How To Convince Your Team To Use (And Love) CoSchedule

Your team needed a solution to help organize your marketing projects, processes, & team. Lucky for you, you’ve found the perfect solution - CoSchedule Marketing Suite. But now comes the hard part: helping your team successfully adopt your new software. This blog post is packed with actionable tips to help your team adopt this new software in no time. By the end of this post, you will be equipped with a plan to help you sell your team on using CoSchedule Marketing Suite for the long run. To convince your team that this tool is the answer, you will need to become an expert in everything CoSchedule Marketing Suite offers. Humans are naturally adverse to change, so you will most likely encounter resistance when presenting this tool. This is where your expertise in Marketing Suite will come in handy. Your team will respond with questions, and you’ll know how to answer them.

Highlight 1: Consolidation (AKA Your One-Stop Marketing Shop)

One of the first questions you’ll get is, “Why are we switching to CoSchedule Marketing Suite?” There’s a tool problem with marketers, and it’s called makeshift marketing. Organizations are getting stuck using multiple different tools that don’t work well together. Highlight the frustrations and challenges with your current tool stack. Why is this approach so painful?

• You’re constantly switching between multiple tools.
• You’re unable to find all documents and information for specific projects.
• You have disconnected tools that make it tough to plan and strategize in one place.
• Team members are confused about where assets are and the status of projects.
• You’re following up for progress updates, questions about projects, & more via email or Slack.
• You can’t find the latest versions of work in progress.
• You spend more time planning your marketing than actually executing it.
• And so much more.

CoSchedule Marketing Suite is the tool that will ease all of this pain. Show your team how it will help them do more marketing in less time. With a user-friendly calendar, your team can visualize your entire marketing strategy in real time. There will be no more disconnected workflows. No more digging through an endless amount of open tabs. Your team’s projects, assets, communication, deadlines, tasks, & details are in one place. In addition, your team can still use your go-to tools with integrations like WordPress, Google Analytics, MailChimp, Google Drive, Microsoft Office, social media platforms, and much more. You can also quickly export your existing project data from another tool with a bulk-import to make the transition a breeze.

Highlight 2: Plan Your Work To Improve Productivity

Like many other marketing teams, you’ve probably tried planning your work using spreadsheets or a multitude of other project management software. This often leads to missed deadlines, outdated documents, broken workflows, roadblocks, wasted time, and lower-quality work. You and your team have tried to be proactive planners, but the tools in your arsenal limit your capabilities. When you plan ahead with CoSchedule Marketing Suite, you can ensure your entire team has enough work, enough time, and enough flexibility to successfully execute project requests alongside campaigns. Marketing Suite’s robust task management tools will help you manage your team and their projects. These capabilities will help you develop a high-performance team that completes projects on time by balancing the predictability and flexibility of their work. Now, let’s look at the features that will help you achieve all these things. Manage Team Resources With Ease The Team Management Dashboard allows you to easily delegate, assign, & reassign work to manage your team’s priorities effectively. This view gives managers visibility into what you and your team are doing this week (and beyond). At a glance, you can check in to see how employees are handling their workloads. This helps you prevent overloading your team when things are busy while keeping them productive when work is light. Work Management One of the best ways Marketing Suite is great for your team is that it sets up every employee for success. They will consistently be focused on the right work at the right time. Each team member can easily see to-do lists and upcoming tasks with the Home Dashboard. This gives your team clear timelines & due dates so that they meet deadlines every time. This home view makes it easy to understand their priorities and get real-time updates on communication-related to their work-in-progress via notifications. Automate Complex Processes Say goodbye to roadblocks in your marketing process. With Marketing Suite, your entire team can spend less time on project handoffs and following up for project approvals. Apply Task Rules to build out intelligent triggers that seamlessly move your projects through each stage of your team's workflow. Add required approvals for compliance and legal review to ensure every project meets industry and company standards before publishing. Apply Repeatable Workflows In Seconds If your employees need to get a new project moving forward, you can automatically assign tasks in seconds. Instead of manually adding and updating tasks for recurring projects like blog posts, social campaigns, email newsletters, or monthly performance reports. Use Task Templates to map out reusable workflows to intelligently assign tasks with relative due dates to ensure projects get completed on time. Stay Flexible When Plans Change Your entire marketing team knows that priorities can change in a second. Highlight how easy it is to pivot using Marketing Suite. Marketing Suite makes rescheduling flexible with automated workflows and rescheduling features.

