The modern workplace has changed vastly compared to just a decade ago. It’s now possible to do business with companies and people on the other side of the globe, with remote and distributed teams scattered across continents and time zones.
However, one thing that hasn’t changed is the need for collaboration. In fact, it’s become even more of an imperative now that your coworkers can be located thousands of miles away.
Related: 7 best tools for project management
Many great work collaboration software are designed to help marketing teams, but it’s easy to get overwhelmed if you try to use them all at once. Here are some of the best, hand-picked team collaboration tools to make your marketing team more productive than ever.
Trello as a project management tool
Let me be completely honest: I’ve tried at least a dozen project management tools, ranging in price and complexity, and none beats Trello. In fact, Trello has become synonymous with “project management app” for many users across industries.
The beauty of Trello is that it’s so simple, anyone can get the basics within 20 minutes and become fully proficient using the Kanban board system. As an extra, it has countless integrations, and you can make it work with practically anything through Zapier or IFTTT.
Chanty as a team chat app
There is no collaboration without communication. When shouting across the office and sending emails becomes impractical and unmanageable, it’s time to introduce a team chat app. Although Slack has been the industry standard for quite some time now, many teams are dropping it in favor of less complicated and resource-intensive solutions.
Chanty is one of the up-and-coming team chat apps looking to take Slack’s crown. Boasting features such as unlimited message history, in-app task management, easy search options for messages and files and a growing number of integrations, it’s a no-brainer for teams looking for a Slack alternative. When it comes out of beta in the next couple weeks, Chanty will certainly shake up the team chat app market.
Marq as a collaborative design app
Design is traditionally a field with a strong necessity for communication and proper collaboration to do right. Unfortunately, sending an InDesign file to your colleagues and waiting for their feedback via email is far from the ideal way to collaborate on design projects.
Marq bridges the gap by providing an easy-to-use design collaboration tool that empowers coworkers to work together on designs in real time, with handy features such as responsive comments and live chat. No more messy emails or feedback lost in project management tools—you can now do it all within one app.
SugarSync for cloud storage
One app that made giant waves in the cloud industry is Dropbox, and it’s been the most popular app for years when it comes to storing, backing up and sharing data between individuals and teams.
SugarSync does everything that Dropbox does, along with some neat extras. For example, you can remotely wipe an entire synced folder, which can be especially handy for teams with remote workers. Moreover, you can also store your entire folder structure, along with the folder’s contents. This means that the path to your files will be the same, no matter the device used to access them.
Usersnap for reporting bugs
For developer and designer teams, one of the biggest collaboration issues is reporting bugs. When a QA wants to report an issue, they have to open a separate app and let the developers know what’s going on. This is anything but convenient, and there’s a chance that some of the message is being lost in the process—not to mention the fact that developers have to find the bug using the description from a QA.
Enter Usersnap, which lets you track bugs directly from your browser. You can annotate screenshots and request changes immediately instead of having to fill out forms and reports. This makes tracking and reporting bugs quicker and more efficient than ever before.
Salesflare for customer relationship management
Entering the CRM arena, the Salesflare team had their work cut out for them. Battling with giants such as Salesforce, Pipedrive and AgileCRM, it quickly had to prove its worth to make an entrance in the market—and so it did.
Its great design, ease of use and multitude of automation options are some of the many reasons why the app has so many raving fans. On top of it all, Salesflare makes it effortless for different stakeholders in the sales process to collaborate on their work.
Box Notes for collaboration in writing
If you’re in need of a collaboration tool that makes writing easier, but you find Google Docs clunky and just can’t imagine sending Word files as attachments, Box Notes is an excellent solution. Created by the Box team (known for their cloud storage app), Box Notes lets you create, share and edit documents with a team of up to 20 people.
Some other reasons to give it a try include options for sharing with non-Box users, version tracking, annotations and comments. Besides writing tasks, it can also be used for taking notes, brainstorming sessions, creating plans and more.
Appear.in for video conferencing
With remote work becoming less of an exception in the modern-day workplace, meetings no longer take place in offices. Instead, everyone hops on a call wherever they’re located for a video conference.
Back in the day, tools like Skype and Google Hangouts were the industry standard—until it became apparent that a more robust solution was necessary for business use. Appear.in is one of the most widely used video conferencing apps out there, with features such as conference rooms, group video calls and more. Like all other tools on the list, it stands out from the competition with its incredible ease of use. All you need is a link to the room, and you can hop on from any device with internet access.
Key takeaway
No matter whether you’re in the office, working remotely, or part of a distributed team, collaboration is a necessary ingredient to any brand’s success. Using the right tools, you’ll be able to communicate and collaborate more efficiently, getting more work done in less time.
