Marketing consultants are no strangers to a full schedule. In fact, you probably find your day-to-day consists of back-to-back meetings, finding balance between creative and data-driven choices, and managing other employees, all while finding yourself neck deep in analytics and reporting.
Simply put, marketing consultants have a lot on their plates, and any tool that lightens the load is a godsend. Here is a quick review of the 9 top tools every marketing consultant needs to help automate processes, streamline work, and make work more productive.
1. Slack
If there is one thing every marketing consultant needs it’s a way to communicate easily with any and every member of the marketing team at a moment’s notice. Of course, it’s important to call meetings, conduct conference calls, and even have the occasional video chat. But, what about when you just have a quick bit of information you need to communicate to your team, or an individual on the team? What about the times when someone on your team needs a quick answer to a question, but you don’t have the time for an in office interruption or a phone call?
This is where Slack enters to save the day.
Slack is an instant messaging tool with features and benefits that go far and beyond simple chatting.
Features and benefits of Slack
Here is a quick run-down of the top features and benefits of Slack and why marketing consultants need this tool.
1. Communicate instantly with messenger
Slack’s main feature is the ability to instant message anyone at any time. Slack brings team communication together in one convenient location, giving everyone a shared workspace where anyone can access chats and information.
Slack offers more than a chatting feature. This tool provides different channels, so you can organize your chats into different projects, groups, teams, topics, or anything that suits your fancy. For example, you could create a channel for #sales, a channel for #marketing, a channel for #feedback, a channel for #leads, and more. This way, your chats stay organized, and you don’t clutter up your messages with unrelated questions or information.
Not only does Slack provide awesome instant messaging features, but they also have a built in voice and video chat feature. Sometimes it becomes necessary to stop typing and start chatting. When this is the case, you can enter in a one-on-one video chat or a team video chat.
With Slack, communication becomes more convenient and streamlined.
2. Don’t miss a thing with Search and Archives
What happens when you, or one of your team members, have missed an important meeting, or an important channel chat?
With Slack, you no longer have to panic. Chat has a built in archive and search feature that helps keep employees up to date on anything and everything that has ever been discussed on Slack.
Slack’s machine learning capabilities also grow with you. As you use the tool, it begins to learn who you chat with most often, what channels are most relevant to you, and offers you information it knows you need. This makes the communication process more individualized to each and every employee.
With Slack, you never have to worry about missing an important piece of information ever again.
3. Streamline your workflow with integrations and an open API
One of the best things about Slack is it integrates with every enterprise and productivity tool on the market. That way, you don’t have to have several different browsers open to monitor and complete tasks. Instead, you can integrate Slack with your preferred productivity tools, and keep your teams moving quickly and efficiently.
Slack has over 1,000 app integrations, but they also make it possible to configure Slack for your team’s unique needs with their open API.
Slack is a tool every marketing consultant needs to improve productivity and keep communication processes flowing smoothly.
For a more comprehensive review of Slack, check out our article on “How to Use Slack Like a Pro“.
2. Asana
It goes without saying that every marketing consultant needs a way to communicate with team members, and Slack is a great option for easy chats. However, Slack can only do so much when it comes to project and task management. To really get the most out of your employees and improve efficiency across the board, you need a project management tool like Asana.
Asana is one of the best project management tools on the market. It will keep you organized, save you time, and help you track progress on various campaigns. Let’s take a look at the top features and benefits of Asana.
Features and benefits of Asana
Here are the top features and benefits of Asana and why you need to familiarize yourself with this tool!
1. Easily sign-up with an email address or a Google account
Asana is actually free for teams that are just getting started, and all you need to sign up is a Google account or an email address and a password. Asana also provides paid premium and enterprise options for larger firms. The benefit to having an email address associated with your Asana account is Asana will automatically email you reminders about upcoming project due dates to help keep you and your teammates stay on target.
2. Keep your employees on track with project management
The main purpose for Asana is to help with project and task management. As a marketing consultant, you oversee anything from copywriting, SEO details, social media campaigns, proofreading and editing, analytics, reporting, and much more. Not to mention, various employees have different responsibilities. It’s vital to have a way to keep track of various projects and tasks as well as which employees are responsible for them. Instead of trying to sort it out in your head, or via email, or even a calendar, make life easier on yourself, and use Asana.
With Asana, you can create and assign tasks, due dates, and enter any other information needed. Then Asana does the rest of the hard work for you. It will email employees updates about upcoming due dates, milestones, etc.
3. View all projects with the Asana Calendar
Sometimes you need to see the big picture. You want to see what projects are on the docket, when they are due, the steps required for completion, and who is in charge of getting what done. For this, there is the Asana calendar.
The calendar view will help you spot overlaps and gaps, make adjustments, and keep you planning more efficiently overall.
