Tools allow us to magnify our output and this is especially important for upper and middle-level management roles like a marketing director who will have an incredibly tight schedule. Without these tools, it would not only be difficult for a marketing director to do their job, but they would have much lower efficiency and see worse results.
The large majority of these tools are either free or have free options so that you can try them out before expanding them to your entire department or company. The purpose of these tools is to make your life easier so that you can get the information that you need when you need it and to make your day-to-day tasks much quicker and easier to perform.
The Most Important Marketing Director Tools
Of all of the marketing director tools that are available, the most important are those that enable you to manage your team most effectively. While you’ll still want access to the software that your team uses for their actual work, a marketing directors’ primary goal should be leadership and management. Making this shift to management rather than implementation is tough, but these tools can make it far easier.
Trello for Task Management
Trello is possible the most popular of these marketing director tools because it has a free option which has made it ubiquitous in startups and small businesses across the nation. But even for larger brands, Trello offers reasonably priced packages that will give you the ultimate task management system so that you can keep track of what your team is doing.
When you’re responsible for the performance of an entire department, it’s incredibly important that you know who is doing what and when it’s supposed to be due. Trello gives your department excellent transparency and therefore accountability, as well as offering you a simple way to ensure that everything important is achieved in any given period.
Slack for Simple Communication
While Trello is ideal for managing your tasks, it’s not the optimum solution for communication. For this, Slack is the industry standard. Slack isn’t just a barebones chat platform; it offers far more than that. You can speak one-to-one, in groups and in different chat channels which gives you more customization over your departmental and inter-department communication.
Plus, Slack has more plugins and tools that any other chat platform which is what makes it even more powerful. Through Slack, you can share documents, do employee onboarding and use fun programs like Donut which match employees up with a coffee buddy each week to encourage employee engagement and friendship.
CoSchedule for Inbound Marketing
Digital marketing is becoming more important each year, and one of the most common types of digital marketing is inbound marketing. Inbound is all about creating content which people want to find, rather than using outbound marketing which is the opposite. Publishing blog content regularly is one way to achieve this and to do so you need a publication schedule.
CoSchedule is by far the most popular scheduling tool, and it’s used by a huge number of website and marketing managers so that they can stay on top of their content. By using this tool, you’ll have your entire content strategy in one place where you can easily review it and make changes as a department.
Quip for Document Reviews
As a marketing director, you’ll often find yourself reviewing the work of your team for example a proposed web design for a financial company. Doing this in person isn’t particularly efficient, especially if you’re managing tens or hundreds of employees. Rather than this, you can use Quip to review your documents online as a group.
Quip is like a combination of Slack and Google Docs because it allows you to see documents and also communicate with your team at the same time. By using this, you can track changes and save yourself valuable time.
Hootsuite for Social Media
Posting on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram daily at the very least is a necessity, but that doesn’t stop it from being a pain. Hootsuite can replace a part-time employee entirely by allowing you to schedule out social media posts into the future. The benefit of this is that you can create an entire social media campaign a year or more in advanced, without needing to be there to post it at the time that it goes live.
Google Analytics for Tracking
In the era of digital marketing, the biggest change is the ability for marketing departments to track everything. Through a tool like Google Analytics, you can track a huge variety of statistics and graphs including your bounce rate, conversion rate, ad performance and average load time. With this information, you can make more informed marketing decisions about where to dedicate your efforts.
The beauty of Google Analytics and Google Data Studio is that you can track the ROI on different online marketing methods and by doing this you can all but guarantee great performance for your department. Plus, Google Analytics is free.
Ahrefs’ for Search Engine Optimization
SEO can represent a significant percentage of any companies yearly revenue and optimize for Google is practically impossible without a tool like Ahrefs’. It gives you unparalleled insight into the websites that are linking to your business, as well as including a variety of powerful tools like their page analyzer and keyword research tools.
Ahrefs’ is the complete SEO suite on the market, and it also has the largest database of links. Backlinks have been proven to be the factor most correlated with rankings, and therefore this fact is an important one when you’re deciding on the right SEO tool for your department.
