5 useful tools to help you plan your marketing strategies

The right tools can make it easier to plan your marketing strategy but also improve the results you get from your activity

Leveraging tools can help you plan your marketing strategies more easily, but they can also help you improve your plan’s results.

But there are so many tools today that it can be difficult to pick the right ones. Meanwhile, picking the wrong tools would lead to waste of money – and precious time.

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In this blog posts, I've compiled five useful tools that can help you plan your marketing strategies; you’ll not only find some useful planning tools that you can use for all of your marketing plans, but also tools that target specific marketing strategies:

1. Trello

Despite Trello being mostly known for its team collaboration tools, it can be your best partner for planning content marketing. With its simple kanban view, you can map out all the stages of your content marketing on a board.

These stages can be represented by lists which include:

• Ideas
• Writing
• Editing
• Publishing
• Promotion

Every team member is aware of their tasks and can post updates on cards when they’re through or have challenges. It’s also easy to move a card representing a particular piece of content through the different stages with the drag-and-drop feature.

With Trello, you can add a card for a particular piece of content, provide a detailed brief, add links, and attach all the necessary files needed to create a piece of content.

You can create lists that show the different stages, from the ideas stage and up until your content is published. As you move your card through these lists from left to right, you can tag different team members who need to work on your piece of content at a particular stage.

And this is just one way to use Trello – just like you’ve seen with content marketing plans, you can use Trello to plan pretty much any type of marketing plan you want. Plus, you might even find some ready-made templates; simply google your keywords + Trello template to see if there are any available that you can use for your plans.

3. Evernote

To plan your marketing campaigns effectively, you need to collate ideas and save all the documents you need in one place. If you’re looking for a tool that helps with this, look no further than Evernote.

While working on pieces of content with your team members, you can create a shared notebook where every member can add their ideas towards the tasks. You can also post briefs for some pieces of content.

Evernote provides a web clipper browser extension that allows you to save articles and ideas related to your content. With the context feature, you can find related ideas to those in your notes already.

This tool will go through reputable sources online to find similar ideas. It can also search through your past notes to find ideas.

Apart from collecting ideas in one place for your team, Evernote has other features that help to plan and execute some of your marketing strategies, such as content marketing. For instance, you can create a checklist of your content marketing process.

This will guide your team members from the idea stage right until you publish your articles. Along with this, you can also set reminders for different tasks.

If your team uses Google Drive, you can integrate it with Evernote and get access to your documents and other files in Google Drive.

3. Agorapulse

To achieve your goals on social media, you need to be consistent in terms of sharing content and engaging with followers. However, it can take a lot of time to do this manually.

But with a tool like Agorapulse, you can plan your social media activities ahead of a week or even a month. With this, your marketing team can spend just a little time, achieve better results, and have time for other marketing activities.

How does Agorapulse help you to plan your social media campaigns?

First of all, it has a scheduling feature that allows you to set up your social media posts ahead of time. On your account, you can see the social media calendar which shows all your posts and publication dates.

It even allows you to create a queue for different types of social media updates like blog posts, podcasts, curated content, etc.

Added to that, you can reschedule a particular post over a period. This is a good feature if you’re trying to draw more attention to an important page on your website.

If you have a CSV file of your social media updates, Agorapulse allows you to import it to schedule those posts according to your needs.

Apart from that, you can also import updates from a website, or import your images.

To run a social media team effectively, there must be a system in place for collaboration. With a tool like this, you have the ability to assign various tasks on your social media calendar to different team members.

Lastly, Agorapulse provides detailed analytics about your current performance and the type of content that are likely to perform well. As a result of this, you can shape your plans to get better results in the future.

4. CoSchedule

Email marketing has become more complex than it used to be. Now, in order to get great results from email marketing, you need to create more personalized email content, set up drip campaigns and use different strategies for different types of leads.

With a tool like CoSchedule, this process can become easier. This tool provides an email strategy template that helps to map out all stages of your email marketing campaigns.

You can enter the buyer persona that shows the details of your ideal subscriber. Added to that, you have the option to add details about your different drip campaigns and the content type for various segments.

Another useful detail to add is your email frequency and the schedule for sending these emails. You can also map out how to go about A/B tests for different parts of your emails. With all these details, you have a solid plan for your email campaigns.

But you even get more than that. Integrations with email service providers are available to help you send and manage your emails from CoSchedule dashboard.

You can then select dates to schedule your emails.

After going through the process, you have an overview of your calendar, when an email will be sent, and by who.

What’s more, you can use CoSchedule to plan all of your marketing strategies in one place; you can collaborate with your team, create team schedules, and even publish some of your content and monitor your results.

5. Ahrefs

Ranking on search engines for valuable keywords can bring qualified leads for your business. With Ahrefs, you can carry out research that helps to plan the process of getting valuable traffic from search engines.

These are:

• Finding valuable keywords
• Creating great content that can rank for them
• Building backlinks to help the page rank

Using this tool, you can find details about a keyword you’re trying to rank for. This will provide insights into whether the keyword is worth ranking for.

After doing this, you can then see pages that are currently ranking for your target keyword. With this, you can see the level of competition for this keyword. You can go through the high-ranking pages to understand why they rank high.

You can also see the pages that are linking to these top-ranking pages. Consequently, you have enough knowledge to form your link building strategy.

Furthermore, these pieces of information are available in CSV format if you want to keep a permanent copy. With the information you get from Ahrefs, it’s easier to plan your search engine optimization strategy.

Conclusion

To plan your marketing strategies successfully, you need the right tools to help first. The tools outlined here will assist in making solid plans for different aspects of your marketing campaigns.

Use these tools to plan your marketing strategies today and executing your campaigns will become easier. Consequently, you’ll be able to hit your marketing goals faster and more efficiently.