Being a marketing manager means keeping track of one million things and constantly evolving your toolkit to fit the times. As a marketer who works in the field of productivity, it’s my duty to share with you the amazing tools that I come across in my constant hunt for perfect organization. Project management software is one thing, but there’s no tool that does everything for you. Here’s my personal list of productivity tools that I love and use everyday.
Slack (Communication)
Slack is a great communication tool used by our entire organization so that we have a good idea as to what’s going on into other departments. Marketing plays a key role in assisting with everything from customer service to product development so it’s important for us to have a pulse on what’s happening and jump into discussions immediately. Our development team works remotely and our customer services team is in British Columbia so Slack is a crucial tool for company connectedness.
Price: Slack offers a free account so you can get started right away.
Evernote (Personal Note taking)
I’ve been an Evernote user for ages and it’s a keeper. Evernote is a place for you to collect your thoughts and ideas into one place and compile them into “notebooks”. For example I have a notebook called “Easy Projects Marketing Ideas” where I compile notes about any flashes of brilliance that may occur at any given moment. When I’m low on ideas, I just go back to my notes and get inspired once more. It’s a great tool for writers as well because the interface is user friendly and allows you to compile some good-looking notes that are organized in a logical way.
Price: Evernote basic is free and it gives you a lot. If you find yourself using it more and more, you’ll be able to upgrade your service.
Canva (Graphic Design)
Okay. This one is huge.
I’m a visual person, who loves pretty things. So are a lot of other people. Now the one thing that used to hold me back from really putting out good visuals to our audience was a) my lack of designing skills (hardly passable) and b) the amount of time it takes to put something decent together c) our graphics design team is busy with much bigger and important projects to put little social media pictures together
Enter Canva – the lifesaver. Canva is a place where design-hopefuls come to easily design almost any sort of graphic element you could think of. I use it a lot to come up with title pages for social media posts. It takes minutes to put something together that people won’t cringe in horror at first sight.
Price: It’s free unless you would like to access more sophisticated design elements which cost a dollar each. Not bad at all.
Google Apps for Work (Web Storage)
This one is an absolute no-brainer. If you’re still pulling up Microsoft word every time you have to write something, you need some serious intervention. Google Apps for work is the best thing since sliced bread. You can create, organize and store basically anything you want on there. This is where I store all of my marketing documents including videos, images and sound bites. It has a global search bar so you can find anything you need very quickly. More than just a web storage tool though, it helps our team collaborate on editing large pieces of content like whitepapers, blog posts or website content.
Price: Google Apps costs $5 per user per month or $50 per user per year.
Buffer (Social Media Management)
Social media management is a tricky subject area for most marketers and there are about a million tools that can do this job. My personal favourite is Buffer. Buffer is a clean, well organized, social media management tool that can do much more than just push out tweets.
Buffer is an innovative company, that is constantly pushing the boundaries on what you can and cannot do with social media management tools. They recently launched Buffer video – which is a dream if you’re trying to increase post engagement. Buffer video allows you upload your video into the platform and share it, embedded to your social media accounts. Cool, right? [link and screenshot]
Price: Buffer is mainly free, unless you would like to be awesome. The awesome plan is $10/month or $102/year.
GetResponse (Email Marketing)
In my day to day at Easy Projects, one of my favourite things to do is communicate with our clients and potential clients. The best way to do this is to use email. The tool we use is called GetResponse. I personally adore this platform because it’s simple to use and it gives me a lot of options in regard to tracking the results of my campaigns, templates, colour schemes and images. The other thing that GetResponse helps me do well is my research. As marketers, we love to A/B test to see what works and what doesn’t. With GetResponse you can literally A/B test 5 different renditions of the same thing at the same time. Moreover, GetResponse has excellent customer service. They are quick at solving your problems if you ever have any. Who doesn’t love great support?
Price: GetResponse is flexible to your needs. It depends on the number of subscribers from $15/month for 1000 subscribers to $450/month for 100,000 subscribers.
Salesforce (CRM)
At Easy Projects we use Salesforce as our CRM. Because our sales and marketing teams work together, Salesforce is an important hub for both teams to see eye to eye. We can track our shared revenue goals, hand over leads and provide each other with important information about our customers happiness levels and what we can do to improve their experience with us. It allows us to collaborate using reports and data to track how well we are doing as a team.
The marketing team tracks it’s leads by day while the sales team tracks its sales by day and both teams have insight into this and are able to hold each other accountable to hit goals. We call it smartketing.
Price: Salesforce has four options ranging from $25/user/month to $250/user/month, depending on the size of your organization and your needs.
Rescuetime (Time Management)
This one is kinda fun. I am a marketer who loves numbers, time included. One of my biggest fears is wasting time because, well, there’s so much to do! Rescuetime is a fun application that tracks how much of day was productive vs how much time you wasted. When you first begin download it, I would recommend just working as you always do and it will track your behaviour. After the first week, you’ll receive a report in your inbox on how you can improve. It becomes pretty addictive after a while but hey, you’ll be getting so much done you won’t even care.
Price: $9/month or $72 per year.
Chrome Users: StayFocusd Chrome Extension (A.D.D. Prevention)
If you work in marketing, and sometimes manage social media, you know how distracting it can be. That one hour you slotted for social media updates becomes three hours and 12 funny cat videos later. Stayfocusd actually limits the time you can spend on websites that you know, waste your time. You can block certain sites for specific hours, allowing you to focus on your work. It’s free!
LastPass ( Password Management)
I have 10,000 accounts online. I have productivity tools, social media accounts, email accounts, you name it. There is no way I can keep track of my passwords and writing them down on sticky notes doesn’t really solve the problem. LastPass basically remembers all my passwords for me and the only password I need to remember is the LastPass. LastPass..last password... 🙂
Price: $12 per year. Amazing.
Try these productivity tools for marketers ; they work really well for me. If you think I missed some tools, feel free to comment below and share. I’m always on the lookout on how to be more productive so I can help other people be more productive and at ease.
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