For a marketing campaign to evolve and progress, you have to understand what’s working and what’s not. Otherwise, you’ll either repeat the same mistakes or fail to fully capitalize on an effective strategy. It’s also important to stay organized, whether your campaign is at the execution or planning stage.

Fortunately, there are a wide array of tools that can help at any phase of a campaign.

Here are 6 Marketing Tools that will keep you organized, efficient and aware:

1. CRM Software

Short for customer relationship management, CRM software can monitor multiple marketing channels. Understanding where leads are coming from and which channels are generating the highest conversions are critical to successful marketing. CRM software is ideal for unearthing this information because it accumulates data from each channel and compares it. If you’re experimenting with a mix of strategies - SEO, social media, email newsletters, etc. - you’ll be able to see which is resulting in the most customers.

Most CRM software can be integrated with social media platforms to track how many mentions you receive on each network and what people think about your product or service. This can provide key insights into what you’re doing right and what you need to tweak.

2. Google Analytics

From helping you optimize your site to showing what channels are producing results, Google Analytics is a powerful tool – and it’s free. Google Analytics lets you see conversion data, as well as a glimpse of how readers are navigating and using your site. Through its multi-channel reports, you’ll be able to tell how marketing channels interact as well as the impact they have on your overall campaign. You’ll be able to see conversion paths that tell you which messages are working. You’ll be able to tell when your campaigns are starting to lag, a sign that it’s time to take another tack.

For all of its advanced options once you begin to dig in, Google Analytics also is great at the basics. It can tell you where you traffic is coming from, so you can identify strengths and weaknesses in your game plan. Once you can see what’s working – and what’s not – you can adjust your message, test, then adjust again if you need to.

3. Inbound Link Checker

Having lots of good links pointing back to your site is a strong endorsement. It’s a signal to search engines that you have valuable content, making your pages more likely to rank higher in search engine results pages. On the other hand, too many low-quality links can negatively affect your organic search visibility. That’s why it’s so important to pay attention to your inbound links and make sure that you’re getting referrals from quality, relevant sites.

Tools such as Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, and Open Site Explorer can show you what’s going on. They’ll look at your inbound links and measure metrics such as PageRank, outbound links, and anchor text. This information helps you determine which links are helping your SEO campaign and which are harming it. You can then take the necessary steps to remove the bad inbound links, which should ultimately improve your rankings. Fore more information on how to do that, see “How to Remove Toxic Links Pointing to Your Site.”

4. Social Media Management Software

While most CRM software allows some level of social media monitoring, tools like  Social Strategy1 specialize in it. These platforms integrate with social networks and track details of campaigns. Start with monitoring brand mentions to see how consumers are responding to your messaging. Next, create detailed reports to see how many social shares each network is generating, the virality of each piece of content, profile stats, and growth over time.

Once you begin doing this, some trends will emerge that’ll help you identify what your popular content has in common, and what you need to do to further improve your content strategy.

For more on how to integrate your social media and content strategies, see my article, “The Confluence of Content and Social Media: Insights for Success in 2014.”

5. Cloud-Based Apps

Remember when you used to keep all your data in a Word or Excel file, then dutifully create a backup disk? These days, you don’t have to be at the mercy of a single computer. Store your important information on the cloud, where anyone in the office can access what they need from work, home, or anywhere in the world.

Services such as Google Drive, Dropbox and Evernote allow you to store documents, presentations, spreadsheets, slideshows, images and audio files online. You can retrieve them via PC, smartphone or tablet. You can allow colleagues to access the files, too, making collaboration easy regardless of whether your collaborator works in the next cubicle or the next town.

6. Task-Management Apps

Just because the desk calendar has gone the way of the music CD doesn’t mean that organization is dead too. If you’re a one-person marketing department, it’s important. But if more than one person handles any aspect of marketing campaigns, it’s imperative.

Google Calendar is one of the easiest ways to stay on time and on track. You can set up appointments or create task lists – and you can share it all with friends or co-workers. You can sync to mobile devices, letting you check your schedule or set up appointments on the go. You can view the calendar by month, week or day, making it a fantastic way to track both long- and short-term views.

If the reminders via Google Calendar aren’t enough, an add-on app such as Remember the Milk will help keep you apprised of daily duties. It’s perfect for those who live by their to-do list. Simple and intuitive, this app can send reminders via email, text, instant messenger and other platforms. You can organize tasks into lists, letting you, for example, create a category for “five minutes or less tasks” and knock some of those out if you’re spinning your wheels on bigger projects.

For more about using task management software, and which ones I recommend, see my article “How to Use Task Management Software to Increase Employee Productivity.”

Conclusion:
None of these tools alone will propel your marketing campaign to success. But they all will make your day go more smoothly, allow you to be more productive, and leave more room on your mental hard drive for what’s really important

About the author

Jayson DeMers is the founder & CEO of AudienceBloom, a Seattle-based content marketing & social media agency.

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