13 Smart Tools to Increase Your Productivity for a Marketing Manager

Every marketing manager knows the feeling. It’s Monday morning and they walk into their office, sit down at their desk, and turn on their computer. That’s all it takes for the barrage of notifications, messages, and updates to come in. Company leadership wants to push a campaign in a new direction. Social media comments need to be addressed. A news story broke over the weekend that is relevant to your industry — reactionary or editorial content should be created to address it. In other words, no week ever goes as planned. In fact, no day ever goes as planned.

Any schedule or structure that a workday is supposed to follow has to be adjusted on an hourly basis. In the middle of a project? You’ll likely be interrupted by an urgent marketing task that must be completed.

This is where marketing tools come in. As a marketing manager, there is a long list of tools that are currently available to use. Some automate various processes. Others assist with collaboration across the marketing team. The trouble with identifying the right tools for the marketing department is sifting through the endless options — in other words, it’s one more task for you to get through today or tomorrow or the next day. To help expedite this process, here is a list of some of the smartest marketing tools out there to help increase your productivity as a marketing manager, as well as your team’s.

1. Teamwork Projects

This software was not solely designed for marketing teams, but it can work wonders for them. It is a project management tool that enables the entire team to get a bird’s-eye view of each project they are working on. They can track them from ideation to completion. They can comprehensively collaborate. And the combination of these abilities is what increases productivity. No more time-wasting meetings, no redundancy, fewer bottlenecks, and complete integration with other marketing and business process applications.

2. Feedly

As the marketing manager, you must stay current on all industry news and changes. To do this, you likely follow thought leaders on Twitter, read articles from a few trusted newspapers and journals, visit competitors’ blogs, and have Google Keyword Alerts set up. The frustrating aspect of all of these sources is that they come from all over the place. You will get an email here and there, which often gets lost in your inbox. You will get an alert on your phone when you’re in the middle of something else. Feedly eases this strain. It is a single feed that aggregates all of your favorite sources in a single place. So instead of having to visit YouTube and then the New York Times and then Twitter, you just visit your Feedly feed.

3. OmniFocus

This app is the perfect to-do list. But it’s not your mother’s to-do list. It can be connected to Siri, eliminating the need to type. It can also help a marketing manager to group their tasks, which is how most people prefer to think of and look at what they need to get done. Additionally, it allows you to tag every task in terms of how high of priority they are, where they need to take place, and more. The list of tools it offers keeps going — you can plan your day by scheduling tasks and sync your tasks to your various devices. Basically, it’s the personal assistant you’ve always needed.

4. Evernote

Evernote is wider reaching than some of the previously listed tools. Marketing teams can use it to collaborate on projects, they can create shared to-do lists, they can ideate through the application by posting ideas, pictures, notes, and voice recordings. At its core, Evernote is a one-stop-shop for complete oversight of what you need to do every day, as well as a software for planning what you will need to do over the next few weeks and months.

5. Buffer

There are a number of social media scheduling platforms. They offer various advantages and disadvantages. Some are easier to use. Others allow for multiple resharing scheduling. And then there are those that provide scheduling for every major social media platform. Buffer offers all of these benefits from a single dashboard.

6. Zapier

This tool introduces your marketing team to automation that will transform the way you accomplish daily tasks. It is mainly designed for content marketing workflows. Therefore, when an initial task is manually completed, Zapier knows to move forward with the workflow. For example, if you make a change to your website, it will post the change to your Facebook page. When a comment is left on one of your blog posts, a notification is sent to your Slack account. The list of options goes on and on and there is room for significant customization. In other words, you can use many of the pre-set options for Zapier by just connecting Zapier to your platforms, or you can design more individualized workflows.

7. SEMRush

As a marketing manager, productivity is about more than just saving an individual’s time. It is about creating a better output for the time and energy that was invested. And this is exactly what SEMRush strives to do. It accomplishes this by addressing one of the most challenging aspects of a marketer’s job: Building an audience. Marketing managers and teams spend all of their energy on creating and publishing content that will attract and keep a specific audience. SEMRush simplifies this by offering tools that make it much easier to build an audience on every social media platform.

8. Brand24

Social listening is a must for every marketing manger. It stretches beyond the confines of @ mentions and allows brands to understand how their target audience feels, what they like, and what bothers them. Brand24 is one of the stronger social listening tools that is currently available. But Brand24 can and should be used for more than just brand monitoring. Marketers can harness its keyword monitoring to identify hot topics in the industry and among customers. These topics can then be repurposed by marketers as content ideas. This allows brands to always be a part of relevant conversations and to become a go-to thought leader for consumers.

9. BuzzSumo

The most effective way to improve social media performance is to monitor and analyze. Unfortunately, tracking how each post does on every single, disparate platform is a full-time job. BuzzSumo takes care of this. It connects to your accounts and monitors every recent post. It then provides insights on which ones are performing best based on shares, engagements, and likes. But the tool goes beyond just your accounts. You can also have it analyze how your competitors are doing. Seeing which posts are working for them can give you ideas on content strategy.

10. Answerthepublic

Coming up with fresh and engaging content is only the first part of the content marketing struggle. After a few good ideas, you actually have to produce and publish. Answerthepublic is built to help you come up with great content ideas. This includes a strong tool that uses Bing and Google auto suggest results to create long-tail keywords. But this same tool extends into other content. Users can type in keywords that are connected to their brand and find words that often appear in the same search query, this can then guide content creation and enable content to rank higher.

11. Canva

Marketing teams are always striving to create great content. They will type of long-form blogs. They will record and publish a presentation from an executive as a webinar. They will compile videos to post on every platform possible. And each of these pieces of content takes time, effort, and expertise to create. There are a growing number of tools out there that allow marketers to create a wider variety of content without advanced expertise. Canva does just this when it comes to every type of graphic that marketing teams could want.

12. Ahrefs

This tool provides marketers with everything they need to know about keywords, as well as backlinks. When it comes to keywords, you can type in competitors’ keywords and see how their various posts and editorials are doing in search engine rankings. In regards to backlinks, you can identify which websites link back to any content that you have created or published.

13. Hubspot

Many times, as soon as a marketing department publishes content, that is the end of its life cycle. It might be reshared in the weeks following on various platforms, but for the most part it will just be mined for analytics. Hubspot provides the analytic data on every piece of published content, but it expands on this. It is a comprehensive platform that offers everything from CRM software to customer service. Hubspot also provides more support than just about any other branded marketing tool available. They have blogs, webinars, additional tools — the list goes on and on.

The right software can be an invaluable tool for any marketing manager. It allows you to concentrate on the highest value tasks and leave the rest to a machine. This means higher productivity and more successful outcomes.

This article first appeared on Jefflizik.com