Working in marketing is all about being a team. Everyone has their areas of expertise and special skills, and you all bring them together to create winning campaigns. A lot of marketing agencies turn to collaboration tools to try and grease the wheels and get everyone working in harmony but how can they take the extra step to get that great collaboration work making a winning business too? Collaboration tools are useful for managing tasks on specific projects, but they don’t bring together a full view of your business from lead generation to billing across all areas of the business. Business management software can incorporate this need and most importantly, give the people who need it easy access to the data they need to run the business effectively in one place from leads to project tasks and through to billing and accounts.

Collaboration Tools: Are They the True Answer?

Tools designed for smoother collaboration can be pretty handy for a marketing team, especially if some members are working remotely. Tools like Slack, Asana and Trello all enable you to set and assign tasks, and communicate as a team. But are these tools really the answer to truly building your business? Or are they just another annoying source of constant notifications, and another application to keep track of? Collaboration tools can be handy and help to bring everyone together, but they might not give you all of the functionality that you need.

Unconnected Tools

The issue with collaboration tools is that you just have another tool that isn’t connected to anything else. You might have brought your team together using one application, but what you can do with it is still limited to task management and communication. If you need information from elsewhere or you need to tie in a task to something in another area of the business, you’ll still need to turn to another application to get what you need or do what you need to do. You can manage your tasks using your collaborative tool, but then you need to use a different tool if you want to manage billing, schedule appointments or track leads. And suddenly you find you are entering the same information time and time again.

Off-the-Shelf Software – Trying to Fit a Square Peg Into a Round Hole

Another issue that many marketing agencies are sure to come across is the problem of trying to use ready-made software. Every marketing company is different, with a different approach to how they do their best work. So when shopping around for useful tools, it can be frustrating to keep coming up against pre-packaged solutions that just don’t really work because they don’t work like you do. You end up with functionality you don’t use, making it a waste of money, or you’re left longing for certain functions and features that aren’t included.

Bespoke Solutions from Workhorse

If downloadable software doesn’t work for your marketing agency, a bespoke solution could meet your needs with even more flexibility than a simple downloaded tool. Workhorse brings together all of the most important parts of your business and gives you the tools you need to stay organised, simplify your operations and save time and money. Marketing agencies like our client AIR SOCIAL benefit from a solution that’s built to fit them, instead of trying to fit their work around an off-the-shelf tool. With tailored software from Workhorse, you can manage tasks and take care of everything from lead generation to billing all in the same place. Any existing tools that you want to keep can be integrated into the same platform too.

Collaboration works better if everyone is working with the same tools and Workhorse enables your business to work smarter with greater transparency on CRM and data, projects, billing, resources, scheduling, lead generation and more.