational background—I tend to go the other way when it’s time to build a team.

Why?

Because homogenous teams get stuck.

They break down.

They burn out.

And, even worse, they become uninspired. 

I'm from the mindset that when the entire team thinks the same, you wind up with ordinary results.

When you don’t have diversity, it means you have a team full of the same strengths and weaknesses. When you’re strong, you’re strong. But, when there’s a problem one person can’t solve, it’s a good bet to derail the whole team.

Diversity in skillset is essential, which means breaking up the homogenous model. 

Having inherited and built startup international teams both abroad in the U.S., there five things you need to focus on when you decide to cultivate a digital marketing team that produces performance.

1. Generational Experience

We live at a time when there are as many as five different generations in the workforce. Don’t focus on building just a team of Millennials, Gen Z, Boomers or Gen Xers. Instead, focus on strategically sprinkling each generation into your teams.

Building a team that spans multiple generations gives you an edge in everything from problem-solving to campaign ideation and execution.

No one can navigate social media quite like Gen Z marketers who understand social influencing.

On the flip side, it takes a seasoned Gen Xer to orchestrate an omni-channel push that brings your campaign to the forefront in a major city. Or a well rounded baby boomer who's experience started from traditional marketing.

Every generation has valuable knowledge and specific skillsets to contribute to a broader more holistic picture of success.

They may paint with different brushes and have different ideas of how to do it, but that's where the beauty lies because the picture is more complete when it’s a collaborative one. 

2. Cultural Diversity

We all know the world is one big melting pot.

It’s impossible for any one person to understand the customs, values, colloquialisms and norms of every other culture. Bringing together a multicultural team means tapping into a broader knowledge of culture.

More important, it means being mindful and respectful of a wider audience. 

Pay attention to the words mindful and respectful.

Too many homogenous teams make the mistake of thinking representation means including different races or ethnicities in their marketing efforts. Truly multicultural teams know that diversity comes from accurate representation.

There are few better examples of this than Bumble’s 2018 Find Them on Bumble campaign, which celebrates cultural inclusivity in a way that focuses on the people, not the issues.

It shows the power of cultural diversity as a means to inclusion. 

3. Collaborative Mindset

Diversity is going to bring disagreement. This is a good thing!

In a homogenous team, team members have the tendency to naturally think that every idea is a good one because it comes from the same track of thinking.

Diverse teams are rife with ideas that compete with one another—or complement one another in new and exciting ways.

Not every idea is a winner, but every idea helps refine the direction of a campaign so it’s the best version of itself. 

What matters most in a collaborative team is a group that sees its members as valid.

Diverse, multigenerational teams fall apart when there’s no shared respect among members. Teams need a collaborative mindset to succeed, or infighting will stall out even the best ideas.

Diversity with a collaborative mindset brings harmony and focus to teams. 

4. Maturity

Whether office politics or an affinity for a particular political party, there’s opportunity for teams to flourish when their politics can exist in harmony. John can believe in a conversative budgeting policy while still respecting Sally’s liberal approach to spending on campaigns with proven ROI.

On the surface these are incidental situations, but they have roots in personal politics. It takes maturity and an understanding of values to create a team of individuals who functions well together. 

Political maturity isn’t about staying silent and getting steamrolled when your values come into question. It’s also not about commandeering every conversation to establish your values as valid.

Political maturity in a team is about brokering compromise and finding the best path forward together.

5. Agility and Adaptability

Employees who share different backgrounds find more creative solutions to problems at work. It’s not one collective mind working to brute-force a problem into submission—it’s many minds at work, hacking away at the problem from all angles.

This diverse problem-solving brings inherent agility and adaptability to digital marketing teams. 

Where homogenous teams might find themselves stonewalled by obstacles or barriers, diverse teams are already exploring which avenue makes the most sense for getting around them.

Why do you think so many startups of two or three people have the power to disrupt entire industries of homogenous companies?

It's been proven over and over again that they’re looking at problems from different angles, solving them with agility and creating better solutions.

Now’s The Time to Diversify

Today’s world of digital marketing is highly competitive and extremely fast-paced.

There’s no better time than now to build marketing teams that are unique in their thinking, on both the personal and professional level. For many companies, their continued success depends on it. 

Diversity is the key to performance in digital marketing.

Whether you’re a startup or an international powerhouse, the days of homogenous teams are over.

Companies need to welcome diversity or they’ll soon find themselves rushing to catch smaller, more agile, more diverse competitors who are changing the industry in real-time. 

ABOUT

Regina M. Noriega is a highly sought-after digital brand strategist by CEOs and CPG, FMCG companies throughout the world. Her fresh and data driven perspective on digital marketing has launched international markets, building household brand names from the ground up. Currently, Regina is an award winning digital creator and social media influencer recognized by unicorn brands such as Yelp, Amazon, Instagram, and Linkedin.

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