Fit Small Business recently reported that in most companies, collaboration accounts for 85 percent of work time, and 9 in 10 workers believe that digital tools that foster collaboration processes are becoming increasingly important.

Eighty-five percent of the work week is a lot of time spent finding processes to work on projects with your own team members or other teams in an equitable and reliable manner. Team collaboration is more important than ever, and digital tools enable companies to collaborate remotely.

The support of collaboration tools is essential in the world of marketing production, as they form the framework of the marketing value chain. Only when participating teams can collaborate on marketing materials without friction can the value chain be successfully streamlined. This is the only way to make marketing production efficient. Below are some important tools to consider for smooth collaboration.

1. Clear communication channels

According to McKinsey, using social technology tools to strengthen workplace communication and collaboration has the power to increase productivity by as much as 20 to 25 percent. In addition, these tools can clarity for workflows and ensure everyone is working from the same page in the same book.

Here are a few tools you can implement to nurture strong communication channels and encourage collaboration:

• LAGO Whiteboard: This module is perfect for marketing managers, product managers, and agencies to plan printed advertisements efficiently, no matter a person’s experience level with layouts. Collectively, your team can assign products with all the relevant SKU data and images to specific pages via a web-based whiteboarding environment. Once your team is ready to go, the pre-layout results automatically populate InDesign templates for the creative team. Whiteboard bridges the gap between category management and marketing production, integrating the two departments to work together.
• LAGO Workflow: LAGO Workflow goes beyond print and digital production to help you control your entire production and create, schedule, and manage projects from beginning to end. These tools give your organization better, clearer control of every project step, from multichannel campaigns to merchandising, promotional planning, whiteboarding, and more. LAGO’s workflow modules help reduce the cost of creating and managing these multichannel campaigns by opening the lines of communication, allowing information to be changed and conveyed to designers, and limiting the possibility of errors, data entry mistakes, or other miscommunication issues. This also helps your team assign pages, monitor status, track results, and more in a web-based environment.
• LAGO Proof: LAGO Proof is a web-based system to bring your team together to ensure that your final product is ready for publication either online or in print. It provides a smooth, efficient, timely approval process even when numerous decision-makers have to sign off on each element. This includes automatic delivery of files for approval (and corresponding email notifications), assignment and tracking of mark-ups, and more. In addition, every user’s corrections are visible, even as the proof is passed from person to person or department to department. Those corrections are seamlessly integrated within the original document, eliminating breakdowns in communication and keeping everyone in contact effortlessly.

2. Efficient task management platforms

There are all kinds of proven benefits to implementing task management tools. For starters, bigger tasks can be handled better when we break them down into smaller, bite-sized portions. But additionally, task management platforms offer a host of other benefits, including:

• Improved personal productivity and better focus
• A deeper understanding of the broader needs of the entire organization
• Stronger communication between employees and departments
• Greater visibility of an entire project and an improved ability to meet deadlines as a team

Staying on task and communicating can be hard when there are multiple projects to juggle or lots of people working together on the same tasks. Task management platforms help foster collaboration, stick to demanding deadlines, and tighten workflows.

LAGO Workflow is entirely customizable and can be tailored to suit your organization’s specific needs for multichannel marketing production. Use LAGO to assign particular tasks defined by each person’s role, including the time allotted for each part of the workflow, to automatically calculate due dates, reduce delays, limit errors, and remove friction from the overall workflow.

3. Reliable asset management support

A Digital Asset Management (DAM) system is an intelligent solution to manage all your company’s assets, including photos, documents, videos, music, presentations, brandings, and other media needed for marketing and promotional use.

Digital asset management is about keeping your workflow moving and preserving your production plan. It helps you catalog, share, and store all of your digital assets in one place – and opens the lines of communication about where all of these assets are being used.

A DAM system can help you build a more efficient and collaborative workflow for designers, photographers, videographers, and art directors. Additionally, there is more time to focus effort on what they do best, like creating compelling content rather than searching for images or sending or requesting certain assets.

For marketing professionals, a DAM system frees you from countless hours searching through images or creating new ideas for print and digital campaigns. Using a single, central repository, you can quickly locate the content you need without sending requests to the creative team and waiting for a response.

Because most DAMs are cloud-based, they make collaboration simple. You can share files from anywhere, at any time, and find what you need quickly. In addition, all of your company content comes from the same place, empowering brand consistency among all collaborators.

Digital asset management helps you share assets with your team and outside collaborators, retailers, and agencies. As a result, you can ensure your brand’s materials are distributed appropriately, that you are using the most updated images and assets, and that you are representing your brand the way you need to. It’s the ultimate collaboration tool.

 LAGO DAM helps you:

• Consolidate your asset management in a single repository
• Share assets with team members via a central platform
• Automate the process of cataloging assets to increase collaboration efficiency
• Save critical information from loss or isolation on a particular employee’s device

4. A smart data management solution

Do you have a way to manage and track all of your data? A Product Information Management (PIM) system provides a single solution to manage your product data, including SKUs, product identifiers, titles, descriptions, images, pricing, quantities, and more. The overall goal is to provide organizations with a central media-neutral storage tool to manage and distribute product information, even when you’re overseeing a variety of output channels.

Here’s why this matters: A reliable PIM system like Comosoft’s LAGO PIM solution can help you avoid mislabeling products and shorten your time to market. It can also automate the collaboration between sales and advertising teams and foster improved collaboration through a seamless workflow.

What are some benefits of managing data with a PIM system?

• You can improve the employee and customer experience by pulling all information from a “single source of truth,” which means your sales agents, designers, and marketing team can access the most up-to-date information. Collaboration is simple because no one has to hunt for the latest data. Sales teams can quickly send product recommendations and details to customers. Designers can access the latest data. Everyone can do what they do best, only more efficiently.
• You can limit human error throughout the product lifecycle and even integrate with warehouse management systems to share the exact product specifications and inventory data across your entire operation via a shared data repository. You can also automate data entry to limit the risk of error.
• You can better classify and categorize your product offerings, which helps your team identify chances to upsell or offer additional products.

Comosoft: Your partner in collaboration

LAGO was designed with collaboration in mind. It’s at the core of what we do. LAGO is a PIM, DAM, and marketing production solution that fosters a collaborative, checkpoint-based workflow, complete with versioning optimization and proofing. It keeps your marketing production process flowing so that work is efficient and cooperative, even when juggling large data sets.

With automated task management and configurable user rights, your whole team will work from the same unified data set. Everyone knows what their responsibilities are. Work happens faster. Approvals are more straightforward, and collaboration is simple.

We’ve seen the power of Comosoft LAGO firsthand. Over 4,000 marketing and production professionals have discovered how easy it is to simplify marketing production workflows, optimize multichannel marketing activities, and cut production time and costs through LAGO’s collaboration toolkit. Now it’s time to see it for yourself.