4. Keep track of all tools with seamless integrations
Just like Slack, Asana integrates with other important marketing and productivity tools. That way, you don’t have to worry about keeping track of all the tools you are using. Instead, you can see everything in one place.
5. Enhance your reporting with dashboards
Dashboards help you with viewing progress and reporting. You can easily see what projects and employees are on track and where you need to make adjustments so you don’t fall behind.
Asana is the perfect project management tool, no matter how small or how large your marketing firm is.
3. Time Doctor
Employees working remotely, especially for marketing firms, is becoming more and more common. However, who is to say your employees are actually working when they say they are and not fudging the numbers a little bit?
Time Doctor. That’s who.
Time Doctor is the app to have to help you keep track of employees and monitor screens when necessary. Here are the top features and benefits of this awesome time tracking app.
Features and benefits of Time Doctor
Here is a quick rundown of everything Time Doctor can do for you.
1. Keep up with time cards with time tracking
With Time Doctor, you can track the time of all your employees. This app will show you time spent on your business, on break, and more. It will also show you the total time worked by every person on your team. The data is accurate to the second, so you can easily bill clients or pay employees.
2. Monitor activity with screenshots
Time Doctor also provides screenshot monitoring, which is awesome for remote employees and lets you know who is staying on their tasks. This feature can easily be turned on or off for every person in your company. They are also only taken when employees have indicated they are working. It doesn’t track non-work time or while employees indicate they are on break.
3. Go above and beyond with chat monitoring
This helpful app will also show you how much time employees are spending in meetings, calls, and chats. This helps you monitor the actual productivity of your employees, not just the time they indicate they are working. This is just one way Time Doctor goes above and beyond a regular time tracking app.
4. Keep up to date with powerful reports
The reporting tool is robust, yet easy to read. You can see everything you need to about how your team works. Then, you can make smarter scheduling and business decisions based on what the data is telling you.
5. Calculate payroll automatically
It’s easy to pay your employees based on fixed salaries or hours tracked with Time Doctor. So easy, in fact, that Time Doctor automatically calculates it for you. Furthermore, payroll features are full customizable and supports different payroll periods and even various currencies. You don’t have to worry about where your employee lives, because it’s supported by Time Doctor. Not to mention, you can pay with PayPal, Wise, formerly TransferWise, and Payoneer.
Time Doctor is an essential tool for marketing consultants, especially if you are looking for flexibility, a wide range of capabilities, and the ability to track time of remote employees.
4. Google Analytics
We’ve talked about the top tools that help with communication, productivity, and time management of employees. However, we would be remiss to write an article for marketing consultants without talking about one of the most important analytics tools for marketing consultants.
You guessed it, Google Analytics. Anyone who is in the marketing consulting world needs a good understanding of Google Analytics, especially since it’s used by more than half of the top million websites.
Measure website data with Google Analytics
It makes more sense to talk about Google Analytics more holistically, since it’s a tool with one main purpose—helping you measure your website data.
Probably the biggest benefit of Google Analytics is how robust it is. If you can dream it on your website, then chances are, you can measure it with Google Analytics.
Here are the top things you can measure with your Google Analytics account:
- Website visitors
- Site search behavior
- Audience location
- Audience engagement
- Mobile traffic behavior
- Page bounce rates
- Traffic sources
- Social media traffic
- Interactions per visit
- Return visitor conversion
- Events
- Funnel visualization
- Conversion rates of your store
- Ad performance
- Site content trends
- Value per visit
- Bounce rate
- Lead generation cost
- Exit pages
- Average session duration
- And more!
Even though the list of metrics above is huge, it’s not exhaustive. You can track almost anything you need to with Google Analytics to help you make smarter advertising, website, and overall business decisions.
The most important thing when using Google Analytics is to track metrics to make better marketing choices. For example, you can use Google Analytics to find out which campaigns are bringing in the most traffic and conversions and then formulate new campaigns based off that data. Similarly, you can find out where your most active and highest converting website visitors are located, and plan personalized campaigns around those areas. You could also track metrics to learn what employees are searching about on your website, and then plan your content marketing strategy around those search terms.
Google Analytics is a must use tool for every digital marketer. It will enhance your performance on all fronts.
5. DrumUp
Social media is a critical part of building a business in today’s world. Whether it’s for your clients or for your brand to reach clients, a social media presence is necessary to reach most of your target market.
However, if you’re an independent marketing consultant or one with a small team, you may be hard-pressed for time and resources, requiring extra-help or an app to manage your social media marketing.
DrumUp is an interesting social media marketing app that you can use to both engage your target audience and manage marketing for your clients.
Manage multiple social account groups with DrumUp
If you’re managing social media marketing for yourself and for clients, it’s essential to have all of your accounts in an organized and streamlined manner in one place.
On DrumUp, you can create social media account groups for each client and yourself for easy scheduling. You can also create separate content libraries for yourself and each client to store content categorically.
