Teamwork is the foundation for any successful marketing campaign. There’s a thriving industry focused on creating tools that foster collaboration in countless forms. You might already know about their benefits for business in general. However, how can such tools help your marketing department?
They:
Enable Real-Time Communication
Whether brainstorming ideas or wrapping a campaign up, getting information from your team in real-time is essential. Some people prefer messaging via text, while others find face-to-face video chats more impactful. Collaboration tools exist for both.
We can’t overstate the benefits of real-time communication. It ensures everyone’s on the same page and on track. It helps team members avoid or catch mistakes before they become serious problems. Also, having a written back-and-forth to reference later will prevent miscommunication.
Project requirements can change on the fly, and communication tools ensure everyone is informed instantly. Tidiness is another benefit, especially compared to email conversations. Communication software lets you set up channels for individual projects, teams, or one-on-one chats that are effortless to find and come back to as needed.
Enable Seamless Document Sharing
Teams can advance their projects only if everyone has access to all the assets & materials they need. Before the advent of cloud storage, crucial documents like your pitch deck or content roadmap could reside on a single laptop and be out of reach once its owner leaves the office.
Cloud-based secure storage solutions make this a non-issue. Everyone you give access to files stored this way can download and work on them without your further involvement. Changes they make to designs or copy are easy to save, so there’s no hassle of dealing with several different document versions.
Cloud storage providers live & die by the security features they offer. Storing files online is safer than ever since encryption is in place to keep their contents hidden from anyone without clearance. You may also give different permissions based on roles. For example, design team members might only get access to relevant files. Similarly, junior members of your own team could be permitted to read certain documents but not alter them.
Get the Creative Juices Flowing
Collaboration tools offer excellent support for the beginning stages of your marketing efforts. The real-time communication aspect lets team members brainstorm new ideas and helps winning ones rise to the top.
Analytics tools let marketing teams gain more insights into the groups of people they’ll be creating a campaign for. Collaborative design tools speed up the workflow by allowing multiple people to work on creating the visual style of a campaign or packaging for a new product. Similarly, text editing tools ensure your marketing copy is as polished as can be by enabling edits and comments from multiple users.
Streamline Task Management
Once you know the target and theme of a marketing campaign, it’s necessary but tricky to break the entire endeavor into smaller pieces. That’s where task management tools shine. Marketing managers use them to lay out the project in a logical manner. Each stage further breaks down into concrete tasks with clearly laid out expectations and deadlines.
This can prove especially useful. Every team member knows what they’re responsible for and can plan their activities based on what others are doing. Studies conclusively demonstrate how collaboration fosters a better work culture and organically improves productivity.
Part of this has to do with a sense of personal responsibility. Team members who are aware that not completing their task may be holding others back will redouble their efforts. If everyone pitches in this way, campaigns and other projects get underway considerably faster.
Make Creating Reports Easier
Marketing is an investment like any other, meaning those who do the investing expect returns and results. Collaboration tools generate a lot of data by design, which you can then use to craft impactful reports.
The C-suite will likely care most about the impact of your marketing strategy on growth. While valid, that’s not the only metric collaboration tools help uncover.
Some offer insight into customers’ attitudes towards the products or services you’re marketing and ways to improve them. Others highlight parts of the campaign customers engage with the most. Such metrics are invaluable for tweaking existing and planning even more successful future campaigns.
Help Save Money
The pandemic-induced WFH experiment proved what everyone already suspected – remote work doesn’t negatively impact productivity. Marketers, in particular, can do their job just as well via video calls or instant messaging. It’s an arrangement where everyone wins and saves money to boot!
Conclusion
Team members don’t need to spend time and money getting to work. Video calls facilitate meetings that would have required costly travel, and the company as a whole can cut utility and real estate costs by keeping more of its workforce at home.
