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Digital marketing is a busy industry, and if you are working in it, you know what we mean. From managing multiple marketing channels to creating content that fits all your audience personas, there is a lot digital marketing teams have to work on every day. If you and your team feel overwhelmed at times, we don’t blame you. But to every problem, there is a technology solution today, and digital marketing is no different. If your digital marketing team uses the right technology tools to assist their strategy and workflows, juggling multiple responsibilities can get a lot easier. Research suggests that the digital marketing software market is likely to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.1% between 2022 and 2030. So whatever your digital marketing pain points are, there is probably an appropriate software for it in the market.
A survey by Gartner in 2021 shows that though overall marketing budgets are shrinking, most marketers still seem to be investing more in marketing technology. However, if you haven’t picked out the right technology tools for your digital marketing team yet, you may be falling behind your competitors.
So here’s a list of 7 tools that every busy digital marketing team should consider adding to their arsenal for boosting productivity and efficiency.
1. Narrato – Content creation, collaboration and workflow management tool
Content is by far one of the most crucial elements in a digital marketing campaign. Digital marketing teams need to create quality content – loads of it. However, speeding up and streamlining the content creation process is something that most teams struggle with. The process is usually spread over several disconnected tools and apps like docs, sheets, drives, email, messenger apps, grammar and plagiarism checking tools, project management tools, and more. Juggling with so many tools at once invariably affects your productivity. Content teams also need to collaborate within the team and with other stakeholders, including sales, support teams, product teams, clients, and more. Such collaboration is complex and more so with most organizations operating remotely today.
This is where a tool like Narrato can step in to help.
Narrato is a content creation, collaboration, and workflow management software that replaces multiple tools and brings your entire team and process to one place. Creating high-quality content is easier with the content optimization suggestions and AI writing assistant on the content editor. Your team can easily collaborate through in-line comments and messages on the platform. There are custom templates, style guides, and SEO content briefs to help share instructions with content creators.
Narrato also provides you with project management capabilities. It has content calendars and workflow boards that you can use to track your content projects and create new tasks. All your content can be neatly organized on the platform under Projects and Folders. You get to choose who has access to which content project using the custom roles for team members, freelancers, and other stakeholders. There is also a client user role if you are a client-facing agency and a freelancer payments management module to better manage freelancers.
You can share completed content tasks using a publicly shareable link or directly publish to a blog or website using the WordPress publishing feature.
Narrato empowers content teams with all the tools they could need to create good content. New features are added every other week, making this software a promising addition to your digital marketing tool stack.
Narrato also has a content ordering platform, Narrato Marketplace, that has hundreds of quality-vetted freelance writers. If you don’t have an in-house content team for your digital marketing campaigns, a freelance marketplace like this can be of much use.
Pricing: Free for individuals and teams just getting started. Paid plans start at $8 per user per month. You can also create custom plans to meet your unique requirements.
2. Venngage – Visual content creation tool
When talking of digital marketing, it is not only textual content that you need. A good digital marketing campaign also relies largely on visual elements. From infographics for your blog to charts for your sales enablement content to LinkedIn videos for your LinkedIn marketing campaigns, visual content goes everywhere. Unfortunately, you may not always be able to afford a graphic designer for visual content creation. So an easy-to-use visual content creation tool is a must-have for digital marketing teams.
Venngage is a useful tool that lets you create all kinds of visual content without any expertise in graphic designing. There are over 7,500 templates for you to choose from, including presentations, ebooks, flowcharts, social media posts, and more. The drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to create engaging graphics with very little effort, so anyone on your content team can use it. The platform also has team collaboration features that allow you to share your design project with more team members and gather inputs.
Venngage offers visual content solutions for various industry verticals and teams, including Marketing & Communication, Human Resources, Training & Development, among others.
Pricing: Free up to 5 designs. Paid plans start at $16 per month per user.
3. Workpuls – Workforce analytics and productivity tool
To improve productivity in digital marketing or any other area for that matter, it is important to ensure that the people involved are making good use of their time. Though there always has to be a certain amount of trust involved when working with a team, there is no harm in monitoring their productivity to ensure a well-balanced work environment. Time-tracking and productivity monitoring, in fact, make sure that everyone on your team is sharing the load equally with no one member being overburdened or underworked, especially in remote settings.
