3 Tools Every Marketer Should be Using

If you’re a marketer -- whether it’s for an agency or for your own company -- you can’t do it alone.

It's extremely hard to run marketing campaigns -- for one or multiple clients -- without the help of some solid tools. Of course you have the basics: Google Analytics for website data, Hootsuite for social media, Constant Contact for email marketing (or HubSpot for all the above in one). But you need even more than this to do your job.

Marketers need to analyze our competitors, manage campaigns, keep track of their time, and stay on top of their daily to-do's.

Well guess what, there are tools for all of these things!

For the Organizationally Obsessed Marketer - Asana

Asana attracted me by being the anti-email productivity tool. It’s basically a way to manage projects where zero emails are involved. All communication is located within the app.

Asana states this:

We’ve re-imagined how teamwork gets done through fast and flexible web and mobile applications. The friction of communicating the right amount of information, to the right people, at the right time, in the right place, gets in the way of teamwork. This friction lowers our collective productivity. We built Asana to improve the productivity of teams and increase the potential output of every team’s effort.

With Asana, you can:

1) Assign Tasks

With Asana, we all have the ability to create projects and assign tasks to our co-workers when needed. We don’t need to waste time waiting for the person in charge to distribute the tasks. We can keep things moving on our own.

2) Keep Track of Projects

If you've ever spent time emailing people individually to figure out where everyone is on their part of a project, then you'll find relief with Asana. You can update the status of a project and notify all involved in one quick click. You can also let people know when you plan to work on a certain task, so others can see if you’re on track or not.

3) Create a Centralized Place for Communication

Ever ask someone if Friday is an okay deadline, and then when Friday comes around, they say they don't remember Friday being the deadline. In Asana, you can communicate within each task and negotiate deadlines. This gives everyone a record on why you chose that deadline. Everyone is then responsible.

4) Forget About Losing Documents

Gmail and Google Drive used to be my hub, I would hang out in there all day. But as the years have gone by and I add massive amounts of documents to my drive and send more emails I lose track of things and even the search bar is unhelpful. Asana is integrated with Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box so you can upload documents into each project and task. This removes the time it takes you to remember what you named a document three months ago.

For the List-Obsessed Marketer - Trello

Are you the type of person that creates lists for everything? Then Trello is definitely for you. I have lists upon lists upon lists set up in my Trello. I’ve even made a grocery list in there.

Before we found Asana, we used to use it as a project management tool, but now we just use it to keep our content organized and to keep our daily to-do’s somewhere safe. Before Trello, I used a word document for my to-do list. I can’t tell you how many times I updated the to-do list with very important information that somehow got lost in a Toshiba abyss.

You can use Trello to manage projects with your team, but Asana is another option for this. I think the best aspect of Trello is its organizational simplicity. It’s a very visual platform, so all of your tasks and projects are presented in a card format.

This is a screenshot of all of our premium content on a board. If my boss asks me about what offers we have on a certain topic, I can scroll through this easy-to-scan view.

Like I said, I also use it to outline my to-do list. When I’m in a meeting, I create a card for the meeting and take my notes. After the meeting, I separate the notes into to-do’s.

For the Competitive Marketer - Buzzsumo

If you’re not keeping an eye on the competitor, you’re missing out on a ton of very cool information. Buzzsumo is where you can find all of that information in one place.

Buzzsumo analyzes what content performs best for any topic or competitor as well as finds the key influencers to promote your content. The platform helps with content discovery, curation, research, and influencer outreach.

If need to do competitor research, check out the Content Alerts section. You can set up alerts for articles on content topics you’re interested in. You can also enter in your competitor’s sites and be alerted when one of their pieces of content gets shared a lot. This will help you figure out what the most popular topics are in the industry, and it will give you ideas on how to one-up your competitor’s popular article.

If you are looking for influencers who can help share your content, this tool helps you find the most influential people on a specific topic.

Find the Right Tools

No matter what type of marketer you are, there’s a tool out there for you. Don’t let your marketing suffer because you think you are a one-person team.