Simply drag and drop projects to their new publish date, and all the connected tasks and projects will reschedule along with it.

Highlight 3: Easily Communicate With Your Team & Stakeholders

Communication is obviously important, but what if you could eliminate unnecessary communication that slows down productivity? Communication is only a good thing when it’s effective. Right now, your team is probably commonly confused about their tasks and projects. So what do they do? They drop by your desk to ask questions, send emails that won’t get replied to, or waste time trying to figure it out themselves. Questions are great for clearing up confusion. But what if we eliminated that confusion in the first place? Demonstrate how your team can eliminate this confusion by providing team members with all the information and resources needed to succeed. Working on projects together is increasingly easy with the discussion tab and functionality within projects. Discussions are available in projects and are a great way to collaborate. You can also share files directly in a discussion, like images, new text changes, or any document that pertains to the project. This way, anyone working on the project can jump in and have everything they need to do their work. Have team members that work with stakeholders, vendors, agency partners, or leadership? Marketing Suite allows you to share a read-only version of your calendar, a filtered calendar view, or an individual project. Read-Only Views are valuable if you need to:

• Share project updates.
• Prove the value of the marketing department.
• Provide updates to stakeholders.
• Share the status of projects with clients.

The custom-filtered views of your calendar are interactive, update in real-time, and give stakeholders the details they want. Instead of spending time replying to emails or following up with updates, you can provide stakeholders with a read-only link, so they can check in on progress any time they want.

Highlight 4: Easily Find And Share Projects Or Files

When we say, “Bring together all your projects, processes, & team into one place,” we mean it. Right now, essential aspects of your projects are scattered throughout multiple tools. Your team works on so many projects that half the time, they don’t even remember where certain things are. Even worse, only certain people know where these project assets are, so it’s impossible to find them if you haven’t worked on them since day one. Let’s not forget your team's frustration when a file is saved locally instead of on a shared team drive. In Marketing Suite, your Projects combine all your processes and assets into one area so there’s no confusion. There is no need to dig through old messages or email threads to find “that one thing” that will help you complete your project. Utilize project attachments to stay organized, find the correct files fast, and keep your projects on track. That way, people working on a project will have all the resources they need in one place. Even better, all of your assets and final deliverables can be stored in the Asset Organizer. The Asset Organizer is a digital asset management software where your team can store, index, and share your content. The Asset Organizer will ensure your team never loses track of assets. Instead of assets being scattered across multiple tools, they are easily accessible in one place. Quickly Find The Files You Need To Get Work Done Use labels and tags to organize assets by topic, team, or audience. Your team will find the files they need in just a few clicks instead of scouring their entire computer. Your team creates incredible marketing assets; shouldn’t you be able to find them? Maintain Control Over Brand Assets Easily update existing resources and keep track of previous versions so they aren’t lost forever. A content audit will help ensure that all your files, content, and design are up to date. Share Project Deliverables With Stakeholders Give stakeholders and internal teams secure, direct access to the content you create for them. Securely share folders and specific files using custom sharing links. Your team can easily replace outdated files as you make updates, so everyone has the most recent versions.

Highlight 5: Get To Know The [Amazing] Social Tools

You are in control of your company’s brand story, and a big part of that depends on your social media strategy. You know that inconsistency with your social media is not good for your brand. However, you have multiple social media platforms, and keeping up is becoming increasingly difficult. These next tools are for your team members that work on social media strategy. Trying to manage your social media presence can sometimes feel like repetitive busywork. Switching in and out of social profiles to manually post singular messages is a tedious and unnecessary task. Even more, tracking your social media publishing in a spreadsheet isn’t sufficient anymore. It’s time to accelerate your social media strategy by simplifying these painstaking processes. Marketing Suite centralizes your social strategy, so you can create more messages, publish them at the right time, and prove the value of social media to stakeholders. Write, schedule, and publish all your social messages in the same place. Having it on a unified calendar makes it easy to visualize your entire social media strategy and align it with company goals. Social Campaign A Social Campaign allows you to create, organize, and track multiple messages. You no longer need to go in and out of different social profiles. Instead, you can write, schedule, and post to your social profiles with just a few clicks. Stay in control of your social media strategy by seeing exactly where posts are going and when. When creating social messages, you have direct access to a built-in social message optimizer that helps you write more engaging social messages. Social Templates With Social Templates, your team can create the perfect social sharing plan, fine-tune your messages, and apply a reusable template to any content or social media campaign.