A productivity tracking tool like Workpuls gives you insights into how your team members use their time. It includes features like Computer Activity Tracking, Rule-based/Periodic Screenshots, Automatic Attendance Verification, and more. It also offers other capabilities like Project Overview, Automatic and Definitive Proof of Work, and Project Budgeting, which are particularly helpful for working with freelancers. In addition, you can keep track of your projects’ progress, automatically assign a time to each project, and access other time mapping features.
Pricing: Employee Monitoring – $6.4 per employee per month
Time Tracking – $8 per employee per month
Automatic Time Mapping – $12 per employee per month
4. DrumUp – Social media scheduling tool
Apart from content creation, another activity in digital marketing that is extremely time-consuming is publishing content regularly on all channels. While your blog or website may not need new content every day, your social media accounts definitely do. An active presence on social media is imperative to digital marketing success, and you need to post frequently to be visible. However, with so much work on your plate already, posting content on social media should not be an added burden. This is where a social media scheduling tool helps.
DrumUp is a social scheduling tool that lets you automatically schedule content, repeat your social media posts, and even recommend content by searching the web for the latest stories and content trends. DrumUp claims to cut down your social media management time by 90%. You can also link to your favorite RSS feeds and your blog updates to curate content for social media from these channels.
Apart from this, DrumUp offers hashtag suggestions, repeat schedules, social media analytics, and more.
Pricing: Free 14-day trial. Paid plans start at $15 per month.
5. Trello – Team collaboration and project management tool
Managing digital marketing projects can be a pain without the right project management tools that give you better control. Your team needs to keep track of a lot of things and unless they have enough visibility into the process, this can be difficult. You need a platform where you can manage all your marketing projects, bring your team members together, and keep them in the know. You have to ensure that you don’t fall short on anything due to a lack of communication. And this is just what Trello is designed for.
Trello is a project management software that manages everything from your team meetings to projects and events. The platform has several useful tools like Trello board, lists, and cards to help you keep a tab on projects. It allows easy task assignment, allocating timelines, productivity metrics monitoring, and more. The Trello board gives you a broader view, while cards give you more detailed information on each project, from due dates to attachments shared and related conversations.
Trello integrates with most of the other tools that teams use, like Slack, Drive, Dropbox, and the likes.
Pricing: Free for individuals and teams that are just starting out. Paid plans for teams that need to scale, starting at $5 per user per month.
6. Mention – Audience insights monitoring tool
Digital marketing campaigns cannot succeed without good market and audience research. If you are putting content out there, you need to know your audience and what they want to see. Knowing consumer pain points, preferences, and interests is the key to creating engaging and high-converting campaigns. But not all digital marketing workforces have a research team to extract this information for them. In such a case, a tool like Mention can be a life-saver.
Mention is an audience insight monitoring tool that helps you monitor the web, follow your audience’s activities and draw valuable insights to improve your campaigns. The tool helps to identify important and relevant conversations from thousands of sources across the web, listen to and interpret social media posts/ trends, and manage your social media content as well.
Mention also helps with competitor analysis and tracking any mentions or conversations around your brand, to help you manage crises before they swell. A tool like this can be invaluable for building and managing brand reputation through digital marketing.
Pricing: Free for individuals getting started. Paid plans start at $29 per month.
7. Boomerang – Email automation tool
Digital marketing involves one more thing in abundance – emails. From sharing your daily or weekly newsletters to emails from clients, there are a lot of emails your digital marketing team has to deal with. Automating such repetitive and rule-based tasks can take some load off their shoulders, allowing them to focus on the more strategic work. An email automation tool is a must-have for all marketing teams.
Boomerang is a popular email automation tool that integrates with Gmail to help you schedule your emails. It also helps with follow-up reminders, calendar scheduling, AI-assisted writing for crafting better emails, Inbox Pause to stop further emails until you are ready, and more.
Other features include response tracking, click tracking, read receipts, and Boomerang Insights. Boomerang can be added as a plugin to your Gmail to easily manage all your emails.
Pricing: Free for up to 10 messages per month. Paid plans start at $4.98 per month.
Wrapping up
Good digital marketing campaigns demand skill and creativity. But even the most creative campaigns may fail to deliver results if you can’t maintain the pace till the very end. With the right tools at your disposal, you can enhance your team’s productivity and make sure that you put the best marketing content out there before your competitors can. It saves you time and effort, all the while delivering much better outcomes. But most importantly, your team is sure to be a lot more motivated and driven to perform when they have access to the resources they need. So, don’t hesitate to invest in some good marketing tech for the years ahead.
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