There are hundreds of different marketing tools out there, but as we head into 2021 and many marketing teams are still likely to be working remotely there are some key tools that you should be using.
These tools will be essential to focus on improving communication and collaboration, getting better visibility of how work is progressing, and increasing productivity as your team’s motivation for working from home might start to waver.
We take a look at the tools your marketing team should be using in 2021:
Time Tracking
Marketing is fast-paced with tight deadlines and lots of different work going on at the same time. Tracking how your team spends their time allows you to get a better understanding of how long things take to do, and any tasks or areas that cause hold-ups and take up too much of their day.
With tighter budgets and the need to ensure consistent levels of productivity in 2021, time tracking software is going to help you figure out how to optimize your team’s work. Use a tracking tool like TimeCamp to get an overview of how much of their day is spent on marketing tasks. It’ll also give you an idea of how long different marketing activities take so you can compare it to the results and understand which ones are worthwhile.
Project And Task Management
With heavy workloads and multiple deadlines, it can be hard for your team to keep track of what they need to be working on and how to prioritize their to-do list. Properly managing their workload is essential to streamlining your marketing team and ensuring that work is always done quickly and efficiently.
You need to break your team’s workload and any projects down into the individual tasks that need to be completed so that it’s easy to track and monitor their progress. Use task management software to manage your team’s tasks, assigning them out with clear instructions and deadlines, so that everything is completed on time.
One of the best available tools is GetBusy, which allows them to easily prioritize their work and automatically reminds them about tasks until they are completed. It also integrates with email, Slack, and other tools, so any tasks can be added to their list in GetBusy and nothing gets forgotten.
Task management software is going to be a key tool for your marketing team in 2021 — it provides better visibility of workload and progress for busy, remote teams.
Social Media Automation
Social media is a key marketing channel for most businesses, but it can also take huge amounts of time to create the content, post, interact, and engage on the platforms. It’s important that your marketing team is using the best tools to schedule and automate your social media accounts and help you to monitor and manage engagement.
In 2021 your marketing team should consider using Sprout Social, one of the best social media tools for curating content, publish, and scheduling. It also includes reporting and analytics features to help you monitor the progress and results of your social media campaigns.
Sprout Social also has team collaboration tools to make it easier to manage different accounts and split the workload between different members of your team. All your social messages can be brought into one inbox where they can be tagged, with live activity updates so that it’s clear when someone is viewing or responding to a message.
With your marketing team likely to be working remotely well into the new year, it’s going to be important to use tools that help with collaboration and minimize any miscommunication or mistakes.
Email Automation
Email is another powerful marketing tool, and using it to communicate and engage with potential leads at exactly the right time is a great way to move them through the sales funnel. It’s also important for developing relationships with existing customers. But there’s no need for your marketing team to spend their time tailoring and manually sending emails out.
Use email automation software to create a series of emails that can be sent out to your mailing list at regular intervals and share relevant content and information about your business to build a connection.
One of the easiest tools to use is Drip, which allows you to segment your leads and customers based on behavior and engagement. You can personalize and tailor your communications, and reach them across multiple channels including email and text message. It also gives you useful insights to help you reassess and improve your strategy.
Behavior Analytics
An engaging, user-friendly website is key to successfully marketing your business — users won’t waste time on a site where they can’t immediately understand what you’re offering and if it’s what they’re looking for.
To help make more informed decisions about your website design, layout, and content your marketing team should use an analytics tool like Hotjar. It goes further than just presenting visitor numbers and bounce rates, it demonstrates user behaviors and collects feedback directly from the source.
The heatmap feature allows your team to see where most people interact with the site, and screen recordings show how people navigate each page. It can also be used to gain feedback through popup surveys.
This kind of information is going to be crucial to marketing teams in 2021 — it gives a better insight into how to improve and optimize websites to provide the best possible experience for potential customers.
These are just a few of the tools your marketing team should be looking to use in 2021. It’s going to be important to focus on improving communication and collaboration, and automating processes wherever possible so that your team can streamline their work and increase productivity.
