How to Choose the Right Tools and Software for Marketing?
Is Marketing an Art or a Science?
Marketing is both: it’s a science and an art that together enable a company to offer its products or services to build customer loyalty. Hence strategy, creativity and organization are all part of the management of effective marketing. Managing a lot of tasks with your marketing team can be tricky. A collaborative tool can help you to manage those tasks more easily.
We’ve noticed several roles in any marketing team:
- The director is in charge of strategy management and leads the marketing team
- A content marketer creates creative content
- Customer support assistS customers.
Each team member has a proper role and handles different tasks with that much complexity, a collaboration between team members is a must.
Teamwork is one of the most essential aspects of the modern workplace. So to be effective, companies need to support their people with technologies that help them to share and collaborate quickly, wherever they are.
Collaborative tools improve employee productivity and build overall business success. This article focuses on these useful tools and how they can help you.
Transform the Way You Work by Adding a Collaborative Tool
Plenty of tools are available on the collaborative software market, so you have to find the right one, the one that suits your needs the best.
These tools enable team members to work together wherever they are and whenever they want, as long as they have an internet connection. Working comfortably on the same project with different people has never been easier. For instance, if co-workers are out of the office for a business trip, they will still have complete access to a document they are invited to review or edit.
One of the mostwell-known tools of this kind is Google, with its online Google Sheets’ spreadsheet software. This tool is collaborative because it allows several people to work on the same document at the same time.
Online spreadsheets such as Google Sheets are definitely efficient, but they have their limitations in terms of data sharing. Indeed, many of them, don’t allow you to control the data you share with your team members. For example, if a spreadsheet contains sensitive information or personal details about some of the collaborators, you won’t be able to hide them. In addition, it may limit users when they want to edit the same file at the same moment.
We’ve all seen that error message: “This file is locked for editing by another user.”
A collaborative tool is also a better way to manage marketing budgets. No matter how big your marketing organization, a collaborative tool lets you manage every money spent.
You get instant visibility into the current state of every one of your marketing budgets. Visualize your investments according to geography, business unit, product line or any other way you’d like.
Manage Your Marketing Budget
A marketing action plan table will allow you to collaborate in real time with your marketing team. By using tables, you get a quick overview of all marketing team tasks within a defined period, including responsibilities, deadlines, status and eventual comments. You can also set a marketing budget and create a budget column to manage the overall expenses for the project.
Marketers have to know how to deal with impromptu decisions, restart promotional campaigns, launch new campaigns, often within the same budget. Good management of the budget is essential. Organize your budget by objective and by quarter, and then assign each budget row to a user. That user will be responsible for updating the row based on the actual expenses.
This encourages transparency, visibility and good financial management.
Elaborate a Clear Marketing Strategy
Use the calendar to create a quick overview of ongoing and upcoming marketing tasks to see if your marketing strategy is going well. In addition, to this feature, you can track the progress of all your team’s marketing efforts, the priority tasks to execute, and each row owner’s role.
What Do You Need to Do Tomorrow?
Too often we make plans or list objectives and then get so enmeshed in all the other things we have to do to run our business that we sideline them.
Taking 15 minutes a day to review your marketing objectives, marketing plan, and marketing activities goes a long way toward helping you stay focused and on track and marketing your products or services effectively.
Manage Your Marketing Tasks
Using a good collaborative software, is a must in the marketing field. Indeed, marketing involves so many elements tools that optimize time and efficiency, are essential.
If they’re easy, simple, and quick, use them, so you will no longer have to schedule a long meeting to entrust tasks to you collaborators. All the documents you need can be transferred directly into the software, and collaborators who have access can review or make any changes they feel are necessary. This clearly supports teamwork and guarantees a powerful workflow on a project. For example,
- Each member has access to the document so they can add, edit, or review.
- Members can see either all of the content or only the content that belongs to them.
- All the members can keep track of the progression of the project.
Present Your Marketing Plan
To present and explain your action plan clearly, use a collaborative working space to share it immediately and get all the feedback you need. Its format as a visual document will help readers understand it better. An action plan typically answers these questions:
- What will be done ?
- When will it be done ?
- Who is in charge of the each task?
- How much should the company spend on each task?
All these questions can be answered using a collaborative software. In fact, its main function is to ease the management of a project, so all these aspects will be covered by the tool.
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