Excessive meetings. Missed deadlines. Emergency fire drills. Conflicting direction. Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?

At best, an enterprise marketing department has a lot of moving parts to manage to generate leads. At worst, productivity can suffer to the point of dysfunction. You’re juggling marketing strategy, messaging, content, and metrics for a large number of products, services, and projects — and then some. You may work with a combination of full-time employees, part-time employees, interns, contractors, and a variety of stakeholders. At this level of complexity, it would be no surprise if your team experiences occasional confusion or frustration about the productivity of the department.

By implementing a few effective collaboration tools, you can help streamline (and minimize) meetings, reduce fire drills and missed deadlines, and prevent duplicate or conflicting output.

Project Management Software

This type of tool may be among the most commonly used in the productivity category, but rarely is it used to full advantage. Project management software is labor-intensive to set up — but well worth the effort once you have your tasks, deadlines, files, and conversations stored in one location.

Need options? We found a whole list to help you decide.

Marketing Content Templates

Consistent messaging and content are non-negotiable if you want to increase marketing productivity. Templates streamline collaboration by standardizing formats, processes, and output. You can complete tasks and projects faster by preventing the replication of these steps. Plus, your team will better understand the expectations for marketing content when they are clearly outlined in a central location.

Hubspot put together a fantastic list of templates. Consider building templates for target marketing email campaigns, social media graphics, presentation decks, press releases, lead gen campaign planning, and more.

Marketing Content Library

Your marketing content library should house source information such as messaging guidelines and frameworks, brand and style guides, buyer personas, social media policies, and the templates we discussed above. Make sure to also include all content generated to date, with a filing system so everyone on the team can find what they need (or what they don’t know they need).

An effective content library is easy to use, accessible to everyone, updated regularly, and searchable. If a brand-new employee can use the database without too much trouble, you’re probably on the right track.

Your content library can be as simple as a system of shared Dropbox folders — or you may want to use a more complex content management tool like the one offered by Salesforce.

Marketing Analytics Dashboard

How effective are your marketing outputs? If you’re not tracking analytics and trends, you might be funneling resources into the wrong areas.

The options are seemingly endless for analytics tools. Whether you use fancy software or plug numbers into a presentation deck every month, you need data to tell the story of your marketing successes and challenges. Analyze your demand generation marketing programs, content engagement, funnel conversions, and other metrics to determine where you should optimize.

If you need support beyond the manual Google Analytics grab, Tableau and Domo offer more sophisticated options.

How to Choose Your Tools

Regardless of the tools you use for collaboration, make sure you include your marketing team in the selection process. You’ll get access to insights and needs you may not have anticipated, and the group effort will increase buy-in and usage of the tools.