Marketing managers are responsible for the success of their company and its marketing goals. That’s a lot of pressure. Even though the pressure is significant, it doesn’t mean managing projects and maintaining productivity should be difficult. There are several marketing management tools available to make things easier for you and your team. Whether you’re new to managing projects or an experienced professional, this article can help you choose the best marketing management tools for your business.
Trello
Trello is another simple project management platform that’s popular among marketers. Task boards in Trello make it easy to manage linear marketing campaigns.
Pros
- Simple drag & drop boards to manage campaign tasks and ideas.
- Create and manage custom task workflows.
- Custom tasks fields and checklists to include custom information.
- Collaborate with task comments and file attachments.
- Automate task workflows.
Cons
- No timelines to plan your campaign schedule or your team’s capacity.
- Poor overview of the campaign progress.
Price
You can manage up to 10 team projects in the free plan. Paid plans start at $12.50 per user per month.
Podio
Podio is a simple task management tool with customizable as well as automated workflows.
Pros
- Task management with custom task workflows.
- Task boards to organize and prioritize tasks.
- Integrations with marketing, cloud-storage, and calendar tools.
- Attach files to tasks.
- iOS and Android apps to manage work on the go.
Cons
- No planning and workload management features.
- Read-only client access is not available in the free and basic plans.
Price
Podio’s free plan comes with task management for up to 5 users. Paid plans start at $9 per user, per month.
Basecamp
Basecamp is a popular collaboration tool for marketing teams. It comes with powerful features for file sharing and project communication.
Pros
- Powerful internal messaging and file sharing.
- Event schedule with recurring events.
- To-do lists to manage campaign activities.
- Collaboration using comments and chat messaging.
- Message boards.
Cons
- No campaign plan timelines.
- No task management or custom workflows.
Price
Basecamp has a free personal plan with limited features. Paid plans start at $99 per month or any number of users.
Toggl Plan
Toggl Plan is a simple yet comprehensive marketing project planner and execution tool. It comes with all the features you need to manage a marketing campaign.
Pros
- Simple drag & drop timelines to plan and manage campaign schedules.
- Drag & drop boards to capture, organize, and prioritize creative ideas and tasks.
- Free read-only timeline views to communicate project progress to clients.
- Custom task workflows and recurring tasks to manage all kinds of marketing campaigns.
- Task checklists to improve task completion quality.
- Multiple assignees per task so team members can collaborate using notes, comments, and file attachments.
- Team timelines to visualize and manage your team’s capacity.
- Integrates with popular time tracking, calendar, and repository tools.
Cons
- No reports. But Toggl Plan sends email notifications with task summaries.
Price
With the free plan freelancers and solo users can manage unlimited projects. Team plans start at $9 per user, per month.
Workamajig
Workamajig is a marketing workflow software. It’s built specifically for agencies and in-house creative teams. It comes with a comprehensive feature set when it comes to project management for marketing agencies.
Pros
- Generate timelines from task lists.
- Manage using any project methodology including Agile, Kanban, and Waterfall.
- Time tracking for managing billable hours.
- Manage multiple teams and forecast demand.
- Manage the sales pipeline with revenue forecasting.
Cons
- It may feel expensive and complicated for smaller marketing teams.
Price
Workamajog does not have a free plan. Paid plans start at $50 per user per month; for a minimum of 5 users.
WP Project Manager
WP Project Manager is a freemium WordPress plugin to manage marketing projects from within WordPress. WordPress design studios and marketing agencies that primarily work with WordPress will find this useful.
Pros
- Drag & drop boards to manage ideas and tasks.
- Gantt chart timelines with sub-tasks and task dependencies.
- Time tracker and invoicing.
- GitHub, Slack, and WooCommerce integration.
- Open-source software.
Cons
- You’re responsible for maintaining your PM software installation.
- Limited to the WordPress platform.
Price
The base plugin is available for free from the WordPress repository. The premium version of the plugin starts at $79 per year for a single domain website.
Monday.com
Monday.com is another popular tool for marketing collaboration. It comes with multiple ways to view a project campaign.
Pros
- Multiple ways to visualize project campaigns, including timelines, calendars, lists, and boards.
- Visual workload management to manage team capacity.
- Integrations with calendars, cloud storage services, and code repositories.
- Custom dashboards.
- Enterprise-level security.
Cons
- While it has multiple views, you can only manage tasks from a task list.
- No free plan. Plus, paid plans have a minimum number of users.
Price
Monday.com comes with a 14-day free trial. Paid plans start at $10 per seat per month with a minimum slab of 3 seats.
Kanban Tool
Kanban Tool is a board-based tool like Trello. It’s more of a marketing project tracking tool. But, it’s lightweight and suitable for simple task management.
Pros
- Capture and organize creative ideas.
- Manage project iterations and tasks with custom workflows.
- Visualize project progress with dashboard reports.
Cons
- No planning features.
- No workload management features.
Price
Kanban Tool’s free plan is limited to two users and two boards. Paid plans start at $5 per user, per month.
Asana
Asana is a comprehensive project management software. It’s suitable as a marketing agency project management software. Particularly if you need to manage large teams or complex projects.
Pros
- Plan schedules using calendars and timelines.
- Create custom task workflows using boards.
- Visualize campaign progress with custom dashboards.
- Get client approvals with the approvals and proofing feature.
- Portfolio management for larges agencies.
