The 5 Collaboration Tools No Marketing Teams Should Live Without
None of us is as smart as all of us -Ken Blanchard
Quip
Quip has managed to take the most successful features from Google Docs, Evernote, and Confluence, then piece them together into a no-frills and distraction-free document library.
What Google Docs did was truly disruptive to the office world, even if we all still buy the latest version of Word and upload them to Google Drive. But as an everything-to-everyone product, Google continues to add features for the masses. Contrast to Quip, which has a “get shit done” approach to creating and formatting documents.
Quip takes it a step further by keeping a history of changes with version control. For those unfamiliar with subversion tools like github, this is basically a time machine for everything you create. They have also included inline comments and chat features that allow for an open, creative dialogue.
We used Quip to create this article. #neat
Slack
As a long-time IRC user, Slack is incredibly confusing to me. Not the actual function it performs since it’s clearly awesome. Rather, how a simple interface was the only barrier to making IRC accessible to non-techies.
Does Slack replace email? Not completely, but it will eliminate all of the one-sentence emails you receive and essentially replaces need for email list groups. Now you can share with @everyone or receive notifications for specific teams or an entire office.
You, of course, are not really using Slack unless you have Slack bots and integrations to really make it a powerful collaboration platform. They have an ever-growing list of integrations to most of the apps your team already uses and loves. However, my favorite part of Slack for collaboration is their webhook system.
For example, we use Recurly for our subscriptions. So whenever a new customer signs up, our #sales channel is instantly notified with the new account details and one of several animated gifs to praise their sales efforts, such as:
Flight
Flight, like these other tools, solve challenges that only appear when you’re not an army of one. Perhaps you are working on a creative team, or you’re a marketing director with brand assets that need global distribution.
Flight is Digital Asset Management (DAM) for marketing teams that manage images, videos, audio, documents, and all sorts other creative and brand assets. Unlike other similar platforms, Flight makes marketing collaboration DAM easy with simple-to-use, intuitive features such as automatic organization by file type and advanced search tools. Easily store and share assets from a secure, central interface specifically built to your brand.
Canva
No one can deny the power and institution that is Adobe’s Photoshop. I doubt you can measure it, but the number of images on the internet created or edited in Photoshop would be staggering. However, the advanced tool sets create a barrier for the average marketing team.
Canva is on a mission to democratize a formerly specialized field of custom image creation. Their perfectly-sized templates, image filters, and modern font styles really make it easy to create engaging visual content. Their team plan, Canva for Work, makes this an ideal tool for marketing teams that work together to tell their visual stories.
Trello
Say hello to project management for teams. I am not here to say they are the best project management tool, but their team-first approach makes it a practical decision for collaboration. It doesn’t have as many features as it’s competitors, which only makes it a better experience as you spend more time working on an assignment than managing it’s status.
