Bringing External Partners into Your Creative Ecosystem

At most content-forward brands, the creative team extends far beyond its office walls. Agencies, freelancers, and independent creatives are often essential teammates in crafting content for an endless calendar of 360 campaigns. While outside expertise can be a huge help, it also necessitates a clear process for gathering, reviewing, revising, and finalizing content. Without a central asset library and integrated workflow, projects become derailed by never-ending email threads, different file versions, and feedback delays.

We find that brands that bring their outside partners into their own creative ecosystem build the most successful working relationships. By inviting external collaborators into your existing creative ecosystem, you empower collaborators to access exactly what they need while maintaining your organizational structure. This means:

• Clear communication between everyone involved in a project
• Alignment with company-specific processes and preferences
• Up-to-date access to your workspaces, folders, and assets
• Brand consistency across channels and file formats

Instead of chasing down deliverables or adapting to countless systems, external teams plug directly into your setup, funneling into workflows tailored to your business’s and team’s needs. Here’s how that can look in practice.

Smoother Collaboration at Every Step

Globaledit’s suite of features stitches every team together, making content management and task handoffs seamless. The platform provides critical communication and curation capabilities that make collaboration with external partners straightforward and intuitive:

• Uplinks let influencers, creators, and photographers upload their content directly into your Globaledit workspace, no licenses or accounts required. This feature is a game-changer for brands that source content from different collaborators and need a secure, rapid way to get content on the go.
• Smart collections automatically populate based on custom rules—think “approved for social” or “ready for retouch”—so no one’s left waiting on a status update.
• @ mentions instantly tag any user in markup comments, status updates, and tasks—immediately pinging collaborators on slack, email, mobile, or anywhere else your team works.
• Public links are the perfect way to share curated galleries with anyone inside or outside your team, allowing them to easily view and download final content.

The creative team at Kiehl’s found that bringing their external retouchers into Globaledit made the photo production process faster and easier—even with remote teammates. Globaledit’s markup, timestamping, and approval features replaced emailing endless PDFs and inadequate project management tools, providing the granularity the team needed to guide retouching rounds. Now, their art directors, photographers, and retouchers all store, compare, and track changes on their assets directly in Globaledit’s interface.

Comprehensive Brand Consistency

One of the most powerful but overlooked benefits of centralizing your contributors and content in a single platform is the comprehensive archive it creates. When new teammates join your projects, they gain access to complete edit history and versioning, historical feedback and markup notes, and examples of approved work. This serves as both an onboarding tool and an evergreen reference, helping external partners better understand the creative feedback that shapes your brand vision and your content strategy.

A Dynamic, Connected Workflow

Uniting your creative, digital, and marketing teams onto one platform is a no-brainer, but it benefits outside partners just as much. Whether you’re bringing in specialized talent or managing multiple clients, opening up your workspace makes external collaboration an extension of your creative process instead of a hurdle. Giving your third-party teammates the ability to work directly alongside your internal team doesn’t just improve efficiency—it fosters an environment for creating truly impactful brand stories.