ReQueue

Wouldn’t it be nice to drive more traffic, boost engagement, and have an awesome social media presence while doing no work at all? ReQueue does all the work for you so you can spend time on other, non-tedious tasks. ReQueue is a social media automation tool that automatically reshares your best social messages for you, so you can get more results from social media with less effort. Your social media strategist can find your best evergreen content and add it to ReQueue to get more leverage out of the social messages your audience already loves weeks, months, and even years down the road - with zero manual effort to fill your social media calendar.

Highlight 6: Prove The Value Of Your Work

You know measuring success is essential to any campaign or project. However, presenting this information effectively to stakeholders and higher-ups can be difficult. Tracking projects, campaigns, & status updates can take forever to put together manually. If you have team members that spend time putting together presentations or reports for stakeholders, these reports are for you! Marketing Suite compiles these reports for you, so you don’t need to spend hours collecting, analyzing, and organizing data. Project Reports & Campaign Reports can help your marketing team:

• Demonstrate how campaigns and projects align with business goals.
• Prove team productivity.
• Plan ahead and stay on top of upcoming projects and campaigns.
• Showcase successful projects and campaigns.

Best of all, you can export these reports and send them directly to anyone requesting them. Hooray! You are now equipped with some bullet-proof talking points on why CoSchedule Marketing Suite is the perfect solution for your team. Your team cares about one thing: how will this make my life easier? You COULD spit out facts about how much more organized and effective the team will be… but let’s save that for when you try to convince your boss. The individuals within your team care about those things too, but they ultimately want to know if this change will make their lives easier or harder. Therefore, your presentation will revolve around how CoSchedule Marketing Suite will benefit the team collectively and individually.

Highlight The Benefits

You’ve already learned about all the benefits; now, let’s align those benefits with the problems your team hates. Your team will love Marketing Suite if it makes their lives easier and solves their problems. So ask yourself, how will this solve a problem for them? Think about all the times you’ve heard disgruntled co-workers complaining about certain things. Here are some examples:

• “I don’t even know why we’re doing this.”
• “I can’t find the [asset] anywhere, and it’s taking forever.”
• “It’s so frustrating that [tool] isn’t compatible with [another tool].”
• “I spend half my day switching tabs trying to find something.”
• “Our social media has no clear direction.”
• “We forgot to update that project and get it published, so now we have to work longer.”
• “I’m so confused with this project.”
• “I still haven’t gotten a reply for the request I submitted weeks ago.”

Identify your team’s problems and align the solutions you’ve learned from this post.

Share With The Rest Of Your Team

Once you feel completely prepped, create a meeting with everyone who will be impacted by the new tool. If you’re actively in the Sales Process, your Sales Exec will provide you with a pitch deck to get your team on board. Share this during the meeting, and be ready to answer any questions they may have about CoSchedule Marketing Suite. Remember, people are naturally adverse to change, so you will get pushback at some point. Here are common reasons why your team may resist adopting Marketing Suite:

1. Deeply engaged with the current system.
2. Too busy to train and adopt new tools.
3. Feel comfortable with current tools.
4. Skeptical about the benefits of new tools.
5. Fear that it will create more work.

These are the underlying reasons which will lead to team members objecting to change. Make sure to predict objections and prepare for how you will refute them. Now, it’s time to implement the tool you’ve worked so hard for. CoSchedule works hard to make the onboarding process as simple and painless as possible; so that your team can start finding value immediately. The Customer Success Team at CoSchedule will take you through our proven onboarding process. During onboarding, your CSM will help you set up your Calendar and train your entire team on your new CoSchedule Marketing Suite quickly and effectively. Your team will get a Customer Success Manager available for ongoing training and support whenever you need it. Your CSM will provide:

• Custom transition plans to retire tools replaced by CoSchedule Marketing Suite
• Calendar Setup & Strategy
• Custom Stakeholder Communication Plans
• Team Onboarding & Training
• New Employee Training As Needed
• Continued Support

In addition, everyone on your team will have access to on-demand training courses and guides. Teams that sign up for Marketing Suite successfully onboard their entire team in 60 days or less. Plus, if you already have projects and content in a different platform, you can bulk import this content to your Marketing Calendar. This speeds up timelines as you transition to Marketing Suite. Haven’t scheduled a demo of Marketing Suite yet? Schedule a free demo with a CoSchedule expert.