August 18, 2023
Let's start with the fact that Elite Crew is a software house working with projects from the humanitarian, social impact, fintech and more industries. Where did the idea for this article come from you may ask? I'm the head of the marketing department (my position is Social Media Manager & Graphic Designer), I work with Weronika on daily basis, who is a Social Media Specialist & copywriter (she is the best!). The nature of my job requires coordinating tasks in my department and working on some projects with the development team. I was also involved in the rebranding and designing of the new Elite Crew website as a co-owner. So I will tell you what tools help me in my daily work in this specific environment.
I have always liked organizing my work. I believe that good organization is primarily about comfort and peace of mind. When I started working for Elite Crew, I was one-man team. I worked closely with our CEO and COO, so I offered to use Asana for this purpose. I have known this tool for a very long time and I have also used it in my previous projects.
What I value Asana for:
- calendar view useful for planning posts
- assigning people responsible for a given task
- the ability to assign tags with a chosen colour (e.g. tasks related to posts on social media are colour X, and tasks related to graphic design are colour Y)
- integrations (e.g. with Google Calendar)
- the ability to break down tasks into smaller ones, assign completion dates and responsible people
The next tool I use is Notion. Notion is great for creating company documentation such as structures, processes, rules of conduct, etc. It is easy to navigate and has many options for structuring files.
Google Analytics, Piwik.pro, and HotJar are the basic tools and are known to most marketers. So I won't write much about them. They are similar to each other and are used to analyze the traffic and behaviour of users of your website. And most businesses have a website. So if your company has a website, you must use them (or alternatives, but I recommend these).
At Elite Crew, we also work on the entire Google business package (i.e. Gmail, google docs, drive, meets, calendar, etc.). An alternative is, for example, a package from Microsoft, but I’m a huge fan of solutions from Google. They are intuitive, we can easily share something between people added to the organization and their products are often updated.
NordPass. In any organization, security is very important. This tool will be used primarily to organize your passwords, generate secure passwords and distribute them among employees added to the tool. It definitely facilitates work in marketing, due to the fact that this department uses many different tools for which hundreds of different passwords are used. And remembering passwords has long gone out of fashion ;)
Keeping your posts under control is a difficult task. Depending on which social media channels you create content for the company, you have different solutions to choose from. You can learn about Elite Crew's activities from LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, and Twitter. Not all post planners support all these platforms at once or you have to purchase a bundle.
One such tool that works well for us is Publer. Convenient to use, intuitive, and easy to integrate with your channels. There are 3 free integrations in the base, you have to pay extra for each additional one (it is not a fortune). So if you want to have everything in one place, it will be the perfect solution. Note that Meta provides a free business manager where you can also schedule posts (only for Facebook and Instagram). It is an extensive tool that also allows you to manage ads, view statistics of your fanpages and much more.
The following tools will definitely come in handy when creating content:
- Canva / Photoshop for creating graphics and video editing
- Headliner for creating automatic video subtitles
- Bit.ly for creating custom links and counting clicks
- Chat GPT as a helper to create a copy, propose various alternative versions
As I mentioned in the introduction, I'm also involved in various technological projects. One such project was the design of our new website and rebranding. So I learned how to work with developer tools. We worked in the SCRUM methodology. Scrum is an Agile project management framework that helps teams structure and manages their work with a set of values, principles, and practices.
One such tool is Jira, which is used to plan and track software development projects. It is a very convenient tool that allowed us to easily manage the work on the project. The backlog (i.e. all tasks to be performed in the project) is established. Based on the backlog and business needs, work is done in sprints. This allows you to verify the progress of work on the project, draw conclusions and improve it for future sprints. Very effective.
Another tool is Miro. This tool, thanks to its various functions, enables collaboration and visual work on anything. You can make charts, brainstorms, tables, processes, etc. in it. We use them for retrospectives and sprint reviews.
The last tool that I recommend you familiarize yourself with is Figma. This tool is most often used by UX and UI designers. I'm not saying here that you should learn to design, but it is good to know the basic functions that will allow you to understand the work that designers do. The basic one is, of course, commenting, it will also be useful to know how to click play mode, share projects and grant permissions, etc.
In the article, I listed the tools that help me organise my work in the marketing department. Of course, there are many other tools available on the market that you can use. I have not listed here all that I use every day, there are many more. The ones you see here are the basic ones that I checked and recommend. So if you work in a software house as a marketer, they should meet your needs.
Justyna Wiśniewska