Once you have social media account groups and content libraries, you can automate content for sharing by linking accounts to libraries and RSS feeds, effortlessly.
Curate engaging content to captivate your audience
Using DrumUp, you can discover fresh and relevant content topics that your target audience would appreciate.
The tool works as a content research and recommendation tool, schedules curated or drafted content across multiple social accounts and provides insights about your social media strategy by measuring your social media engagement.
By measure of your engagement metrics, you can assess and refine your social media content and improve your social media marketing performance.
Many brands miss out on the benefits of curated content, because they believe in sharing only original social media content. This is a miscalculation.
Curating high-quality content allows you to build better relationships with current and future clients, influencers and partners. With DrumUp, you can save a ton of time on content curation.
6. Filestage
As a marketing consultant, you’ll know just what it’s like to try and coordinate feedback with your clients. You probably have millions of emails and far too many files with “Final_Final_2” to prove it, too.
The review and approval process is a critical part of every project, but it’s often one of the most hectic and disorganized. If you fail to receive and distribute your feedback effectively, you might inject errors into your work just before it’s completed. It could also affect the morale of everybody involved and leave a sour taste in your client’s mouth right at the end of the project.
That’s why you need Filestage. This is a sophisticated review and approval tool that gives you the power to grasp control of the review and approval process – whatever medium you’re working with. Let’s look at how Filestage can drive value for you at this critical stage of your project.
Features and benefits of Filestage
Here is a brief look at how Filestage can improve your review and approval process.
1. Feedback and comments in one place
Filestage makes it so simple for every person involved in your project to leave their feedback and comments in one place. This helps you to collate your feedback and put an end to the madness of managing different offline files coming from all sources. The transparency helps to make everybody work more efficiently, too, by showing the feedback that has already been delivered.
2. Task and version control
One of the best parts of Filestage is its version control and integrated to-do list features. The tool makes it a breeze for you to upload new versions and really keep track of which changes have and haven’t been implemented. This can stop you flicking through documents worrying that you’ve missed a piece of feedback. The to-do list is great, too, and helps you to methodically implement your changes.
3. Support for all file types
As a modern marketing consultant, you’ll undoubtedly find yourself working with different file types. Filestage works flawlessly with images, PDFs, videos, documents, and much more. This makes it very simple for you to share your work to get the clear and in-context feedback that you need to seize success.
4. Integrate with your existing tools
There are more lines of communication open today than ever before. You might find that you communicate with some clients through Trello and use Asana with others. Filestage integrates with the key tools to enhance your existing processes and upload your files in a quick and easy way.
7. Crystal
Each of your customers (and potential customers) has a unique personality and communication style. That’s why it’s so hard to write effective messaging﹣what resonates with one persona may completely bomb with another. However, by tailoring your messaging to specific personality types, you can include the content and style that appeals most to each specific audience.
Crystal uses AI to predict anyone’s personality from their online footprint, which can help you learn more about your audience and appeal to a wider demographic in a more personalized way. Communicate better, increase email open rates, and boost sales with Personality AI﹣your coach for every campaign.
Crystal can help consultants communicate more effectively when meeting with clients, conducting outreach, or hosting team meetings. It makes communication less stressful by providing insight into someone’s personality and offering advice for communicating with them. Basically, it becomes a lot easier to build and maintain important relationships with people, whether they’re on your team or a part of your clientele, when you’re able to communicate with them in the way they want.
8. Milanote
Milanote is a tool for organizing your creative projects into beautiful visual boards. Created to replicate the feeling of working on a wall in a creative studio – visual, tactile and sometimes a bit messy – Milanote is a great fit for marketing consultants who work with their clients remotely.
Milanote has heaps of built-in templates to help you get started with a variety of different projects, from putting together a marketing strategy to writing that perfect creative brief. Its sharing features make it a perfect option for collecting client feedback.
Milanote’s basic plan is available for free with no time-limit.
9. Wideo
Wideo is an online video tool that allows you to create animated videos and presentations in a very easy and user-friendly way.
You can produce videos quickly and easily with templates. Add your own images, videos, and audio, or create a custom video from scratch, then animate in just a few clicks.
Video is the best way to hook your desired audience, increase social media engagement, and boost CTRs. You can automatically turn your blog posts into engaging videos that you can share on social networks with tools like the blog to video converter.
Keep costs down while maintaining full creative control as you design professional animated marketing videos with Wideo!
With Wideo, you don’t need to have any previous video editing or design knowledge.
The free forever plan offers an unmatched level of functionality compared to other “freemium” platforms.
Wrap up
There you have it! As a marketing consultant, if you’re not using Slack for communication, Asana for productivity, Time Doctor for time tracking, and Google Analytics for website analytics tracking, the time to start is now. It will help you enhance your work as a marketing consultant this year in every way.
