Our 3 Favourite Tools To Streamline Communications

Businesses should always be looking for ways to improve their output. This is why many focus on optimising their processes, spend time improving their financial management, and even work hard to recruit the right people. All of this is to boost productivity and the efficiency of your departments.  

However, one aspect of marketing that is most indicative of success is how the people communicate with each other. Good communication can make your marketing campaigns rise to great achievements, whereas poor communication has the potential to ruin projects and lead to many mistakes. In fact, 86% of employees and executives associate a lack of collaboration with workplace failures.  

This is why it’s important to look at your communication methods within your business and evaluate them. If you’re still communicating primarily through email, don’t yet have a companywide cloud system to share files, or require staff and clients to travel in for in-person meetings, you may need to overhaul your communication methods.  

One of the best things you can do to improve your communication is to invest in various forms of communication software to modernise your business and boost its performance.  

Why You Need Collaboration Software 

Collaboration has always been an essential practice in any workplace, as working together helps create better results, but the way businesses collaborate has changed over the years.  

Teams are now made up of people from various geographical locations, and all might not be centered around a single hub location. Furthermore, with remote working being a mainstream working practice, people need new ways to communicate to ensure there’s no workplace isolation.  

It’s for this reason why collaborative software has seen a rise and has become more important, as it allows workers to connect better online.

As well as this, collaboration software for marketing has a whole host of other benefits that can help teams improve in various areas. This software can make you work better as a team, schedule tasks in a more effective manner, increase your productivity, be more organised and transparent, and help you create better content as a result.  

Marketing, in particular, is an industry where teams rely on each other for the best results, whether that’s through sharing data, statistics, and other kinds of information. Collaboration software for marketing is available to help make this file sharing easier and organise people’s workload in a way where everyone is in the loop and knows everyone else’s responsibilities.  

Here’s a rundown of our favourite communication software that we use daily.  

ClickUp 

ClickUp is an all-in-one project management tool with a lot of nifty functionality that can help an individual stay more organised while also aiding teams to manage their collaborative tasks more efficiently.  

ClickUp markets itself as the ‘app to replace them all,’ and that’s a pretty apt description, as it combines many different tools that can be found on other types of communication software.  

Firstly, ClickUp has an awesome task planning and project management tab, where you can organise each individual task and track it as it moves across each phase of the project. With this tool, you’re able to see who has what work assigned to them, keep an eye on due dates, and even set the priority of different tasks.  

ClickUp also has a decent chat functionality, allowing people within a team to chat directly one-on-one or communicate in groups.  

You’re also able to create goals on the app and track this progress, allowing you and the whole team to see how far away you are from meeting these goals. This can help keep the team focused and improve transparency, as everyone will be aware of the company’s performance.  

Perhaps one of the best features of ClickUp is its many tools for collaborative idea generation and content creation, thanks to the whiteboard feature. Here, multiple people can add notes, doodles, and other items to a shared virtual whiteboard to help develop better solutions and figure out a plan of action that works well for the team. All of this makes it an essential piece of software for a marketing department.  

Pros  

Despite being designed to help improve the collaboration of a team, ClickUp can be very effective as a solo project management tool, unlike many other apps of this nature. This gives the app extra versatility.  

The layout of ClickUp is also really easy to see and understand, and the dashboard provides a great number of visuals that can seriously help users out.  

Cons  

ClickUp has a lot of features, and those features can overwhelm users, especially when first starting to use the app. Due to this, many people state that the learning curve is really high, and some team members can find it hard to utilise all the features.  

It’s also extremely customisable, which sounds like a positive, although this leads to a more complicated product and process. Users need to choose various options to make the software run optimally for them. This might not suit a team that is looking for something simple.  

Costs 

There are multiple price packages for ClickUp, starting with their free version that gives you full functionality. However, it is only suitable for a single user – which isn’t great if you’re trying to improve collaboration within a team.  

For small teams, its Unlimited service is just £5 a month per member, but this can grow to £19 per member a month if you’re looking for the Business Plus subscription, which best suits larger organisations with multiple teams.  

Teams

Teams is a piece of communication software from Microsoft that has grown a lot during the last few years because it’s extremely well suited to help remote workers collaborate effectively.  

Potentially most well known for its effective video conferencing features, which is great for holding virtual meetings and calls, there’s a lot more to Teams than this single yet effective feature.  

Teams has various Microsoft applications embedded within the software, such as OneDrive and Powerpoint. With Teams, you can easily share files with your colleagues and give presentations digitally. This streamlines a lot of various processes, making it easier for staff to communicate with each other while also sharing work.  

It also has other chat functionality, such as live text and voice communication, making it a universal application and a perfect piece of software for a marketing department.  

Pros  

With Teams integrating a lot of tools into one single place, it makes things a lot easier and more convenient, as you can stay within a single application to complete multiple tasks and functions.  

If you’re already a Microsoft 365 user, which can be a large portion of businesses, then Teams comes at no additional cost, which is a great deal.  

You can integrate other apps into Teams, meaning that you don’t have to stop using some of the other great collaboration software for marketing that’s available to you.  

Cons  

Teams’ biggest issue is that its functionality doesn’t make it stand out against other collaboration apps – even those created by the same company. For example, many of the same video conferencing and live chat functionality can be done via Skype. This means there can be some confusion about the best purpose for Teams.  

It is also a fairly big security risk, as currently, anyone within your business can make a Team’s account and connect to your shared cloud server. This can lead to malicious files being uploaded, people getting access to confidential documents, and more. Your business will need to create more security protocols to use Teams safely.  

Costs  

Teams is free if you already have a Microsoft 365 subscription. If not, premium plans start at $5 a month per user, and more expensive plans offer more storage capabilities.  

Slack

Slack is an interesting team communication software because, unlike creating private chats and direct lines of communication, in Slack, you create bespoke URLs for each of your teams to log into.  

From this URL, you can then divide your teams into different topics (labelled as hashtags) so that people can quickly find the information they need for a specific function.  

For example, you can have a team URL based on your entire company:  

ClickIntelligence.slack.com 

Or have one for a team within your business:  

ClickContent.slack.com  

You can then have different channels for various topics within that domain, such as #editing, #titles, #SEO, and more.  

As well as this unique method of communication, Slack can also send you reminders, which is great for keeping you or other team members on task. It also allows you to create and share meeting notes with the rest of your team, and it also has a great search functionality that will enable you to search chat archives to find the information you need, which is why it suits a marketing department so well.  

Pros  

Channels can be made public, private, or shared, depending on their function.  

It’s a great way to share and collaborate in real-time, making it perfect for situations where you need an instant response.  

Cons  

For a conversation to be archived, it needs to be saved. This means that if you forget to do it, conversations are deleted after 14 days, which could be an issue if important information is left in there.  

If not managed well, Slack can inhibit collaboration as you can be overwhelmed with notifications and updates that can be deemed distracting. It can become a source of non-work-related discussion.  

Costs 

Slack comes with a free version that has all the functionality you’d need from it. However, it can range from £5.25 to £9.75 a month per user for larger businesses, but you get more advanced functionality with this.  

Conclusion  

Communication is essential within marketing as it ensures that everyone is working effectively. With traditional ways of communication not suiting the modern business anymore, these examples of communication software for marketing can all be good ways to boost your communication and improve your team’s performance.  

We love to keep in the loop with our staff as well as our clients and use the apps mentioned daily as we feel they’re the best software for a marketing department. If you want to communicate with us about other ways to improve your digital marketing, Book a call, and we’ll be happy to chat.