In 2009, Apple launched its famous slogan for the iPhone 3G , “There's an app for that.” According to Apple, whether you want to check the weather, find out how many calories you consumed at lunch or know where you parked your car, there is an app for everything.
No phrase better describes today's marketing landscape. Want to send an email? Want to launch an ad campaign? Want to chat with your buddy? There's a tool for all of that.
In theory, it sounds great: a marketing tool for everything you could ever need! However, in practice, it's a bit different.
Social media management platform Buffer recently published an article titled “ The Marketer's Toolbox: The 60 Marketing Tools We Use at Buffer.” Yes, that's 60. It's enough to make anyone dizzy.
Both managers and frontline workers say that working with so many systems is the main reason their teams are unable to achieve flawless performance, according to Wrike’s 2018 Operational Excellence Survey.
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Important information is isolated or grouped into silos when these tools don't "talk" to each other. Details are lost and work is duplicated. Employees waste valuable time browsing and copying and pasting text between different browser tabs, which is a headache-inducing job.
To better organize projects and tasks, many marketing teams consider implementing a work management system. However, work management should never be just another tool for the team to use.
The best work management platforms seamlessly centralize information and streamline your team’s workflow across existing systems. Below are five tools every marketer should sync their work management platform with to limit marketing silos, minimize switching costs, and streamline workflows.
1. Gmail
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Despite the proliferation of social media and chat apps, email still reigns supreme when it comes to communication. With 1 billion active users worldwide and 53% of the US email market, Gmail continues to gain tens of millions of active users each year.
However, sifting through conversations to find the information you want, consolidating feedback from different stakeholders, and responding to ad-hoc email requests is chaotic and time-consuming.
Work management features like dynamic acceptance forms, real-time @mentions and comments, australia phone number data and reviews and approvals give marketers a more efficient way to manage projects and requests. But with more than half of the world’s population using email , your inbox is still an important and necessary space.
Instead of users having to work on two tabs at the same time, major work management platforms send automatic email notifications when important updates or changes to tasks occur. Some even offer a Gmail add-on , so users can manage tasks within the work management system itself without having to leave their inbox.
In addition to viewing and editing tasks associated with email notifications in Gmail, you can also create tasks from new email threads, attachments, and all that sort of thing.
2. Adobe Creative Suite
Adobe Creative Suite is arguably the most important of all the solutions in the creative marketer’s toolkit. From Photoshop to Premiere Pro, your team is constantly using these programs. And every time they need to respond to an email, upload a file, or update a spreadsheet, they have to force themselves out of their creative zone.
25% of creative teams spend less than two hours a day on creative work, according to a 2013 iStock survey of 400 creative employees in the US and UK. Don’t let this happen to your team!
Choose a work management tool that integrates with Adobe Creative Cloud® Suite. This will allow creative marketers to view creative briefs, leave comments, upload documents, and more, directly from Photoshop, Premiere Pro, InDesign, and Illustrator. Letting creatives use the tools they love will help them stay focused and get their work done faster.
Goodbye, silos! Five tools marketers should centralize through work management - Wrike
Real recap: Seconds spent switching between tabs, exporting files, and completing other administrative tasks add up when you’re managing up to 400 creative requests a month. OSF HealthCare’s creative team was struggling to stay afloat before finding Wrike’s Adobe Creative Cloud® extension.
“It’s great,” says Heidi Wessler, Graphic Design Coordinator at OSF. “From InDesign, I just go to the Wrike extension to see the changes I need, then upload the new sample until we release a final version. I no longer have to customize the PDF settings, export it to desktop, write a new email, attach the file, and send it. I just click a button to add it to Wrike directly from InDesign and that’s it.”
3. Dropbox (or other file storage tool)
How many times have you looked for a final file only to realize you have five different ones? Few marketing tasks cause as much frustration as file management.
Using a file storage tool like Dropbox is a step in the right direction. However, organizing resources and making sure your team can find the latest version is tricky. Distributing resources to stakeholders is another hurdle: you first have to locate the correct “final” file and then compose a long email to describe its status.
The ability to pull files directly from Dropbox into your work management system saves marketers a lot of headaches. First, it eliminates the need to search for the right file in Dropbox. Once a resource is attached to a task, all collaborators can easily find it.
Second, it minimizes version control issues. The latest files are always displayed at the front. Finally, it keeps documents in context, allowing marketers to go back and find comments from previous tasks and track the evolution of a file.
4. Slack
Less than 30 years ago, workers had to walk upstairs to ask a coworker a “quick question.” Today, you just text them.
Slack is one of the most popular chat apps in the tech industry, with users spending an average of 10 hours every weekday logged into the app. Reducing the time and effort it takes to share ideas and get answers is incredibly valuable.
However, problems arise when details and project requests get lost in a long chain of short, unrelated messages. Instead of having to spend time sifting through conversations or agonizing over the lack of ideas and requests, choose a platform that uses Slack’s conversation feature .
Dialogs can allow users to fill out a short form to create tasks in their work management system directly from Slack. Some work management solutions also send real-time project notifications directly to Slack, where users can preview tasks within chat windows.
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