When the U.S. Congressional Budget Office projects that the economy will flatline, as it did in February 2023, the knee-jerk reaction for most businesses is to slash budgets. Marketing and communications departments are often among the first to feel the pain.
If the powers that be in your company have instructed you to consolidate your productivity and task tools to pinch pennies, you’ve got some tough decisions ahead of you.
How do you consolidate and remain productive, efficient, and effective? And what’s the best way to achieve the desired result?
Fortunately, consolidation can have its benefits. Once you know what they are, you can navigate the process with those in mind to accomplish a streamlined system that increases efficiency and saves money.
SPOILER ALERT: DivvyHQ’s content operations platform can help you eliminate numerous tools that are commonly used among marketing and comms orgs, giving your team a centralized hub for request intake, planning, project management, and reporting. Request a demo to see how we can help you consolidate!
What Are the Benefits of Consolidation?
We know it might be challenging to see how consolidation could be beneficial, but when done correctly, it can improve your team’s performance.
Improving Efficiency
When consolidation streamlines productivity and task management, it makes your team more efficient. They no longer need to juggle multiple systems, operating between them to accomplish their goals.
If you implement a platform that centralizes your tasks and projects in one location, your team won’t need to switch between tools to get their jobs done.
Reducing Costs
Let’s face it: the goal of consolidation is usually to save the company money. While consolidation can lower the costs associated with paying for multiple subscriptions and licenses, it can increase costs in other areas — by reducing team efficiency or ROI, for instance.
However, choosing a single platform to manage your marketing operations eliminates individual subscription and licensing costs. You also save money through increased staff productivity, which can result in more effective marketing and a higher ROI.
Image Source: Deloitte – The CMO Survey
Improved Collaboration
Collaboration is so much easier when communication and sharing tools are housed with every other tool your team needs. DivvyHQ’s platform allows for instant, consistent, and constant collaboration.
With the right platform, teamwork doesn’t rely on meetings and emails to keep everyone on the same page. Instead, team members receive instant notifications and can access every project component at any time and from anywhere, even when your team works remotely.
Better Visibility
When every aspect of a project is located on a single platform, keeping track of progress is easier. All team members have access to the big-picture view. And managers can more readily assess progress and potential bottlenecks, allocating resources more effectively.
Increased Data Accuracy
From research to up-to-date content to analytics, maintaining data accuracy is challenging. However, when you consolidate your marketing operations in an all-in-one platform, all your information is in one place. Centralizing it ensures your data remains consistent, accurate, and up-to-date and reduces the likelihood of data and communication errors.
Better Integrations
Integrations allow you to fold multiple systems and tools into one. If you implement a content management platform, you can readily integrate other invaluable systems, such as your customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning systems. Doing so improves your marketing team’s productivity and your business processes and outcomes.
What Is the Process for Smooth Consolidation?
While consolidating productivity and task management tools will require a thoughtful process, it doesn’t need to result in chaos. The transition will go much more smoothly if you break it down into four basic steps.
1. Include All Those Impacted
Your marketing operations team might not be the only one impacted by the directive to consolidate productivity and task management tools. In this first step, identify other units, departments, and teams that work either directly or indirectly with marketing.
Tell them that consolidation is on the horizon and that you need their help to ensure a smooth transition with the best possible outcomes for everyone. You should also send out a survey to determine their management needs, what tools they currently use, and what features and functionality is crucial to their use cases.
2. Identify Productivity and Task Management Requirements
Generate a list of features and functional requirements for an ideal productivity and task management platform that will meet everyone’s most-pressing needs. You can also identify “nice-to-have” features.
Distribute the list to everyone and ask them to review it. If you receive feedback that requires you to adjust the list, make the necessary changes and resubmit it to the team to ensure they are comfortable.
3. Generate a List of Options
Create a list of existing tools and platforms your company uses. You may also want to research new, industry-leading tools and obtain demos for the most promising ones. Score each platform according to your finalized list of ideal features and functional requirements.
4. Choose the Platform That Best Meets Your Needs
Choose the platform that best meets your needs based on the scores the systems received. Now it’s time to present your final choice and share your rationale for choosing the platform, addressing how each team will benefit.
Why Should You Choose a Content Operations Platform?
When evaluating tools within the project management software category, you have two basic options: a general project management platform or a specialized platform.
You might be tempted to go with a general project management platform that can broadly serve many use cases, especially considering a goal to consolidate. But this also may mean making tradeoffs in functionality that is specifically geared towards supporting the content production process.
It’s often helpful to do a quick thought exercise. When you consider the full scope and types of projects that need to be managed, what percentage of those projects are content-centric vs. non-content centric.
Brands are increasingly shifting their marketing efforts away from traditional tactics to content, with the average traditional advertising budget decreasing by 0.7% in 2023. To keep up with this evolving trend and maintain productivity, you will need a specialized platform designed for content.
Image Source: Deloitte – The CMO Survey
As you assess the future of marketing for your company, how much of your efforts going forward will focus on content-based output? If content is a growing priority, choosing a content-centric platform with the essential elements of project management platforms for marketing teams makes more sense.
What Makes DivvyHQ the Most Effective Content Operations Platform?
We are content marketers who designed a platform for content marketers. Based on decades of experience planning, producing, publishing, and evaluating the effectiveness of content marketing initiatives, we incorporate everything you need into one system.
And we’re always innovating. Automation and artificial intelligence applications further improve efficiency and effectiveness, and our powerful project management and task management features let you manage an entire campaign or project from one centralized hub. Request a demo to discover why DivvyHQ provides painless consolidation.