11 Best Tools To Maximize Your Marketing Team Productivity
Your sales and marketing team have diverse tasks to perform while keeping communication free and open all the time. Using the right tools for each task will go a long way in making every aspect of your business highly productive. And while there’s certainly no dearth of productivity tools today, some of them have a distinct edge over the rest in terms of their specific functions.
In this guide, we’ll discuss the best tools for maximizing marketing productivity and highlight their features and advantages to maximize the efficiency of marketing teams big or small.
The tools we’ll look at will cover will fall into 4 categories:
Project management
Marketing automation
Design
Communications
Project Management
Trello
Trello is one of the leading collaboration and project management tools available today. Although Trello was primarily meant for agile software development teams, its utility makes it apt for other departments marketing, sales, support and HR. The tool uses the concept of "boards" that hold “cards” (representing various tasks).
Cards can contain lists that are used to track the progress of any project. They can also simply categorize things that your team needs to do.
Trello is extremely helpful for creating, organizing, and prioritizing actions across different teams. You can even define workflows, assign tasks to individuals or teams, set deadlines and monitor progress.
Features:
Free for the basic service
Quick overview using cards
Easy management with tags, labels and categories
Drag and drop functionality
Mobile responsive
Easily upload files and attachments
Archiving of records
Automated email notifications
Benefits:
From planning meetings to collaborating with team members to organizing different tasks, you can accomplish anything using Trello.
You can get more work done together.
Trello has the flexibility and features to fit any team’s style.
You can organize and track all of your teams’ tasks, files and project statuses in one place.
You’ll find everything with search, filtering and labels.
Asana
Asana is another of the most popular project management tools currently available on the market. It can efficiently manage most of your communication and collaboration tasks. Businesses praise it for accuracy and efficiency.
As a powerful work management platform, Asana helps you stay focused by easily allowing you to set priorities and deadlines, share details, and assign tasks — all in one place. You can use it directly through a web browser or its smartphone application.
Features:
Free for teams that have less than 10 members
Lets you add assignees, attachments, and hearts to tasks
Sends automatic updates by email
Create custom calendars
Availability of My Tasks list and Focus Mode
Tracks tasks and adds followers
Real-time updates
Project Sections and Search Views
Track project timelines using Gantt charts
Advantages:
Asana is beneficial to businesses for three main reasons:
With Asana, it is extremely easy to manage multiple projects, tasks, and sub-tasks. It simplifies incoherent record of communication-related to various tasks.
You can easily prioritize tasks by moving their positions on the list, revising due dates, and changing the task class.
It’s a powerful software to facilitate collaboration, you can invite people to join Workspaces. Members of a Workspace are able to see all the projects and tasks in it.
Time Doctor
Time Doctor is a time tracking and productivity measuring tool, which is excellent for businesses with distributed or remote employees. It’s easy to use and has smart features that help you focus and complete your most important tasks.
Apart from tracking the total time, Time Doctor provides a breakdown of how much time is spent on each project, client or task. It also generates detailed reports for completed work, which in turn provides helpful business information. Its pricing starts from $9.99 per month.
Features:
Highly accurate time tracking
Can be integrated with other software
GPS tracking feature
Effective productivity evaluation
Flexible configuration
Editable settings
Time and task breakdown
Compatible across different operating systems
Benefits:
Drive efficiency and productivity at work.
Stay concentrated on your work and get alerts if you are losing attention.
Monitor apps and sites to get details on how time is spent on work online.
You can integrate with other apps like Workflow Max, Teamwork, Podio, Trello and Asana.
The tool helps you remotely record computer screenshots, which is useful for monitoring off-site employees.
ProofHub
ProofHub is a powerful yet simple project management and collaboration tool for teams of all stripes. ProofHub helps teams manage everything from initial planning to final delivery of a project.
You can view all tasks associated with a project in a wide variety of views such as Kanban, Gantt, List, and Calendar view. Real-time notifications keep the entire team updated on task progress whenever a particular stage is completed. Team members can attach files directly to tasks, making collaboration easy for all stakeholders.
Marketing teams can carry out all important discussions, distribute roles and responsibilities, and track project progress at any given time with ProofHub.
