Since 2021, over 60% of customer interactions have been carried out online. Marketers dedicate a significant part of their work to developing digital marketing and automating repetitive tasks. In particular, specialists seek to automate planning as any solid marketing strategy begins with it. After all, as the American lecturer and speaker Dale Carnegie said, an hour of planning saves up to 10 hours of work. Let’s consider 5 digital marketing planning tools to optimize your promotion strategy.
The main advantage of marketing strategy planning platforms is that they store important information centrally. Any member of a team can view a plan, evaluate progress, and take on a task assigned to them. Such a platform guides team members and contributes to a more coherent work of the marketing department.
Specialists value marketing strategy planning platforms as they make it possible to:
- set the duration of a project or a campaign;
- visualize the workflow (Kanban boards with tasks, etc.);
- automate repetitive tasks;
- save ideas and files and share them with colleagues;
- involve other marketing tools (email marketing software, social media management applications);
- receive analytics and generate reports on the results of marketing campaigns.
Today, there are dozens of applications for planning marketing activities. We’ll take a look at 5 proven digital marketing strategy planning tools for teams of all sizes.
Monday
Monday is a tool for managing projects and product discovery processes, including the ones related to marketing. The platform allows you to plan SEO tasks, publish content on a site and post it on social networks, conduct promotions, and perform many other activities. By collecting all tasks in one interface, Monday provides a visual overview of the current state of affairs on a project. Thus, the manager makes sure that the marketing team is moving in the right direction.
The service allows you to visualize marketing tasks using charts, cards, a Gantt chart, or a calendar. For each task, you can assign an employee responsible for its implementation and set the desired status. You can edit the workboard by adding up to 50 new columns (for example, deadlines, priority, progress control, and so on).
Each participant in a marketing campaign sees the amount of work that they need to do. Through the platform, they can freely communicate with their colleagues, share files, leave comments or feedback, and suggest ideas. The manager can open the “Monitoring” tab at any time and see if the team is coping with the volume of tasks and deadlines. At the end of the marketing campaign, a working dashboard is imported into a report. Thus, you can compare the results with the goals set in the beginning.
The Monday library has templates for planning a marketing strategy but the team can easily create theirs and customize them for unique tasks. The platform is integrated with 12 third-party resources (Outlook, Slack, Zoom, Excel, LinkedIn, and others). So, the team can seamlessly build a continuous workflow.
Hive
Hive is used to plan and manage projects of any complexity and duration. With this tool, you can easily create and track the implementation of marketing strategies. It is necessary to create a new project (for example, “Content plan”) and add people who will participate in marketing activities. To view the project, you can use various presentation options (calendar, Gantt chart, table, and employee cards).
If we take a Kanban board view, we can create columns with the following content:
- blog article ideas;
- “In progress” tasks;
- written articles;
- articles for editorial revision;
- articles submitted for publication;
- published works.
Hive Analytics is an essential option for marketers. This feature uses machine learning to find flaws in team performance. A smart algorithm analyzes the pace of carrying out tasks and compliance with deadlines, warns the manager about a problem, and offers a solution.
The service is free for individuals. But if you need to work in a team, there is a paid plan for small businesses (from $12) and individual prices for enterprises. Hive is integrated with Google Drive, Slack, Zoom, Dropbox, and other specialized resources.
ClickUp
The creators of ClickUp position the platform as an application that can replace all the others. This service unites all tasks, documents, chats, and employees in one place.
To involve a team in a marketing campaign, you need to create a work board with a list of tasks and employees responsible for their implementation. For convenience, tasks can be displayed as lists, tables, or boards with cards. When transferring a task from one employee to another one, you can contact the colleague through a special chat to speed up the priority work. The platform allows you to monitor the progress of each employee. The manager detects low performers and finds out the reason for the backlog.
ClickUp has a hierarchical structure. The work environment of an entire organization is divided into a workspace for each department. It stores sheets (a list of tasks and subtasks for certain projects). To view them, you can use a dashboard, task list, Kanban board, calendar, or Gantt chart. Each task is customized to the goals of users: color is set, attachments (links, photos, videos) are added, a role is assigned to an employee, a chat is opened, and a deadline is set.
It is convenient for users (especially managers) to track all the actions necessary for the timely completion of a project. The service is like an online office of a company, where the marketing department has its place to track the performance of the team.
Trello
Trello is a convenient digital marketing planning tool for arranging Kanban-style work. Small businesses use it for free (they can create up to 10 boards in one workspace) or at a price of $ 5 with various terms of use.
Each project operates as a board where managers add task cards. As the work progresses, a task moves from one column to another, changing its status or responsible employee.
By scheduling work in Trello, marketers will be able to:
– establish transparency in the work of a team;
– be aware of the scope of a project (see the goals, progress of work, and future activities);
– contact managers to clarify details;
– discuss work issues with their colleagues;
– conduct online brainstorming.
Trello also has a workflow automation feature. You can set an action to start automatically if a certain card is completed. For example, if employees complete all tasks from a card and change its status to “Done”, then the contacts are removed from the card, and the tasks are archived.
The platform is convenient as it offers board templates for different workflows (remote team meetings, Agile board, Kanban board, simple project board, and so on). This option simplifies the work of managers and reduces the time for organizing the workspace.
Taskworld
The service aims to help marketing teams “turn ideas into structured projects.” Taskworld also visualizes tasks to make it easier for a team to complete and track progress as a project moves on. When creating a task, the manager assigns it to the responsible marketer, leaves notes, and tags, and sets a deadline and a reminder.
You can clarify the necessary details in individual and group chats. To track the progress of tasks, the manager filters them by employee, priority, status, or deadline. Thus, they can detect problems in time and solve them before they start to slow down the marketing campaign.
Since 2020-2021, managers have been building remote work for entire departments from different countries with the help of Taskworld. This allowed them to adapt to new market conditions and not lose touch during difficult times. The platform integrates 9 popular services, including Google Meet, Calendars, Zapier, Microsoft Teams, and others. In total, with the help of Zapier, you can connect to 3,000 applications.
Conclusion
A marketing strategy, like any other project, must be implemented on time and not go beyond the allocated budget. Therefore, specialists must strictly follow their goals. It is possible due to careful planning and coordination of the work of employees. The digital marketing strategy planning tools we have listed above are the best fit for this purpose.