Management tools help you run your team more efficiently, and they’re essential to running a high-performance marketing organization. This is a broad category of marketing tools, but it encompasses everything from budgeting to project management. It also includes collaboration tools that can help your team work together more efficiently.
All of these tools together might seem like overkill, but it’s important to remember that each plays a critical role in running a marketing organization. And the data shows that leveraging these tools in the right way can have a positive impact, too. For example, marketers who use agile project management tools were 252% more likely to report success in their campaigns. It’s clear that management tools are important to marketers, and in this roundup, we’ll assess how different management platforms can help you run your business more efficiently. Let’s get started.
Seven types of martech management tools critical for success
1. Talent management
Talent management tools are primarily HR-focused, as you might expect, and there are more than 50 of these platforms on the market today. They help marketing teams manage their employees’ logistics, from vacation time requests to processing compensation increases. Many teams also use tools like LinkedIn or Greenhouse to find promising candidates to add to their team.
Marketing organizations looking for a comprehensive talent management system can consider tools like DeepTalent or BambooHR. These platforms enable marketing leaders to automate the performance management process, and even input individual targets for their employees. If needed, they can also integrate with other enterprise platforms like SAP to pull in even more data about employees.
2. Product management
Product management tools can help marketing teams measure the effectiveness of their products. These platforms are generally more widely used in organizations with digital products. Product management platforms can measure everything about (Read more...) product, from user engagement to purchase paths, and more. This data is invaluable because it can give marketers the insights needed to optimize the funnel and their marketing offers within the product itself.
Tools commonly used by product managers include platforms like Atlassian and ProductPlan. These platforms help facilitate the software development process and are often used in collaboration with marketing during development cycles. Some of these tools also aid in project management, making themselves useful to marketers even outside of product development. Wrike and Sopheon are two examples of such project planning platforms – both are frequently used by marketers and project managers alike.
3. Budgeting and finance
There are more than 30 of these platforms, and they’re all about helping marketers get the most out of every dollar they spend. While frequently used by finance organizations budgeting and finance tools are also leveraged by marketing teams to stay on budget too. Marketing managers often use such platforms to manage vendor payments, event budgets or pay freelancers for creative. Last year, 27% of marketers reported that securing enough budget was their top professional challenge. This makes having a quality finance tool all the more important.
For a pure budgeting tool, many marketers use tools like Budgeta. But for a more holistic view of the business, it’s worth investing in a performance management platform like Allocadia or Longview. These platforms give marketers visibility into the investments being made across the organization, as well as the ROI on those investments. Having this kind of visibility into your marketing data is critical for knowing where to strategically invest next.
4. Collaboration
Collaboration is a nebulous term, but what’s important to know is that these tools simply help your teams work together more effectively. Some collaboration tools help marketing organizations brainstorm on new ideas, while others simply aid in easier communication.
Platforms like Zoom and BlueJeans are popular video collaboration tools that help marketers work together in real-time on a global scale. Beyond just video chat, these tools also offer features like screen-sharing and live chat to aid in collaboration. Some platforms such as Conceptboard and Slickplan even act as virtual collaboration spaces. These tools help distributed marketing teams to collaborate across borders and design marketing plans or new creative briefs.
5. Projects and workflow
There are nearly a hundred platforms dedicated solely to helping marketers manage and improve their productivity. These tools span a broad spectrum, from conventional project management to time and activity tracking solutions. Most organizations have a surprisingly high project failure rate (sometimes up to 70%), so having a tool in place to keep track of every workstream is essential.
Whitepapers
This category is almost exclusively comprised of project management platforms like ProofHub and BrightWork. These platforms help marketers keep track of all projects in one place, which in turn increases accountability across the organization. Many of these tools also integrate with external platforms like SharePoint for consistent tracking across the entire team. Some project management platforms such as Brightpod are even designed specifically with marketing teams in mind.
6. Agile and lean management
Many of these tools are also project management tools in some way, but they slant more towards agile and lean development. Originally commonplace in software organizations, agile management has now been adopted by marketers as an efficient way to quickly iterate on a given campaign or product. 37% of marketers already use Agile in their day-to-day work, and that trend is only increasing.
It’s important to keep in mind that many agile management tools are used for more than just project management. Platforms like Pipefy and Kantree help marketers manage processes and other workstreams with ease. Some agile management tools are even focused on a particular niche like ZenHub, which is used for GitHub project management.
7. Vendor analysis
Beyond designing great campaigns and running analytics, a big part of every marketing leader’s job is also deciding which vendors to use. That’s where vendor analysis platforms come in. These tools help marketing organizations track all of their software in one place, and decide which platforms are worth using next.
Some of the largest B2B platforms in this space are SiriusDecisions and G2 Crowd. They both gather thousands of data points to make vendor recommendations, and can even work directly with marketers on other projects like building KPIs. There are also more lightweight web apps, like TrustRadius and Capterra.
Conclusion
Management platforms are an essential component of the martech universe. They help marketers keep track of their work, and ensure that campaigns are ready on time, and on budget. But they are also crucial to keeping marketing in sync with the rest of the organization.
And staying organized pays off – in fact, recent research indicates that the most organized marketers are 397% more likely to report success in their campaigns. From this statistic alone, it’s clear that leveraging management tools is a critical component of every successful marketing strategy.