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Have you ever struggled to find the most recent file version in a chain of email attachments or taken multiple back-and-forth messages requesting access once you finally do?
We know the struggle, too.
Without effective marketing collaboration software, these simple, everyday tasks can eat up time and productivity. Marketing collaboration tools help break down the barriers to productive work and smooth out the bumps in project workflows and collaborative workspaces.
Let’s dive into what this software does and how it can turn around a bad day.
What Does Marketing Collaboration Software Do?
Marketing collaboration software is a type of digital tool that supports marketers and creatives to work together more efficiently. This software provides a centralized platform that allows team members to access digital assets like brand logos, images, videos and other marketing materials, which enables them to collaborate more effectively, even when working remotely.
For instance, marketing collaboration software offers features such as content creation and management, branding guidelines, analytics, user permission controls and team communication tools. These features help team members to work more efficiently by providing them with easy access to marketing assets, streamlining the creative process, and ensuring that everyone is on the same page.
Marketing collaboration software is particularly beneficial for remote and hybrid teams that work across different locations and time zones. This type of software provides a cloud-based solution that enables team members to access marketing materials from anywhere and at any time, eliminating communication breakdowns and delays and ensuring that all team members are aligned with the same marketing objectives.
Ultimately, the goal of marketing collaboration software is to optimize marketing tasks and improve team productivity. By centralizing and automating workflows, reducing redundancy and errors, and facilitating effective communication and collaboration, marketing teams can work more efficiently, achieve better results and improve their overall return on investment.
What Are the Different Types of Marketing Collaboration Software?
There are several types of marketing collaboration software available on the market, each designed to meet specific needs and requirements of marketing teams. Some common types of marketing collaboration software include:
- Project management software: This type of software is designed to help teams manage tasks, timelines and project workflows. It provides a centralized platform for team members to track progress, assign tasks, set deadlines and collaborate in real-time.
- Communication and messaging tools: These tools enable team members to communicate and collaborate in real-time, regardless of their physical location. They may include chat apps, video conferencing tools and other messaging platforms that allow for easy communication and file sharing.
- Content creation and management software: This type of software provides tools for creating and managing content such as blog posts, social media updates and other marketing materials. It may include features such as content calendars, editorial workflows and content optimization tools.
- Analytics and reporting software: These tools provide insights into the performance of marketing campaigns and help teams track progress towards marketing goals. They may include features such as data visualization, reporting dashboards and predictive analytics tools.
- Digital asset management (DAM) software: DAM software provides a centralized platform for teams to store, organize, and manage digital assets such as images, videos and other marketing collateral. It enables team members to quickly access and share assets, ensuring that everyone is working with the most up-to-date files.
Digital asset management is one of Brandfolder’s specialties. Let’s take a closer look at marketing collaboration software for DAM specifically.
Marketing Collaboration Software For DAM
Digital asset management (DAM) is a type of marketing collaboration software that can be a game changer for both small businesses, large enterprises and mid-market businesses in between. Cloud-based marketing collaboration software enables all team members to work from the latest copy of all documents and makes assets accessible to all who need them. This eliminates the headaches associated with sharing updated copies of files such as copy, graphics, video and audio media. Email chain attachments can easily get lost, and LAN storage solutions often do not provide collaborative tools on top of file storage.
DAM for small businesses can be costly to create internally and often comes with several restrictions. Small businesses are responsible for their network management and security, which can be challenging, especially if they do not have a dedicated IT department. Collaborative software offers an alternative, where small businesses can pay a monthly fee to offload the responsibilities of security, reliability and scalability to someone else. This allows them to focus on their core business strengths without worrying about technical details.
Large enterprises also benefit from utilizing DAM as part of their marketing collaboration software. These tools enable teams to collaborate seamlessly, ensuring that everyone has access to the most up-to-date versions of digital assets. Large enterprises often have complex workflows and require robust security features to protect their valuable assets. Collaborative software can provide a reliable and secure platform that meets the needs of large enterprises while offering the flexibility and scalability required for a rapidly changing business environment.
Marketing collaboration software is essential for small businesses and large enterprises alike, particularly when used in conjunction with DAM. These tools enable teams to collaborate more efficiently, ensuring that everyone has access to the latest digital assets. Collaborative software also allows small businesses to offload the responsibilities of security, reliability and scalability, while large enterprises benefit from the flexibility and scalability required for a rapidly changing business environment.
How Does Marketing Collaboration Software Save the Day?
Marketing collaboration software can be a lifesaver for teams working on complex projects with tight deadlines. By providing a centralized platform for communication, coordination and collaboration, it helps teams stay organized, focused and productive. Without such software, team members might waste precious time searching for files, coordinating schedules, or clarifying feedback. With marketing collaboration software, they can instead focus on delivering high-quality work.
Marketing collaboration software saves the day by reducing errors and redundancy. When team members have access to the latest version of project files, they can avoid errors caused by working on outdated copies. Moreover, when workflows are automated and streamlined, teams can avoid redundancies that can slow down projects and increase costs. This leads to faster project completion times, better quality work and improved ROI.
We’ll dive deeper into some of these benefits below.
