Marketing teams are the creative heart of many organisations. Tasked with delivering campaigns that will build brand awareness and drive growth, they often work to tight deadlines and must coordinate their efforts with other areas of the business. Complex campaigns can span multiple channels, platforms and regions too – and they need to deliver tangible results.
In this fast-paced environment, manual processes or project management tools with limited features are bound to fall short. One particular problem is keeping external agencies, freelancers and consultants on task, so that projects don’t run off course and fail to hit deadlines.
Smartsheet, a cloud-based work management platform, helps marketing teams to meet this challenge. “The wonderful thing about Smartsheet is that external guests can access the platform for free,” says James Ferrier, manager of large enterprise solutions engineering at the company. “So if you’re a smaller organisation and you want your agencies to interact with you on your campaign projects, they won’t need to pay anything. That lowers the barrier to collaboration considerably.”
Marketing professionals often have to juggle multiple campaigns at once, which can quickly lead to project delays and costly bottlenecks. Smartsheet addresses this by acting as a single source of truth for all current campaigns and assets. Once entered into the platform, all project-related information is readily accessible and shareable. Project managers can also assign tasks, and automate reminders and requests for updates.
Smartsheet’s spreadsheet-like grid view is intuitive and familiar to many marketing professionals. However, the diverse range of view options included in the platform, from kanban cards to Gantt charts, also caters to different working styles and preferences. This makes it easy for teams to adapt the platform to their specific needs and preferences.
“Marketeers love tools that are easy for everyone to use and that foster efficient collaboration with multiple internal and external individuals,” says Ferrier. “They want a nice user interface. They want flexibility. But most importantly, they want to be able to manage everything in one place.”
Smartsheet says that its customers have significantly improved their marketing productivity since adopting the platform. Webex by Cisco has saved more than 520 hours a year, for example, while the software solutions company PTC has reduced the time spent on campaign planning and execution by around 30%.
Robust reporting and analytics capabilities also provide marketing teams with the insights they need to measure campaign effectiveness and return on investment. Users can easily create custom reports and share them with stakeholders, for instance, thereby demonstrating the impact of marketing efforts and justifying investment.
Managing digital assets
Digital marketing assets such as videos, photos, display banners and logos are an integral part of modern campaigns, helping to communicate brand messaging to target audiences. Smartsheet’s Brandfolder platform provides teams with the robust digital asset management (DAM) capabilities they need to organise all these files. Trusted by startups and Fortune 500 companies alike, it effectively allows them to store, manage and share digital assets within a single unified space – from initial creation to distribution and archiving. “You can control the entire marketing lifecycle [with it],” says Ferrier.
This centralised approach to asset management eliminates time wasted searching for files. Users can easily locate what they need with natural language-powered search, for example, just as you would when searching for something online. Because any stakeholder can easily find the assets they need, marketing teams are also less likely to waste time duplicating existing content.
Smartsheet’s proofing tools also enhance review and approval workflows, streamlining the process of finalising marketing materials and readying them for release. Users can review and approve content by annotating images and documents with markups and comments, for example, or by leaving locational and time-stamped feedback on videos.
Pre-built integrations with other essential marketing tools like Adobe Creative Cloud, Salesforce, HubSpot and Hootsuite further enhance the way assets are created, managed and approved. “Someone might sign into Adobe and see, via our integration, that they need to do some work on a banner. They can do that work in Adobe and then upload the image into Smartsheet to create a proof … and use automations to send it to all the reviewers.”
Smart and secure
Brandfolder’s version control and permissioning features also prevent unauthorised use of key assets and ensure that everyone is using the latest approved versions. This means that users can share a collection of assets – or even the entire Brandfolder – with confidence, and enables secure, efficient and seamless collaboration between internal teams and external stakeholders.
Whenever a folder of assets is dragged into Brandfolder, it’s automatically organised by an AI tool called Brand Intelligence. “It can read pictures and media and footage, and then apply tagging to them [to assign them to] certain categories,” says Ferrier. This takes what is often a tedious and time-consuming task off the plates of marketing teams, freeing up time for more strategic and interesting work that will benefit the bottom line.
The duplicate detection and suggested description features can help under-pressure marketing teams save even more time. Brand Intelligence also shows you who is using your assets, where they’re being used, and what your highest-performing assets are. This allows teams to make data-driven decisions to optimise campaigns – for example, which products should receive more focus.
These benefits further demonstrate how Smartsheet and Brandfolder can help busy marketing teams stay on top of multiple projects, collaborate effectively with internal and external partners, and manage digital assets with ease. So while marketing is often a fast-paced environment to work in, with the right tools it needn’t be a complex one.
Discover how to plan and execute an unparalleled marketing strategy with Smartsheet
