Real-time collaboration tools every marketing team needs

Real-time collaboration tools are indispensable helpers in managing a company or individual projects. Online services and applications are widely available on the market. They allow increasing the efficiency of the team many times over.

Thanks to real-time collaborative access to documents, no data is lost. Employees and management work exclusively with updated information, including the latest changes on the project. Such tools also solve some tasks, including task management, report preparation, creating a unified information base, and more.

Obtaining detailed analytics is also necessary for the marketing team because they help to understand the trends more accurately.

Here are the main services designed for collaborative work that may be useful to you.

Project management

Wrike

Organizing collaborative work to manage projects is an important task in any business. There are special services that allow teams to plan, work together, optimize work processes, and much more.

Wrike offers the use of kanban boards: you can drag and drop cards between columns, attach files, and so on. Wrike has Gantt chart support: you can view the project schedule and define the dependencies between the activities on a visual timeline. The system also has time tracking: you can find out how much time a team member or a project group spends, so you can plan your work and budget with maximum precision. Wrike supports real-time collaboration: you can work simultaneously with other employees on task descriptions, editing and updating documents and other files without downloading them to your computer.

CoSchedule

CoSchedule is one of the best ways to plan your marketing and save a lot of time. It is trusted by over 10,000 bloggers, editors, and marketers from around the world. CoSchedule is a workflow editing and calendaring software with various integrations such as WordPress, Twitter, FB, LinkedIn, Buffer, Google Analytics, Google Calendar, Evernote, and Instagram.

Widen Collective

Widen Collective is a cloud-based digital asset management solution designed to support the content lifecycle from creation to distribution.

The product offers a centralized library for managing images, documents, audio, and video files in one place. It can be configured with an unlimited number of metadata types, categories, and collections. The system includes a comprehensive management model for user role management and access control. Assets can be downloaded, distributed, or embedded into other websites and applications.

ProofHub

Marketing teams have a wide range of needs, so instead of relying on several platforms for campaign management, you need a project management tool that is versatile enough to handle everything in one place—this is where ProofHub comes in.

For both users and managers, this robust application fulfills a long list of useful requirements. ProofHub offers a simple platform for your marketing project management responsibilities including- seeing everything your team does visually with boards, tracking time with timesheets, spotting bottlenecks early with Gantt charts, communicating in real-time with an in-built chat app, and more. Furthermore, it is simple to use with a short learning curve.

Content planning

Airtable

The cross-platform Airtable service allows you to create databases for all occasions. With it, you can easily structure your list of content, your own ideas, your competitors` content, your personal digital library, and much more.

Airtable offers users almost unlimited customization possibilities. You can change the name of any table, change its icon, create as many columns and rows as you want, and customize them for maximum automation.

As for the cells in Airtable tables, you can write not only text in them. The service allows you to fix media files and even barcodes in them. It is very convenient that all the data is stored in the cloud and is automatically synchronized with any device on which the Airtable application is installed.

Special mention should be made of the record search system. It becomes a strategically important function when the number of lines in the table exceeds at least a hundred. You can find the information you need by a certain word or even a part of it, or sort the records by some criterion, for example by the genre of content.

Trello

Trello is an online platform for project and task management. It is suitable for work control in small companies and startups. This system is organized according to the kanban principle, a popular project management methodology. You can integrate Trello with project applications via Trello enhancements.

Trello has a simple interface. Boards structure includes 2 elements: lists and cards; the drag-and-drop feature is available. Interaction with the platform is easy. You can schedule people’s work within each board or card, track changes as well as control tasks with a calendar. Trello can be integrated with many email clients, which makes it even easier to quickly assign tasks on the fly

Trello can also be used for personal planning. The web application will help you rationally plan and track your work tasks for the day, week, and so on. It’s also a handy tool for improving personal efficiency: use Trello to plan your personal tasks outside of work and even your vacations.

Google Spreadsheets

Google Spreadsheets is a very versatile and functional tool with lots of features and use cases. Google Spreadsheets is probably one of today’s best tools for group work. You can both edit texts and work on spreadsheets with your colleagues. This is a necessary tool of any list of real-time collaboration tools.

Email marketing and design

Chamaileon

Chamaileon is an email editor with adaptability and sharing. There are 150+ email templates available for free and 1000+ blocks for creating your own designs. Templates are modern and not overloaded with complicated structures.

To work with layouts, you’ll have to spend a couple of minutes registering. After logging in, the first work screen will prompt you to create a new email, import your HTML, or choose a ready-made option from the collection.

After choosing a template, you will go straight to the editor, where you can replace the necessary blocks and substitute your own data. In the upper right corner, there is an export button. Copy the HTML code or download the template as an archive for free.

Hubspot

HubSpot is a service that covers all areas of Internet marketing, including blogging, social media, SEO, content management, and a landing page builder. The system also offers a wide range of email marketing automation features. Sales tools include sales CRM, lead management, and email management. In addition, HubSpot offers analytics, mobile apps, and a wide range of integrations with third-party services.

HubSpot also works as a content management system: it allows you to update website content, optimize it for search, and customize it for mobile devices. You can even personalize the site to the visitor.

HubSpot CRM saves all contacts and details, including interaction history, via email and phone. You can also keep track of all offers, tasks, and schedule appointments.

