Smartsheet for marketing: a supercharged spreadsheet for creative project management?
Smartsheet is a popular work management and collaboration platform that blends the familiarity of a spreadsheet interface with powerful project management, automation, and reporting capabilities. Marketing teams often use it for campaign planning, resource management, budget tracking, and dashboard creation. Its strength lies in handling structured data and automating workflows based on that data. However, its suitability for managing the visual and often less structured aspects of creative content production has limitations.
The challenge: managing creative projects in a spreadsheet interface
While Smartsheet’s grid-based interface is excellent for structured data and tasks, it’s not inherently designed for managing highly visual or creative projects. Tracking the stages of a brochure design or video production can be done, but the platform lacks native tools for visualizing and interacting directly with the creative assets in progress. Managing visual content production project management might feel less intuitive than in platforms with more visual Kanban or timeline views like Asana or monday.com.
Visual proofing and creative collaboration
Smartsheet allows file attachments to rows and has commenting features, but it lacks the dedicated visual proofing (online proofing tools) needed for effective creative feedback. Providing precise annotations on images, PDFs, or videos is difficult. Review and approval cycles involving multiple stakeholders (multi-step content approval management (legal, brand, product)) are better handled in specialized tools that integrate with Smartsheet, rather than directly within it.
Enforcing brand compliance and governance
Smartsheet is not designed to enforce brand compliance. It can track a ‘Compliance Check’ task, but it cannot ensure that content created in external tools actually adheres to brand governance platform guidelines. There’s no built-in smart template system to ensure large-scale brand guidelines adherence / compliance during the creation phase.
Centralized asset management
While you can attach files, Smartsheet is not a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system. Final, approved, ready-to-use centralization and control of brand assets requires a separate solution.
Brandeploy: adding compliant content creation to smartsheet project management
For marketing teams using Smartsheet for its data and workflow prowess, Brandeploy offers an ideal complementary solution for the content creation piece. Use Smartsheet to plan, track resources, and automate project steps. When a task requires marketing collateral creation, execute it in Brandeploy. Our smart templates ensure brand compliance from the start. Our built-in creative workflow automation handles visual approvals efficiently. The final approved asset from Brandeploy can be linked back to the appropriate Smartsheet row, completing the workflow and ensuring projects tracked in Smartsheet result in compliant deliverables. Brandeploy provides the content automation engine that integrates with Smartsheet’s work management power.
Leverage Smartsheet for data-driven project management and Brandeploy for compliant content production. Discover how this combination can streamline your complex marketing workflows. Schedule a Brandeploy demo.