1. Helps Distributed Teams
Marketing collaboration software is flexible in how and where people access it. This is particularly well-suited to distributed teams, whether offices are in different locations, remote and hybrid work schedules or working with full-time employees and contractors. Teams can connect and share the same documents (respecting access policies) regardless of team structure or schedule.
Teams can work simultaneously or on staggered schedules so that, for example, you could have an office in London pick up where the Tokyo office left off and then have them hand over business to the New York office. All of these teams work using the same tools and resources.
2. Improves Communications
Communication tools can help smooth workflows, from shared file storage access to comments, kanban boards, chat rooms and more. These tools enable employees to communicate with less friction. Teams working asynchronously can work seamlessly, as comments and notes are immediately visible and accessible anytime.
For example, workers can use dedicated chatrooms and channels to talk about specific projects, engage with specific teams or departments and easily message people one-on-one or arrange group chats. There are even means of aiding communication across teams in multiple countries, such as with auto-translation tools.
3. Allows for Effective Collaboration
In addition to improving communication, marketing collaboration software can enable effective, streamlined collaboration by offering shared access to the same live files and workspaces to entire teams. Everyone who needs access can add and alter elements at will; others can help and offer real-time comments.
For example, online whiteboard tools allow for effective, visual and interactive collaborations. Workers can add text, images, videos and more onto an online canvas and arrange these assets as they see fit. Online whiteboards' visual nature and immediate feedback allow for very fluid collaboration.
4. Find Information Faster
Another benefit of marketing collaboration software is that it makes finding files and data much faster and easier when combined with effective digital asset management. When there is only one location to look for all documents and assets, there is much more clarity over where to find a particular document or asset.
Effective and performant search engines built on this data make finding information much more effortless. For example, team members can search for explicit terms or use descriptions, such as with a Google search, and machine learning-augmented search tools can apply search terms to the contents of multimedia assets like images and videos.
5. Standardizes Practices and Branding
Allowing all team members to work from the latest set of assets simultaneously helps keep workflows and assets consistent. This is particularly helpful for branding practices such as brand asset management, where everyone always has the most updated version of assets, so you don’t have to worry about someone accidentally using an outdated version.
Collaborative software can also enforce specific workflows. For example, you can build workflows and rules into project management software that follows specific user-defined steps. This helps to maintain consistency and standardize workflows, even across distributed teams.
6. Tracks and Records Activity
Marketing collaboration tools also easily track activities and time spent on them, helping project managers see schedules and manage workflows. For example, a project manager can use collaboration tools like project management software to put a list of a project’s tasks together, along with estimated delivery dates and instantly see a visual timeline of how long each task should take.
These tasks are interactive, can be moved around and experimented with, assigned to different people, and can update live as people work on the tasks and cross off milestones. You can determine differences between time estimates and actual time spent on tasks to help improve future estimate accuracy.
This time-tracking data can also be output into reports to easily look at daily/weekly/monthly performance. Data recording and tracking happen automatically, enabling much more effective, data-driven decision-making based on empirical data.
7. Increase Your ROI
Studies have shown the ROI of marketing tools to be as high as 273% in the case of Brandfolder. This is due to streamlining processes and tools from multiple different products and tools under one collaborative umbrella.
Paying for a suite of tools rather than paying individually for multiple tools typically offers cost savings. Still, there are additional ways in which these tools can help increase your ROI.
For example, these tools help improve employee efficiency and productivity as team members no longer spend time on unproductive activities like chasing down the most recent copies of files or keeping track of asset expiration dates. While the time saved on each task may seem minor, little inconveniences are common workplace occurrences and will add up. Reducing the overall volume of these minute yet time-sucking tasks will result in significant time savings over time.
8. Offload Your Security Concerns
Complying with data regulations such as GDPR and CCPA means treating your IT security seriously, processing data responsibly and being able to locate and/or delete specific data upon request.
Data breaches can seriously damage an organization’s reputation while failing to promptly respond to data deletion requests can lead your organization to breach certain regulations. Businesses have to juggle the dual responsibilities of keeping data private while having quick and easy access when needed.
Marketing collaboration software such as cloud-based or DAM makes these tasks easier. The provider handles network security, so you don’t need to worry about having internal IT expertise.
Likewise, there are also often purpose-built tools for data regulation compliance. These make finding all data on a particular individual easy to access and delete. This quick and easy data management allows you to maintain regulatory compliance without requiring as much active effort.
Marketing Collaboration Software Might Be Just What Your Team Needs to Boost Efficiency and Teamwork
The purpose of marketing collaboration software is to support marketing teams by providing the tools and services they need to do their job faster and more efficiently.
You can achieve this by providing tools for more fluid communication, collaboration and creativity. When you can eliminate the struggle of trivial yet tedious tasks, employees have more time to focus on creative, productive and revenue-generating work.
That’s a win-win for all.
If your team is looking for ways to boost productivity and teamwork, then take a look at Brandfolder’s marketing collaboration software solutions. Our suite of digital asset management products and marketing collaboration software keep these principles in mind. Get in touch to see how our tools can help take your organization’s marketing department to the next level.