6 powerful collaboration tools for digital agencies

Digital agencies can be called as a conglomeration of many stakeholders such as in-house employees, freelancers, agency partners, clients, and of course the audience! More often than not, the bandwidth of a digital agency gets assessed on the basis of their ability to handle and access data.

Being one of the heavy data-driven businesses, digital agencies need to smartly collaborate data and teams in order to live up to the expectation of all its stakeholders.

Here are six best collaboration tools that can do wonders for digital agencies.

1. Skype

Skype is one of the most popular names in both, home and work settings. The popularity of Skype is attributed to its user-friendly interface and host of communication features such as text, voice, and video calls. More so, this tool can be used across multiple devices like computers, smartphones, tablets, and even television. Using Skype, you can collaborate for meetings with team members and clients from anywhere around the globe. You can send instant messages, make voice and video calls, share files, and conduct training sessions. It is also equipped with screen sharing technology by which you can share your screen with another user.

On a lighter note, you can also surprise your team mate with a celebration for his or her outstanding performance. A part of Microsoft now, Skype has further broadened its horizons as a must-needed office tool. All in all, Skype is one collaboration tool that allows you to merge the work environment via all three mediums of communication: text, audio, and video. Currently, over 520-million people worldwide use Skype, a testimony of its acceptance!

2. Asana

‘Move work forward’ is how Asana introduces itself. Asana is a smart project and task management collaboration tool that is useful to keep all members – in-house teams and remote teams, of a project in the loop by abstaining from regular e-mails. With Asana, you can assign tasks, keep track of projects, create a single platform for communication, and keep all documents safe as Asana is integrated with Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box.

It streamlines a project from start to finish where each member is aware of his responsibilities with the clarity on why a particular responsibility is assigned to him. Hubspot regards it as a tool for organisationally-obsessed marketers.

Asana is applicable for high action work set-ups like that of a digital agency. Asana strives to lower the friction in communication that arises out of information overload or irrelevant information. In this way it aims at improving productivity of individuals and teams at large. Thousands of companies are already sorting out their complex project requirements with Asana and the results have been great!

3. Trello

Trello is a popular card-based virtual to-do-list tool that organises multitasking across various projects. Social media and content management are two big challenges for any digital agency and Trello effectively streamlines the entire process.

The best part about Trello is its simple and easy-to-understand user interface. Trello allows you to collaborate with all members of a project both at an individual level and a team level. In order to organize all your projects, you can create individual boards under which you can list all your tasks by creating columns like Ideas, To-Do, Doing, and Done. Assign cards for each list so that you can drag and drop cards between lists to show progress.

It brings in all stakeholders on a single platform. For example: an agency may have a freelance writer, outsourced designer and an in-house editor, all in one card to communicate, share files, and work in unison. With Trello, it becomes possible to keep track of multiple projects and workflows in one single board.

Keeping a clutter-free appearance on the surface, the cards in Trello gets everything done for you. It allows you to post comments for immediate feedback, upload files from your personal computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and OneDrive. You can add checklists, labels, due dates, etc. and get notifications to ensure that you remain updated of all the important activities.

The Power-Ups feature allows for additional inclusion in boards like calendar, card aging etc. which can be turned on based on need of the user. It also ensures that communication relevant to one project get fed on the specific card thereby allowing for hassle-free communication. This collaboration tool syncs across all devices and is also available in an app version for Android phones, tablets, iPad, iPhone, and Kindle Fire, making it a tool for on-the-go collaboration.

4. Slack

Walk into any digital media agency and you will find the social media team to be the busiest. In such a scenario, Slack helps social media teams to streamline communication. According to the Hubspot team, Slack is one of the hottest real-time messaging apps in the market (22 Handy Slack Hacks Everyone Should Know).

It is a communication collaboration tool with the feature of creating communication threads called as channels. You can invite team members to join a channel along with the option to send direct private messages to individual users. These channels also allow for conducting advanced searches to pull out information you are looking for.

The Slackbot reminder helps you to remain on track with your tasks at hand. These channels allow sharing of various types of files like documents, spreadsheets, images, PDFs, and GIFs as well. It has an added feature of text formatting your messages like emphasis, strikethrough, lists, blockquotes, and code blocks. Slack has a simple and user-friendly interface with the option of getting custom notifications.

It can be used by both on-site and off-site team members allowing for flexibility of work. Slack is free for use by small teams whereas it is advised to consider Slack Enterprise for large teams for collaborated team information, company-wide analytics, and additional security. Slack’s voice calling feature is at an early stage thus lacking in video calling or screen sharing feature, at present. However, the existing features of Slack do make it an innovative tool.

5. Zapty

What could be better that to open a single tool and get all the information you need for the moment on a single platform? Sounds too ideal? Well, Zapty makes it a reality. Jeff Bullas calls it one of the best collaboration tools currently on the market.

Zapty is one of the very few solutions that really live up to the definition of collaboration tool. It is an all-inclusive productivity app for all office-related work needs. It integrates the potential of various apps with its features like to-do list, document collaboration, daily task management and collaboration, team and shared calendar, and project management information system. It allows for real-time communication through either one-on-one chat with a team or multiple teams, video chats, and built-in simplified workflow that enables faster approvals and swift information sharing with instant surveys and polls.

It is also equipped to provide real-time data accessibility along with YouTube video references. With all its project management features, it proves to be a potential productivity tool in data-driven industries like Information Technology, Creative and Digital Marketing Agencies, Law Firms, Educational Institutions, Trade Associations, and Non-profits.

Remaining true to its credo of ‘seamless teamwork, anywhere’, Zapty has an advanced search feature within the app that brings everything to your fingertips anytime, anywhere and at all time in any device, thereby revolutionizing work sphere and driving productivity to newer heights.

6. Google Hangouts

Google Hangouts is a communication collaboration tool powered by Google. Google Hangouts enables individual and group communication with team members, partners, and clients through video chat and also text chat. You can also broadcast your live hangout with Hangouts on air that will get uploaded to your YouTube channel. As this tool is a part of Google, you don’t need to install any third party app, and as current smart devices already come preinstalled with this tool, all you need to do is – just use it!

The latest version keeps all your communications synchronized in one place. It seamlessly integrates with Gmail and gives you a chat history along with the provision of importing contacts. Already a popular tool for video conferencing, the latest version has taken an extra step to improvise the experience by enhancing the quality of video conferencing along with giving the tool a simpler and cleaner interface.

Just as the audience enjoys the output of your digital media agency, let yourself and your team enjoy as well while working with these captivating creations! Assess your needs and choose the tool that will best suit your agency and make the most of it.