We’re living in challenging economic times and, sadly, marketing departments often have their budgets cut first. At the same, companies are asking those same departments to produce more whilst cutting costs.
That can seem like an un-squareable circle and, frankly, can be quite demoralising for teams.
Marketing teams can save money, however. Over the past few years, the martech stacks employed within companies have grown bloated with teams employing multiple tools from differing vendors all at once. Imagine a world where martech stacks could be flattened with teams across the company and around the world singing, quite literally, from the same hymn sheet.
If we told you there was a company that could deliver $24 million in NPV and a 273 per cent ROI boost over three years, you would probably think we were talking nonsense. But, that is exactly how much is being left on the table as a result of bloated martech stacks.
Working Smarter With Smartsheet
Let’s lay out the facts before we get started. Smartsheet is a collaborative work management (CWM) platform that offers marketers the tools to leave cumbersome, tedious and, above all, inefficient processes behind.
Rather than relying on spreadsheets, emails, and outdated project management systems to facilitate marketing campaign plans and creative requests, Smartsheet offers custom project dashboards, end-to-end content production management and robust projects with workflow automation. That sounds techy and, it is — particularly with Smartsheet’s AI component. But to the end user, the tool creates simplicity through its back-end complexity, leaving you and the rest of your team with more time.
For example, Smartsheet can reduce project-related emails by as much as three-quarters — an absolute godsend for many. It can also halve project review cycles and project review times by three-quarters. Saving those working hours alone would free up significant time for any marketing team. You don’t have to take our, or Smartsheet’s word for it, either. Consulting firm Forrester carried out a Total Economic Impact analysis of Smartsheet to ascertain exactly how powerful the tool was.
American firm McGraw Hill implemented Smartsheet’s platform and boosted team efficiency by some 50 per cent as a result of its Automated Workflows, for example. Meanwhile, Uber cut its customer life cycle creation time by up to 45 per cent, giving its teams more time to focus on running experiments and designing better campaigns. These are the time-savings marketers need to work smarter and execute better, more impactful work rather than churning through endless back-and-forth conversations over email.
Flattening The Stack
The other money pit marketers routinely stare into is the number of platforms they use to execute campaigns, manage workflows and simply do their jobs. They’ll regularly be jumping between the workflow programs to digital asset management (DAM) tools, email platforms and instant messaging tools. Viewed from the outside, this bloated number of tools only leads to complexity, confusion and conspicuous wastes of time.
What’s more, an issue that routinely affects marketers more than other teams in companies is the number of external staff that might need to be added to a platform. You might need an external copywriter for support, or you might need a producer to put on an in-person activation, for example.
By flattening the stack of tools marketers rely on to do their jobs, the Forrester study found that Smartsheet could save marketers more than $1.5 million through free viewer licenses, flexible, no-code WorkApps, pre-built integrations and robust APIs.
Smartsheet won’t replace your email provider (sadly) but it will allow marketing teams to remove a number of tools that slow down work with built-in project management and budgeting tools, real-time reporting and process automation to quickly and slickly handle requests, plans, reviews and execute on your work and content.
Seamless Digital Asset Management
The other side of Smartsheet is its DAM platform, Brandfolder. Rather than having to jump into an entirely different piece of software every time you want to use or create a marketing asset — whether it’s a company logo, product photo or explainer video — Brandfolder centralises all of that information, making it available to everyone at the touch of a button.
Of course, it’s not the only tool available to marketers that can centrally manage assets. However, it is the only tool that plugs into a CWM platform like Smartsheet. Again, this leads to huge time savings and, in business, time is money.
By implementing creative templates, collecting and curating assets and utilising cloud-based brand guidelines, Brandfolder can make searching for content 90 per cent faster — a huge time-saving. What’s more, its Brand Intelligence automated, AI-powered asset tagging can help marketers make content distribution 15 per cent more efficient. McLaren (yes, the Formula 1 team) has already been putting it to use to communicate with its millions of fans around the world, gaining huge productivity improvements in the process.
Times are hard for marketers and you certainly don’t need to make your lives any harder by using 20th century martech stacks in 2023. Combining Smartsheet and Brandfolder could save your team hours upon hours, freeing them to do more creative work that actually contributes to a company’s bottom line.
