90% of marketers include content marketing in their marketing strategies in one form or another in 2024 according to Forbes. It cannot be overstated just how important it is for a business to have a solid content marketing strategy in order to reach thousands of potential customers through social media. If you want to reach Gen Z or Millennials in particular, you’re going to need to be active on social media.

Here’s the issue most social media managers and content marketers face: making content the old way isn’t easy. It’s really time consuming and difficult to set up a collaborative process and keep it going consistently. The traditional tools are complex and don’t include streamlined collaboration functionality. Adobe has a forty year history at this point. Illustrator, Photoshop and Premiere Pro were designed in the 80s, 90s and early 00s, pre-internet boom and “the cloud” hadn’t even been coined yet. They’re undoubtedly fantastic for professional designers and movie editors, but they just don’t fit the bill for content marketers.

Marketers require tools that were built from inception around simplicity, intuitiveness, and collaboration.

We’ve compiled 5 super efficient content collaboration tools for marketers that will get you from the brainstorming stage to that final video or image. These tools all have modern design philosophies that trim away all the complexity of making content collaboratively.

Miro for brainstorming

Miro is an interactive online whiteboard that helps teams brainstorm and plan content strategies together visually in real-time. You can start from a clean slate or use one of Miro’s many useful templates for things like process mapping to get started. Process mapping can help you shape your content production process, something that shouldn’t be underestimated because a good process will enable you to be consistent in your content output. After all, consistency should not be underestimated when it comes to social media success.

Canva for image posts and stories

Canva is incredibly easy to pick up, so marketers can get hands-on and make slick story designs without the need for a professional designer. At the same time, it has enough depth for advanced users to make beautiful imagery. If you’re working with others, Canva’s collaboration lets you give feedback and participate in the design process in real-time. If there are small edits you need to make, instead of going through the process of emailing the designer to tell them to move a logo up or down a few pixels, just do it yourself and get it done in 5 seconds. Don’t worry about messing up either because versions are saved throughout the process that you can revert to at any time.

elevate.io for videos and reels

Unlike graphic design, brainstorming, docs and spreadsheets, there was a noticeable gap for intuitive and collaborative video editing. If you wanted to create videos, you were either completely dependent on agencies or forced to learn how to use complex video editing software. While great for pros, these video editors need to run on the latest hardware and require expert knowledge. They also lack the collaborative functionality that marketing teams require. This is problematic because video (especially short-form) is by far the most important content marketing format in 2024. With elevate.io, you’ll be video editing right in Google Chrome on an easy-to-use interface with real-time collaboration built in. Share all your media and projects between your team or agency without the need for physical hard drives. You can jump into your video timeline with multiple people at the same time to track progress and make edits together. What Figma did for design, elevate.io is doing for video editing.

Trello for content project management

Do yourself a favor and don’t use a spreadsheet to keep track of your content production process. It’s messy and unorganized. Trello is an online kanban board that will help you keep track of your content production process intuitively through cards and stacks. Cards can be set up for each piece of content, assigned to specific team mates, given a deadline, and dragged from one stack to another to visualize progress from the planning stage to final output. Trello can really help you stay on top of your content pipeline.

Google Docs for writing briefs and scripts

This last one isn’t going to be as exciting as the previous four, but you’re going to need a word processor, and Google Docs’ sharing and collaboration integration is second to none. Jump in with multiple people and start writing collaboratively in real-time, or easily review work and leave comments. Briefs will be easily accessible by anybody added to the document, ensuring that the right people have everything they need to get to producing content. We definitely prefer it over Word, which similarly to the Adobe suite was retrofitted with collaboration features, not designed with it in mind like Google Docs or any of the other tools above.

Content creation budget

There you have it: from ideation and script writing to content creation, both image and video. And the beautiful thing is every single one of these tools is either completely free or has a capable free basic plan with access to essential features. A business plan for professional creative suites can cost your business around $90/month per user. That’s $450/month if you’re working with just 4 other people.

elevate.io

We are the developers of elevate.io, that collaborative video editing tool that runs in Google Chrome that we told you about. Why not give it a try today and see how well it works?