10 Best Productivity Tools for Your Marketing Team

Team productivity has become a modern-day version of the holy grail in our fast-paced world. Everyone wants it, but no one knows where or how to find it.

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And it’s no surprise: an ability to get more done for less (be it time, effort, or money) sounds very tempting. This is especially true for marketing teams that usually have limited resources and are undervalued compared to other business departments that bring immediate ROI.

While there is no easy way to become a better, more productive version of yourself, many tools can help you achieve your goal. Below is a list of applications, tried and tested by yours truly, that can help you supercharge your marketing team and set it on the path of productivity in 2019.

How to boost your marketing team productivity in 2019?

1. Always stay in touch

It doesn’t matter if you spend 10-12 hours a day in the same room with your colleagues or if they live half the world away; communication is vital to team productivity. Team chats like Slack (and other Slack alternatives) can help you stay on the same page with your colleagues.

One of the new and noteworthy communication tools you should try in 2019 is Chanty. This simple and lightweight chat app is perfect for orchestrating teamwork within your marketing department and the whole company.

Its intuitive UI makes it easy to set up and use. You can use public conversations to share the latest news (or adorable cat videos). You can create private chat rooms for separate teams to focus on specific questions. You can also initiate one-on-one conversations with any of your teammates if you need to talk in person.

At the same time, Chanty is packed with helpful productivity features, like a built-in task manager or custom notification settings. On top of that, you get complete message history and unified, searchable file storage for better collaboration for free.

If you are running a distributed marketing team or in case you work with remote contractors from time to time, a text chat is not enough to keep everybody on the same page. Sometimes, a short video conference is worth a thousand text messages.

The first thing that comes to mind when discussing video calls is Skype. Yet, as you might have noticed, our team loves discovering new and promising alternatives to traditional tools. One such alternative is Appear. In, a lightweight video conferencing tool.

The video chat is super easy to use: all you need to do is create a chat room and invite the people you want (up to 12 participants with paid subscription) by simply sharing a link.

It’s convenient, primarily if you work with short-term contractors or freelancers. And, what’s more, the app offers screen sharing and recording features.

2. Work side by side

Unfortunately, not every issue can be resolved via text or video chat. As in a situation when you need to get feedback on your new banner from several people within your team or outside of it. Trying to explain in writing what needs to be changed is a surefire way to miscommunication and can lead to more unnecessary and wasteful iterations. Sometimes it is better to show than tell.

In this case, real-time collaboration tools can save the day.

Quip is an all-in-one collaboration tool that can make working as a team much more accessible. It is a unified space where you can store your files and effortlessly collaborate on them with your teammates. Just like with the G Suite apps, you can access your files from any device and create shared folders to allow access to specific files for your colleagues.

The app also allows you to work on the documents collectively: review and edit shared files in real time, discuss the required changes, make suggestions, etc. It even has a built-in chat section where you can discuss any ideas.

This means no more emailing an article back and forth with your copywriter to finalize its contents. The same applies to spreadsheets and presentations.

But the best part is that you don’t have to install different apps to manage your docs sheets or share files and folders on your mobile devices. Everything you need will be right there at your hand, anytime, anywhere (even offline).

3. Keep your team organized

It is hard to stay organized when your tasks and to-dos are scattered across your emails, team chats, and sticky notes. To stay productive, especially when working as a team, you need to keep all your tasks and assignments organized in one place.

While some of the tools mentioned above, i.e., Chanty, offer a convenient built-in task manager, it’s still not enough to see the bigger picture. That’s the reason Trello has been our primary project management tool since day one. This virtual board helps us keep our tasks in check and effectively manage our workload within our marketing team and other departments.

It is also straightforward to use: You can track the progress on every task, manage assignees, share files with your teammates, create collective checklists or discuss anything in comments.

However, some tasks require a particular approach. Take, for example, content marketing. An extremely demanding process; it involves multiple people working as a team. No one can remember all the due dates, marketing channels, editor follow-ups, etc. That is why you need an editorial calendar.

event

A reliable and robust event management platform is essential. The event provides consolidated information on the projects you’re in charge of. Budget sheets, strategic plan, task list, attendees registration, speakers logistics, sponsors expectations, stakeholders communication: it’s all in there for the PCO to improve control of processes and results For the very early stage of the event until the management of a fully customized branded experience, it provides PCO´s the right tool to handle the job to be done.

CoSchedule is another must-try productivity tool for marketers. Aside from robust task tracking and planning capabilities, the app offers tools to organize your content distribution across multiple channels.

It even allows you to streamline social media management by scheduling or re-scheduling posts in advance.

You can plan and launch your marketing campaigns from the CoSchedule dashboard, instantly see the results and get actionable insights on their performance to tailor your marketing strategy accordingly.

4. Optimize your efforts

Automating some of your routine tasks can save you work hours every week. So, why work harder when you can work smarter?

A great way to contribute to your team’s productivity is to set up orderly, streamlined processes. And Process Street is a handy little tool to help you do that. This workflow management app is perfect for keeping track of your recurring tasks and streamlining your internal procedures.

Be it a guest post contribution or newsletter, it helps ensure you never miss a thing. Just create a checklist for every process and follow the steps.

Another way to optimize your marketing efforts is to automate as many tasks as possible, starting with social media management.

Loomly is much more than a social media calendar. In addition to allowing you to schedule posts in advance and share them automatically, it offers more valuable capabilities. These include curated content inspiration, effective audience targeting, and post-optimization features.

With Loomly, you also get a built-in shared content library to review and approve the content with your team (up to 40 users) before it goes live.

MailChimp is an email marketing version of Loomly. This handy app allows you to build up and segment your mailing lists, create custom email templates, schedule and send your newsletters with one tap, and get actionable real-time insights on how they perform.

One more thing that is better put on autopilot is social listening. Using tools like Mention, you can keep track of specific topics and jump in on the relevant conversation on social media. This can be related to your brand, competitors, or the industry.

Statusbrew is an SMM tool that helps businesses and brands manage their social media channels effectively. This earned us a top spot on major software review sites like G2crowd & Capterra as one of the best social media marketing software.

Create stellar content

Investing so much of your time and effort in content marketing, you can’t afford to create less-than-perfect content. And the least you can do for that is to make sure it is grammatically correct.

Grammarly is your must-have tool for creating error- and plagiarism-free content. You can use a convenient browser extension to spell-check your content whenever you need. It even works with Google Docs, so you don’t have to rely on the default tools (which are not perfect, to say the least).

With a paid subscription, you can get advanced feedback on your writing, e.g., style and vocabulary suggestions and plagiarism checks.

Make 2019 your most productive year yet.

There are dozens of other marketing productivity tools. Of course, the list is far from complete. The choice is yours, but consider our long-term goals and the marketing activities you are focusing on.

The only way to reach your common goal is to work on the individual productivity of each team member. Everyone, be it a social media manager, a cont nt writer, a data analyst, or an SEO expert, can contribute to the overall team performance by employing additional tools to streamline their daily tasks. And don’t forget; you can only move as fast as your slowest team member.

So, start small: choose a tool or two from the list and take them for a spin. This is the only way to find out what works for you.

Au hor Bio: Olga Mykhoparkina is a Chief Marketing Officer at Chanty, a simple AI-powered team chat. This powerful and free Slack alternative aims to in rease team productivity and improve communication at work. With a 9-year of experience in digital marketing, Olga is responsible for Chanty’s online presence strategy, managing a fantastic team of marketing experts and getting things done to change how teams communicate and collaborate. Follow Olga on Twitter, or feel free to connect on Linke In.

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