Features:
Task management
Built-in proofing tool
Customizable views
Real-time notifications and alerts
Dedicated space for discussions
Android and iOS mobile app
Benefits:
Clear delegation of tasks on Kanban lets everyone know who is doing what.
Managers can get a bird’s eye view on the status of all tasks quickly and easily.
Real-time notifications keep everyone informed and team members can take action on a task immediately.
Teams can communicate one-on-one through team chat across different time zones immediately.
Built-in proofing tool and file sharing features helps teams avoid email chaos.
An entire project plan can be made in a timeline form using ProofHub’s Gantt chart.
Marketing Automation
MailChimp
MailChimp is a powerful marketing automation platform that allows you to create, send and analyze emails and ad campaigns. It allows you to receive a complete overview of:
Campaigns
Email tracking
Success metrics such as open rates and click-through rates
With MailChimp, you can also generate custom reports, manage subscribers and view un-subscribers.
Create custom designs on your own or choose from an array of prefab templates or campaigns. Send up to 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers for free.
Features:
A/B testing to optimize campaigns
Analytics and reports in real-time
Marketing automation to reach the right people at the right time
Build ads and landing pages
Email editor
Multi-user accounts
Subscriber profiles
Spam filter diagnostics
Benefits:
MailChimp has a flexible user interface and they give you many options for making your email campaigns your own.
MailChimp seamlessly syncs up with different CMS and lead gen platforms, which is extremely helpful when you are capturing emails on your website. You can easily login to your account, select the list, create emails, and send them without any importing at your end.
Use easy and insightful reporting and analytics. The reports can be viewed on mobile devices and you can easily export them to share with team members and clients.
Infusionsoft
Infusionsoft is a robust tool for online businesses, brick and mortar stores and local service providers. One of the biggest advantages of using this tool is it integrates seamlessly with third-party software applications (including some of the tools in this guide).
Infusionsoft helps you automate routine tasks, and create and implement effective sales and marketing strategies. It also enables you to capture data about your customers so you can build closer and more profitable relationships.
Use this tool to map out each step of your sales and marketing strategy as well as automate repetitive tasks such as follow-up emails.
Features:
Drag and drop for creating and publishing landing pages
Lead scoring and distribution
Marketing and sales reports
Social sharing
Built-in metadata and keyword fields
Marketing automation
Payment processing
Referral program management
Advantages:
You can segment your customer lists by separating them into target groups and tag them easily.
Save time and streamline your workflow by easily automating repetitive tasks.
It puts almost everything small businesses need for marketing into one system and allows you to do all of that in one place.
Use it effectively as a CRM system to build more value for your customer relationships.
OptinMonster
OptinMonster is a cloud-based software solution that is extremely helpful for lead generation and marketing automation. With this tool, you can create a range of forms:
Slide-ins
Floating bars
In-line forms
Scroll boxes
Lightbox popups
The drag-and-drop form builder allows you to customize branding such as messages, images, and colors, without requiring any coding.
OptinMonster’s detailed analytics measure the engagement of your customers. OptinMonster utilizes Exit-Intent Technology to help you track visitor behavior and identify when and why customers are about to leave the site so you can serve targeted campaigns to retain them.
Features:
Drag and drop form builder to increase conversions
Exit intent feature to convert ‘lost’ visitors
Advanced page level targeting
A/B testing
Detailed analytics and reporting
Advantages:
Using the advanced drag-and-drop builder, you can create or modify a form within minutes. You can attach attractive floating bars, slide-ins and lightbox popups for faster email signups to improve the experience of your visitors.
The new mobile addon allows you to create beautiful mobile-only forms.
You can create an unlimited number of A/B split tests with notes to keep track of your incremental changes and tweaks.
The new version of OptinMonster has built-in integrations with HubSpot, Emma, TotalSend, and Customer.io.
MindTickle
MindTickle is a sales-readiness platform for onboarding, product training, and coaching. It helps business prepare their sales team and partners in a scalable and highly effective manner. The data-driven analytics of MindTickle provide useful insights on how sales readiness programs are impacting revenue growth.
The robust platform tracks pre-work as well as post-work reinforcement, which ensures that in-person training and coaching is effectively absorbed and implemented. This maximizes the impact and reduces the costs associated with these trainings.
