In the past, the marketing team worked in the same office as everyone else, so it was easy to catch up on progress or have meetings about what your next steps should be. These days, though, people tend to be more spread out. Your company’s employees may be working from home, and you may be outsourcing some of that work.
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As the go-to marketing agency for home builders in North America, we know how important it is to stay connected as we work together. Fortunately, there are several tools that teams can use to boost efficiency or stay in touch.
These are just a few of our favourites.
If you’ve been following our blog for any amount of time, you know we’re big fans. HubSpot is one of the best programs out there for marketing automation.
The software allows you to create and track online campaigns, publish blog posts, manage your social media, and do just about everything else that relates to inbound marketing. It’s a fantastic tool.
Best of all, it has an integrated project management feature called “Projects”. If you’re going to be using this company for most of your content marketing needs, it’s smart to use them for project management as well, at least when it comes to managing your marketing.
Trello has an easy-to-use interface that looks like a bulletin board. You create lists and then add notecards to each list. It’s easy to move cards around if you need to recategorize, and you can give access to anyone who needs it.
One of the nice things about Trello is you’re able to create different boards and limit who has access to them. That means you could have one board for your personal life or your family’s schedule, but then have different boards you use for work.
Best of all, it’s free! You can upgrade for additional features, but you can easily stick to the free version to access the basics.
Basecamp is a great solution for bringing teams together and keeping everyone on the same page. It also has a bulletin board design with access granted to specific individuals.
Other functionality in Basecamp includes message boards where users can pitch ideas or discuss projects. With the group chat feature, your team can talk to each other even if you’re spread across the world.
You’ll also have the ability to upload files you might need for your projects, making it easy for everyone to access them.
Basecamp is free for personal use, but if you’re using it for business, you’ll have to sign up for their business plan. There’s a small fee for that, but once you try it, you’ll love everything it has to offer.
Teamwork is a project management suite used by large companies such as Disney, Paypal, Netflix and Spotify. Like Basecamp, it allows you to view the progress of your projects in a handy bulletin board view, and assign tasks to specific people.
It’s also useful as a tool to time your projects, allowing users to log the time they spend working on specific projects or even specific subtasks within those projects, so you can know exactly how long each task is taking, and who’s been working on what.
Teamwork has several pricing tiers, including a free one that allows you to manage up to five employees, perfect for a small marketing team. You can then scale up your efforts from there.
Asana has a very sophisticated-looking interface, and it’s a great option for people who want to focus on project planning rather than team building. Yes, there are still places where you can have conversations between team members, but the focus is on visualizing the task flow of your project.
One of the best features for this is the timeline. Here, you can place each task associated with your project to better see the whole picture. You can even adjust the way that your information looks in Asana.
Another great feature is the ability to easily add guest members. This is perfect for when you’re working with contractors on a specific project. Once they’ve finished their work, they no longer need access to the project, and you can easily take them off.
Asana is a fee-based program, but there’s a free trial, and there’s a per-user rate. This means that small marketing teams won’t have to pay a lot of money to use the program.
Slack isn’t strictly a project management tool per se, but it is a great tool for teams working remotely. The goal of Slack is to replace email.
It allows you to do many of the types of things that you’d normally do over email while being more manageable because users can focus only on the conversations that are meaningful to them while still having access to other conversations that they may need in the future.
You can separate conversational topics by creating different channels, and the program allows you to upload files, so it’s easier to discuss your projects.
Slack has a couple of different pricing structures, so you can select the option that works best for your marketing team.
When you choose Marketing Ninjas as part of your marketing team, we’ll be able to set you up with a project management and collaboration tool that fits your needs. Ask us how we can best serve you.