Four collaboration tools to bring your marketing efforts to a new level

Digital marketing is finally beyond well-defined cookie-cutter tactics. It's all about creativity these days. Therefore collaboration has become an integral part of digital marketing.

There are many forms of collaboration that can help marketing strategy: You can collaborate with your team members and employees to empower them to participate in your brand marketing efforts. You can collaborate with your customers enabling them to spread your message. You can collaborate with your peers inviting them to help you make better content.

The internet has given us the ability to work with people around the world, and there are a few powerful tools that offer different types of collaboration to enhance your marketing efforts.

Note: I am not listing any generic project management collaboration tools here. I am a big believer in a productively-managed workplace but I have yet to find a good project management tool that will solve all my problems. This article is not aimed at addressing that, but rather at listing tools that specialize in one particular marketing task.

1. Collaborate on idea brainstorming

Stormz is a new brainstorming tool you may have never heard about. It's an easy-to-use platform allowing you to make your brainstorming much more effective. Collaboration is the most essential element of brainstorming and the tool handles it perfectly.

Stormz lets you create brainstorming dashboards allowing your team to generate, select and enrich ideas that can solve their business problem or challenge. Participants can contribute and organize ideas as well as vote for those they like most.

The tool uses two effective brainstorming techniques enabling your team to produce and pick the best ideas:

NUF (New, Useful, Feasible) evaluation: Is the idea new? Does it solve a problem? Do we have the ability (skill, money, resources) to do it?

Virtual budget. Ask people to spend a virtual $100 budget on the options they like most. Using money, even if virtual, gives a very clear way to evaluate ideas

More tools to make brainstorming easier and more effective:

MindMeister is an effective brain-mapping tool that allows you to visually break down complex concepts and show how each idea flows into another. MindMeister lets you add contributors to work on a mind map together

Scribblar is another useful tool allowing you to brainstorm with others in real time. It's also a great educational tool if you want to teach and collaborate in a virtual classroom.

2. Collaboratively monitor rankings & competitors

SE Ranking is a powerful keyword position monitoring tool that has an extremely clear interface and top-notch usability. One of the most frequent problems of keyword ranking tools is addressed here perfectly: Setting up projects to monitor keywords is extremely easy. And once set up, it's even easier to track positions and compare your site to competitors.

The tool supports keyword tracking in Google, Yahoo and Bing as well as all their localized versions. You can also compare rankings in different devices. You can target your position monitoring to any city of the world.

You can also add extra users to your account allowing them access only to the data you wish them to see.

3. Collaborate on social media promotion

DrumUp is a social media management dashboard with a big focus on in-team collaboration. They have launched the brand advocacy program enabling companies to encourage and monitor their employees' sharing brand-sensitive updates on social media.

You can add your team members to your social management dashboard and post your URLs, reviews and comments encouraging the employees to actively engage with that content.

The built-in leaderboard lets you monitor who of your employees are most active on social media spreading your word and promoting your content.

This is a great way to encourage and reward employees' sharing, making them part of your company's public image and turning them into brand advocates.

4. Collaborate on content creation

MyBlogU (Disclaimer: This is the tool I founded) is a free blogging platform allowing you to collaborate on lots of aspects of content marketing, from content brainstorming to promotion.

One of its most recent features is called "Article Collaboration". It allows you to upload an article draft and invite members of the community to contribute paragraphs to make the article more varied and indepth. Contributors can also leave inline comments with their thoughts and ideas.

Here's a quick article describing how the feature helped me to turn a pretty boring draft into a great article featuring diverse opinions and various tools.

More tools to collaborate on content:

Google Drive is a great free tool allowing to invite collaborators to an article draft. It also enables contributors to add feedback too

Medium lets you invite any Medium users to an unpublished article draft. The collaborators can add notes sharing their opinion on your future article.

Pakwired also gives a good roundup of more collaboration tools to try (none of them made it to my roundup above, so it's worth checking out).

Are there any other marketing collaboration tools you are using? Please share them in the comments!

Ann Smarty is Brand and Community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com and a contributor to Search Engine Watch.

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