The pre-work session allows individuals to prepare beforehand so that the remaining time can be utilized for discussion and practice. Post-work and ongoing learning, on the other hand, can be easily delivered in micro-learning modules.
In a nutshell, MindTickle solves problems in three key fields — new hire onboarding, sales enablement, and product training.
Features:
Content management including import, creation, templates, advanced search and content storage
Knowledgebase, coaching materials, playbook creation and video recording for training
Badges, triggers, commission calculators and leaderboards to incentivize team members
Reporting, alerts, account-based engagements and content utilization analytics
User reviews, scorecards, real-time updates, and notifications
Profiles, custom reports, dashboards and personalized goal setting
Live presentations, screen sharing and mobile presentation
Administrative integration and behavior monitoring.
Advantages:
With simplified learning, sales reps are able to record audio or video of their practice pitch or demos for feedback.
Digitization of learning provides flexibility to reps and managers alike. The sales coaching and readiness become a part of the day-to-day routine.
Personalization ensures that the material viewed by each rep is specific to their learning needs, which ensures continuous growth.
Improves accountability.
Share best practices amongst team members.
Graphic Design Tools
Bannersnack
Bannersnack is a banner ad creation tool that has a wide array of features for increasing productivity for your marketing team’s designers. It allows you to design and create banner ads as well as manage and implement display advertising campaigns across different marketing channels.
These ads are also compatible with numerous social media sites.
The tool has hundreds of thousands of built-in assets such as stock photos, fonts, text presets and clipart.
Features:
Magic animator creates animations from static content
Import your own custom images
Drag and drop banner designer
Free stock photo collections
Analytics
Banner Score algorithm evaluates your design’s effectiveness
Supports HTML5, Flash, JPG, GIF, PNG or MP4 file formats
Benefits:
Bannersnack ads are compatible with major display ad networks such as Google AdWords, AOL Advertising, RightMedia and OpenX.
Designing an ad is quite simple and easy and doesn’t require a significant amount of time on training.
You can give your ads an edge by adding interactive elements.
Easily integrate your ads to social media posts using Bannersnack.
Sketch
Sketch is a new tool for mobile and web interface mockups. Most of the tools you’re used to using in Illustrator are readily available in Sketch and it’s quick to learn even if you aren’t a proficient designer.
In the past few years, there have been a bunch of incremental updates to help you quickly and easily apply effects and modifications to your banners.
Experiment with different designs, images and layouts using its powerful editor.
The only drawback of this tool is it is a platform for Mac only.
Features:
Non-destructive editing
Grids and guides
Reusable elements
Collaborative platform
Lots of toolsets available
Benefits:
With Sketch, you can modify your images and still revert back to the originals (non-destructive editing).
"Symbols" allow you to create icons, avatars, and other design elements and save them for future use. You don’t have to repeatedly create these elements on other visuals.
Easily add pre-loaded screen templates as artboards.
What Next?
Obviously, once you’ve selected the right tools for your team and get everything set up, what you do next will depend on your unique business situation and team needs:
Still building out your team? Read our guide to building an SEO team from scratch.
Starting or running an agency? Follow the best practices for digital agency pricing.
Bonus Tool
We've got one additional tool to share with you to make your marketing team as efficient as possible!
Omnisend
Omnisend is an omnichannel marketing automation platform that lets you communicate with your customers via email, SMS, Facebook Messenger or even push notifications. Deep integration with ecommerce platforms let you setup Omnisend automation workflows, contact forms, and landing pages without any programming skills.
Ominsend can replace small plugins and you will have everything in one tool: different lead forms, landing pages, predefined marketing automation workflows, advanced visitor segmentation, and even SMS marketing.
On their free plan you can send up to 15,000 emails per month.
Features:
Predefined marketing automation tools
Different forms: landing pages, signup boxes, popups.
A/B testing for emails
Sync for Google Ads and Facebook Ads
Reports: Campaign, Automation and Forms
24/7 support
SMS, Web Push notification, Facebook Messenger.
Benefits:
Deep integration with popular ecommerce platforms.
Flexible segments: Target not only customers that have just placed orders with you, but also those that opened and clicked on your campaigns.
Omnichannel marketing communication. You can include different channels directly within marketing automation workflows like SMS, Facebook messenger or Web push notifications.