Marketo

Marketo is an automated marketing program designed to provide answers to almost all marketing needs. Most teams use Marketo as an email marketing tool. It can improve efficiency, optimize marketing processes and increase sales productivity.

Marketo is essential for marketing analytics. It can help find and engage the right customers, find out what they want to know about products, how they start the journey, learn the details of search marketing, landing pages, personalization, and track user behavior.

Graphic design

Canva

Canva is an online service for creating elements of graphic design, from illustrations for social networks to layouts for printing. The key advantage of this editor is its simplicity. The service tries to make design accessible to everyone, even those who can’t draw.

Piktochart

Piktochart is a web application for creating business presentations, infographics, and various kinds of reports with a special design and almost no effort. The service will help in the creation of catchy materials for marketing, sales forecasting, and annual reports, for implementing concepts, presenting your projects, attracting traffic, etc.

Presentations are created as infographics. You only need to insert the text in the necessary parts of the templates, and the system will bring the material to the end.

Visme

Visme is a platform for creating presentations, animations, banners, infographics, reports, forms, and other visual content. In the enterprise version of Visme, you can see your folder tree, manage access, and upload or “share” files (JPG, PDF, HTML, code, and URL insertion). Plus you can track who, when, and how long has been viewing content.

Social Media management

Mailshake

Mailshake is a simple tool for creating cold emails. Templates, automatic tracking, click tracking, and response tracking is available.

The service can retrieve addresses and Twitter accounts by viewing messages and CSV files. It provides the ability to edit the list and delete duplicate mailboxes or people you don’t want to contact. Mailshake also offers contact forms as well as article and message scanning.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an SMM service that can help businesses boost their social media performance and see scheduled posts across the team. It supports teamwork, analytics, CRM, and HelpDesk.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management tool used by business people to manage and monitor all social media channels from one place. Hootsuite has several applications that are very important for any business looking to maintain better relationships with social media users. Among the benefits are monitoring, scheduling, informational research, and analytical functions.

Data analysis

Optimizely

Optimizely is a service that emphasizes A/B testing. It is a method used to test changes to a web page compared to its current design, to identify the more successful parts and pages with which visitors interact better. Optimizely offers testing of two different versions of a web page to determine which one best meets the objectives.

Kissmetrics

According to many experts, Kissmetrics is one of the coolest web analytics services, which is suitable for large Internet projects. It has very wide functionality, allowing you to collect the maximum amount of information on all parameters. Here you will find user activity analysis, real-time monitoring, and an unlimited number of reports, experiments, and tests.

Simply Measured

Simply Measured was a very popular social media analytics and measurement platform. It was used to quantify performance, determine the impact, and derive strategic direction from social media data. Simply Measured was acquired by Sprout Social – SMM platform for businesses.

SEO

Google Search Console & Google Analytics

Search Console reports in Google Analytics contain data on the effectiveness of regular search traffic. You can, for example, view search queries and see how many times your site’s URL appeared in search results. The reports also show your bounce rate and transaction rate. This data can help you optimize your site and get as much valuable traffic as possible.

Semrush

SEMrush is a service from SEO/SEM professionals for professionals in these fields. It has the knowledge, experience, and data to help you analyze projects/competitors and then develop your own designs to the next level. The system collects huge amounts of SERP data on more than 106 million keywords and 71 million domains, including AdWords copy and positions, organic positions for domains and landings, search volumes, CPC, number of results, and more. The service also provides accurate and customized data for rapid growth special projects.

MozBar

MozBar displays SEO indicators of sites when they are viewed in the browser: incoming links, domain authority, positions in Google search results, and social activity. The tool helps to check the correctness of the markup, written using the Schema.org microformat. The special function Page Overlay allows you to analyze the quality of internal optimization of the site.

Communication and chat tools

Microsoft teams

Microsoft Teams is an enterprise platform that includes chat, meetings, notes, and attachments. It is developed as a competitor to Slack. There are enterprise-level security and compliance features, all of which are offered in Office 365. It is possible to manage your team project wherever you are, to use the remote sending and editing features. You can also communicate as if you were on Skype – with high-resolution sound and video, join meetings wherever you are. You can create personal and group chats, as well as specialized channels to communicate with the whole team.

Flock

Flock is a messenger for teamwork. It is designed to increase the efficiency and speed of tasks. The application allows you to make video calls, manage projects with task lists, create surveys and reminders, and even integrate applications into one platform.

Slack

Slack is a platform for corporate communication and teamwork on projects. The purpose of the service is to optimize team communication and facilitate interaction between departments. Slack is suitable for companies from different spheres: creative agencies, development teams, education, financial services, production, sales, and other areas. Thanks to Slack integration with many programs and services, it allows a company to create a full-fledged working environment.

Integration with other services allows Slack to increase its functionality many times over. For example, development teams from Jira can share, edit and view tasks in a special channel. Executives can sign contracts with partners without leaving Slack by integrating with DocuSign. There are many such integrations.

Final thoughts

This guide to real-time collaboration tools is designed to show that you can benefit from better performance and efficiency with the right tools. Real-time collaboration tools can be used for a variety of purposes, for example, a team can use them to develop a presentation plan. Most of the tools in this collection are quite simple.