- Manage team workloads.
Cons
- It can feel overwhelming for small teams or simple marketing projects.
Price
Asana’s free plan allows up to 15 team members for an unlimited number of projects. Paid plans start at $13.49 per user per month.
FunctionFox
FunctionFox is a project management software for marketing departments and agencies. It comes with time & expense tracking, project management, and internal communication features.
Pros
- Gantt charts for project planning.
- Blogs for internal team communication.
- Track time and expenses along with project management features.
- Custom report builder.
Cons
- No team capacity planning or workload management features.
- The tool feels rough around the edges.
Price
FunctionFox does not have a free plan. Paid plans with project management features start at $40 for the first user per month. For additional users, it costs $8 per user, per month.
Buffer
If social media is part of your company’s marketing strategy – and it should be – it’s essential to find the right social media management tool. At WebFX, that tool is Buffer.
With their browser extension, you can share and schedule updates to all of your social media accounts without ever leaving the page you want to promote. Plus, with their Power Scheduler, you can schedule as many future updates of the same page as you want.
It’s also worth noting that while their basic service is free, it limits you to 10 scheduled updates for each profile at any given time. They also offer a paid version (called the “Awesome Plan”), which allows for up to 10 social profiles on each platform and up to 100 scheduled posts at a time.
Canva
No matter which online channels you use for marketing, visual content is absolutely necessary for attracting and keeping potential customers’ attention. But if you don’t have a background in graphic design, that often means falling back on stock photos.
That’s where Canva becomes useful.
It makes creating and editing professional-looking graphics a breeze, even without any prior knowledge of graphic design. And once you make a basic template for your company, it’s easy to swap out designs for blog posts, article pages, and social media posts.
Canva also offers premade templates sized for different social media platforms and other common marketing materials like email headers and infographics. But I don’t recommend using their templates as is.
Given Canva’s popularity, there are likely hundreds of other companies looking at those same templates – and identical images are the last thing you want.
Google alerts
Staying on top of your brand’s reputation is a critical part of your job as a marketer. With Google Alerts, you can make sure that you always know when your company is being discussed online.
You can use this tool to set up email alerts for your company’s name, your CEO’s name, well-known products, and any other distinctive words or phrases.
When these alerts are delivered directly to your inbox, you never have to worry about missing the opportunity to share a positive news story or respond to a negative one.
Google Analytics
Any successful marketing strategy requires regular monitoring and improvement. For most companies today, Google Analytics is the preferred platform for analyzing website traffic and activity.
Of course, chances are strong that your company already uses it – but if not, it’s time to start. Once installed, it allows your company to view in-depth information about how visitors are arriving on your site, what content they’re reading, and what actions they’re taking.
With all of this information, you can see how your campaigns are performing and identify areas where your strategy could be improved.
Google Keyword Planner
Selecting the right keywords for your SEO and PPC campaigns requires a lot of research and planning. And whether you run ads on AdWords or not, Google’s Keyword Planner is extremely useful for research.
Enter your keywords into the planner and see how many searches each keyword generates per month. Plus, you can see how competitive they are to rank for using AdWords.
You can also use this tool to find other keywords that are similar to yours or relevant to your website.
MozBar
There are thousands of different SEO tools available to marketers today, and they can be completely free or cost thousands of dollars a month. The expensive versions, of course, provide more in-depth analytics and information, but as far as free tools go, MozBar is one of the best.
It’s a Chrome and Firefox extension that lets you see information like domain authority and page authority for your site and your competitors’ sites.
You can also use the extension in “DA mode,” which shows the domain authority of each site you visit to the right of your browser’s search bar.
Open Site Explorer
Up next on the list is another Moz tool: Open Site Explorer.
This tool allows you to see all of the pages that link to any URL, as well as the page and domain authority of the link’s location. This is extremely useful both for monitoring your company’s inbound links and scoping out your competitors’ link profiles.
That being said, the free version only allows three reports per day with 200 links per report. But if you’re just starting with SEO, it’s enough to give you an idea of where you stand.
FAQ Fox
In order to connect with your audience, you need to create content that addresses their questions and concerns. But without speaking to them directly, it’s difficult to determine what those questions are.
With FAQ fox, you can find real questions people are asking related to your industry. You can search for keywords related to your company, and see what people want to know.
You can either answer these questions directly on the sites or use them as ideas for blog posts and pages on your company’s site. Either way, you know that people are interested in the topic before you invest time and energy creating content.
Rapportive
If you do outreach for your company, Rapportive can be a huge help in making your email more effective.
It’s an extension for Firefox and Chrome, and it pulls the job titles and companies for each of your contacts directly into Gmail. It also shows information from their social media profiles, which allows you to learn about them without ever leaving your inbox.
The extension also shows if you have any shared connections on LinkedIn, and mentioning them can sometimes go a long way in opening up the conversation.
KeywordsFX
If you want to identify new keywords for your marketing strategy, KeywordsFX is a great way to generate a long list of possible options.
Just enter a basic keyword in their search bar, and it’ll show many (typically several hundred) possible variations.
Once you’ve selected possible keywords, you can download them as a CSV file and keep for future reference.
Conclusion
Choosing the right marketing project management software is critical to managing campaigns of all sizes.
To help you choose the right tool, we looked at why your marketing team needs project management software. Next, we looked at the features offered by these tools. And finally, we did an overview of the best tools available today.