How Virtual Whiteboards Enhance Marketing Strategies

Virtual whiteboards have emerged as a premium tool for teams working in digital workspaces, and have the capability to engage in many different kinds of activities. While they are extremely versatile and have expansive applications, they are especially helpful to marketing teams. 

Many of the things that marketing teams strive to accomplish, whether they be goal-oriented, team-oriented, or otherwise, align with the key advantages of virtual whiteboards. Virtual whiteboards engage the communicative and collaborative potential of marketing teams, allowing them to better communicate, grow, and achieve their goals. Below we will discuss some of the key ways that virtual whiteboards enhance both marketing strategies and marketing teams as a whole.

If you are interested in learning more about online whiteboards or visual collaboration, check out the Fresco blog for more collaboration content.

What are Virtual Whiteboards?

Virtual whiteboards are tools that have gained significance since many people made the switch to work from home. They allow people to collaborate on a shared visual platform from anywhere, expanding people’s ability to work together while apart. Virtual whiteboards are defined on Fresco as:

• “A shared, online workspace where teams can utilize visual elements in order to express ideas and collaborate together. Just like people use traditional whiteboards to communicate information to each other, online whiteboards act in the same way but are able to integrate multimedia content, interact and contribute in multiple different ways, and lack the limitations of traditional whiteboards”. 

Virtual whiteboards, similar to traditional whiteboards, are very versatile in their applications and can be utilized in many different scenarios. They provide many of the features consistent with traditional whiteboards, like adding notes, drawing, and working alongside others, while also adding features that expand the collaborative potential of everyone involved. These features include creating and using complex structured elements instantly, pivoting between multiple modes of interaction, focusing on certain contributions, and more.

Examples of online whiteboards being used effectively are everywhere, but the most common come in the forms of brainstorming activities, customer journey mapping, creating business models, or conducting virtual workshops. 

Now that we understand exactly what virtual whiteboards are, let’s dive into how they enhance marketing strategies.

Key Advantages for Marketing Teams

Having a Growth Mindset

Innovation is crucial to marketing, and there are always new routes to connect and interact with potential customers. The best marketers are always pushing themselves to learn and master new and exciting things. 

Virtual whiteboards are a cutting-edge technology of collaboration and allow marketing teams to collaborate and communicate more efficiently than ever before. 

By using innovative tools, you are able to produce innovative outcomes. If your team is set on growth, then they must be willing to think outside the box and create unique solutions to their problems. Virtual whiteboards push people to think uniquely and visualize their thoughts in unprecedented ways.

Having a growth mindset means pushing yourself and your team to try new things in an effort to push each other forward. Using online whiteboards is a great way that teams can push each other to innovate not only their product but their interactions as well.

Clear Communication

Communicating in a clear, organized, and succinct manner is incredibly important for marketing teams to work together efficiently

Especially when working online, it’s harder for teams to communicate effectively when they lack a shared mechanism of collaboration. Communicating over messaging tools or video conferencing is fine, but it’s equally as important for you to have an effective way of visualizing information together. Visualization is a key not only to collaboration but to communication as well.

Creating and carrying out a strategy is very difficult through long email chains or without a shared platform to operate from, and virtual whiteboards provide an intuitive shared space for people to visualize and execute from. Having this is extremely important for the alignment of your team and enhances their ability to achieve their goals together.

Talent Diversity

It’s important when forming a marketing team that you think about the diversity of skills and experiences that different candidates bring to the table. Not only do you need to have good people, but they should have different pathways of experience and skills to give your team the furthest reach possible.

You may be wondering how online whiteboards help with this, but because of their accessibility, they are actually a catalyst for diversity. When working with virtual whiteboards you are not limited by who is immediately accessible. You have a wider pool of candidates to utilize in your team, and this expands all the way around the globe.

By being able to collaborate and communicate with a wider range of candidates and team members, you expand the range of skills and opportunities your team can access and utilize. This is a huge boost for marketing teams and is only provided by virtual whiteboards.

