Who likes meetings with rambling that runs on and on? Endless email exchanges over the smallest detail? Having to pick up the phone to answer questions? Juggling different websites and software just to view a document the way you want? According to a recent study, 84% of executives believe that the future success of their company depends on their ability to rethink how teams collaborate. The same percentage believe a connected workspace is essential. This is where SaaS planning and collaboration tools come in: aggregating elements needed to run a marketing campaign in a single place, including calendars, assets, tasks, people involved, and more.
The objective is to help project managers or leaders in all stages of their mission, right down to the tiniest detail. To accomplish this, a collaborative work tool in SaaS mode allows you to save precious time by centralizing all the project information. You see the overall schedule as well as progress on each project, who's in charge of which task, which questions remain unanswered, and which resources can still be activated. No more long meetings! It also reduces recurring problems like lack of communication on document versions.
If much project planning takes the form of a spreadsheet, this choice in practice proves to be questionable: the rendering is not the most readable, editing and manipulation information are sometimes complex, and rights management is not always adapted. These limitations are all the more apparent now that there are SaaS solutions dedicated to collaboration.
As always, the criteria for your choice depends on your needs and those of your team. Do you want to exchange better, or do you need to organize many tasks in parallel? Is it a one-time or regular need? How many people will need to use this SaaS solution? Are the users comfortable with project management and new technologies? In all cases, collaboration solutions offer the same core functionality.
Must-have Features
As the collaboration market is one of the most dynamic in the martech stack, choosing isn't easy. The best practice is often to try a few weeks before a final adoption. Along the way, you're likely to encounter one of these solutions.
With its kanban-like boards, Trello is definitely one of the most well-known SaaS collaboration platforms. With this particularity, Trello gives a view of an entire project in a single glance. In concrete terms, the solution offers a system of tables with columns and cards. Each column can correspond to a specific mission or stage of the project, with, for example, "to do," "in progress," "delivered," and "released" columns. The cards represent the different tasks to be done, and can contain attachments, comments, external links, and even a calendar to plan a deadline. This simplicity also has its limits for large-scale and complex projects or organizations.
With tasks that can be viewed in different methodologies like list view, kanban boards, calendar, and Gantt charges. Asana aims for versatility. Team pages make it easy to share ideas and conversations, rights management and notifications are fine-tuned enough to work in a dense and large-scale manner. Everyone can easily visualize their tasks and deadlines and prioritize them. The solution is also distinguished by the wide range of applications (office automation, storage, email automation, and more) with which it can be integrated.
Known for its quality user experience, Monday features a well-balanced mix of features from task lists to project tracking to collaboration. While it may not offer as many features or integrations with third-party solutions as its competitors, it is customizable and flexible. The result is a very short user adoption cycle.
Halfway between a database and a spreadsheet, Airtable is one of those "no-code" SaaS solutions that allow users to build multiple applications. In other words, Airtable is not directly usable as a collaboration application but can be easily used for marketing project management. Numerous templates are available that take advantage of the different views offered by the tool: maps, calendars, kanban boards, Gantt charts, etc.
Whatever your final choice, all the solutions mentioned here allow you to manage multiple calendars, integrating all your assets: social media planning, email campaigns, paid campaigns, content production, and email signatures. This is the challenge and the complexity of these plans: you have to make sure that they contribute coherently to large sequences (for example, the promotion of an event) and, at the same time, that the rules of the game are respected for each contact point. This is why it's important to rely on both global planning and channel-specific solutions.
You can integrate a channel such as email signatures into overall planning by leveraging Letsignit to guarantee the performance and the technical and visual conformity of the signatures.This is why, for a channel such as email signatures, it is relevant to integrate it into the overall planning while leveraging Letsignit to guarantee the performance and the technical and visual compliance of the signatures.
Note that Letsignit also takes care to embed its own collaborative features that fit your organization. Thus, the multi-subsidiary functionality helps you to give their own workspaces to your different entities to efficiently delegate signatures management. From planning to execution, SaaS solutions have now matured enough to handle email signatures as a full-fledged marketing channel within your overall planning.