Keeping Members Informed and In Sync

Keeping members informed is similar to enhancing communication but comes with a different twist. Especially with marketing, it is critical that everyone is on the same page at all times, not just about what is going on at the moment but about the vision and strategy as well.

Keeping team members engaged and informed can be difficult when you are using traditional methods of communication and collaboration in a digital workspace. But, when using online whiteboards to collaborate and communicate, there is less opportunity to fall out of sync with your team because they all share the same virtual workspace.

Your virtual whiteboard acts as a living document for those working on it, meaning that it can be accessed, learned from, and contributed to at any time. Due to this, people who may not comprehend some idea or solution can keep accessing the board to learn from others' thought processes, develop smart questions, and remain aligned with the team and the vision. This shared collaborative space allows for team members to stay informed and in sync, two things that are critical in order for marketing teams to operate effectively.

Accountability

Holding and keeping your team accountable is a mandatory feature for any successful team no matter what area, and marketing is no different. You need to rely on people to be consistent and accountable in order for your team to function properly.

Accountability can be a difficult topic in digital workspaces due to their separate nature. Virtual whiteboards, however, unify digital workspaces and allow people to work together as a team.

Virtual whiteboards have features like a focus view that guarantee you will be able to isolate and locate certain people’s contributions whether it be based on each person or by section. This allows people to focus on singular contributions and gauge the thinking processes of each person. Features like this make virtual whiteboards effective tools to keep workspaces accountable and working efficiently.

Key Advantages to Align with Marketing Strategies

Now that we understand how virtual whiteboards directly improve marketing teams, let’s discuss how they impact the marketing strategies that they employ.

Have a Strategy and Plan for Success

One of the most important strategies marketing teams utilize is the ability to plan coherently and extensively. Doing so over zoom is never an easy task, and usually, people find it easier to plan and prepare with visual aids.

Luckily, virtual whiteboards specialize in visualization and provide many different business models and procedural templates so that marketing teams can effectively map their way to success. With these templates you can either take a macro approach, targeting the overall vision of the program, or look at smaller details to break down each individual step. Either way, the structure provided by virtual whiteboards has you covered.

Identify your Target Market

Identifying your ideal customer (aka your target market) is a key principle for marketing teams and influences all of the decisions that they make. Having an accurate grasp on who you’re selling to is crucial in order to guide effective marketing strategies.

One of the larger categories of templates that virtual whiteboards offer is those centered around customer journey maps and creating customer personas. These templates guide marketing teams through envisioning their ideal customer and mapping their journey using their product/service. By visualizing this, marketing teams can develop an accurate and narrow view of exactly who they’re targeting and how they’ll approach them.

Consistency

Being consistent in your marketing strategy is one of the most important keys to a successful campaign. In order to be consistent, the entire team has to be aligned and involved, while also staying accountable to a shared schedule. 

As we’ve already seen, virtual whiteboards promote accountability within marketing teams, but they also help integrate organizational elements. By using specific organization-based canvases like kanban frameworks, calendars, or flow charts, virtual whiteboards enable the ability to share constant access to the documents that people need most.

Having your things well-organized means people can easily keep up with the vision and strategy of the team and stay consistent with the overall goals you set.

Be Unique

Being unique can be hard when there is a sea of established options out there, but virtual whiteboards allow you to create a unique structure of your own. The ability to create structure that is unique and pertinent to your goals is a manifestation of creating unique solutions that fit your specific product.

Utilizing unique structure allows you to create endpoints and pathways specific to your goals, and structures your collaboration around your personal north star. Being able to organize around a specific template catered to your personal goals and strategy means not only are you using a unique template but through that, you will be able to produce unique outcomes.

Being unique is a critical strategy for success in marketing, and virtual whiteboards create solutions that enable teams to be as unique as possible.

Conclusion

Virtual whiteboards have a ton of unique possibilities, and marketing teams are able to engage with the full potential of these online boards. Whether it be benefits to the team at large or directly to their strategies, virtual whiteboards are able to provide unique capabilities that create unique solutions