How to Overcome Makeshift Marketing CoSchedule Buyers Guide

How to Overcome Makeshift Marketing Buyers Guide Marketing  departments are busy places. Everyone has too much to do, and not enough time. Plus, there are always competing deadlines to meet, metrics to monitor, and channels to manage. None of this makes keeping teams organized any easier. In fact, sometimes, it feels downright impossible. Naturally, most marketers rely on a variety of tools to keep things under control. From planning to execution to measurement, there’s a tool or ten for everything. They’re supposed to make life easier. They’re supposed to make marketing management feel, well, manageable. Except they don’t. Not as well as you’d like, at least. Everything feels scattered, and your disjointed workflows don’t seem to work at all. So, what gives? In an ironic twist, your tools could actually be killing your marketing team’s productivity. Fortunately, this problem has a name, and you can fix it. How to Overcome Makeshift Marketing: The Buyers GuideWhat Is Makeshift Marketing (And How Does It Hold You Back)? Marketers often do marketing with non-marketing tools. Like spreadsheets. Too many spreadsheets. For everything. Or, they choose single-solution tools that do one thing †¦ but don’t integrate with other software. This is what we call makeshift marketing, and it’s no way to work. What makes this approach so painful? It makes developing efficient workflows impossible. Switching between multiple tools that don’t sync with each other leads to a lot of tab-switching. It necessitates a lot of inefficient hacks and workarounds. Tedious copy-and-paste processes aren’t fun, and they leave too much room for error. It makes collaboration feel like a trip to the dentist. Clunky tools lead to clunky processes that lead to dreading going into the office. Fortunately, there’s a better solution out there: . Free Pitch Deck: Are you sold on but need help educating your team? Grab your free slide deck to pitch to your boss. What Is ? is the  industry-leading marketing suite  that brings all your content, social, asset management, email, and marketing project management tools together on one unified platform. It’s mission control for your marketing team, making it easy to plan and execute your entire marketing strategy. In short, it’s the all-in-one answer to makeshift marketing. Could makeshift marketing be blocking your marketing teams productivity?Who Is For? Anyone in marketing who needs to get organized. That includes †¦ Professional Marketing Teams Keeping in-house teams focused and collaborating effectively isn’t easy. With , managing everything from small projects to full-fledged multi-channel campaigns isn’t only possible, but it might actually be fun. Learn More: For Professional Marketers: One Calendar to Rule Them All Marketing Agencies Instead of managing multiple clients with multiple tools, get all your clients into . You can finally stop trying to manage tons of different platforms and get everyone on the same page. Learn More: For Agencies: Every Client. Every Project. One Platform. Small Businesses SMBs have enough things to worry about, without worrying about keeping marketing organized. Our marketing calendar keeps things together so business owners and small business marketers can spend their limited resources doing work that matters. Learn More: For Small Business: The #1 Marketing Calendar For Your Growing Business and Keeping Your Sanity Solopreneuers When you’re a solo marketer, you’re responsible for everything that needs to get done. Fortunately, there’s one tool built to keep your life in order, so you can focus on building your business. Learn More: For Solopreneuers: The #1 Editorial Calendar For the Solopreneuer Who Does Everything Universities When managing marketing campaigns and communications across multiple departments, there’s a lot that can do wrong. That’s why top schools like American University and the University of Georgia depend on to keep everything organized in one place. Learn More: For Higher Education: Mission Control For Higher Education Teams Why Use ? Most marketing teams use a wide array of tools to get work done: Editorial calendars  to plan pieces and content themes in advance. Google Calendar  to manage meetings and events. Social media management platforms  to wrangle multiple networks. Email platforms  to schedule and deliver newsletters. Spreadsheets  to build reports. More spreadsheets  to track project progress. Yet another spreadsheet  to store future marketing ideas. †¦ too †¦ many †¦ spreadsheets. You have nightmares about endless color-coded columns. Analytics platforms  to prove your work is driving results. Communication apps  to keep inner-office chatter out of your inbox. Numerous publishing and execution tools  for different types of content. Note-taking apps  for storing memos and documentation. Project management tools  to keep creative teams organized. If that sounds like a lot of software, this list is only scratching the surface. Here’s a visualization of the martech landscape from back in 2011: Of course, the marketing industry has matured since then. The number of tools we have to choose from has grown accordingly. Here’s a similar visualization from 2017: That is an overwhelming number of tools and services to choose from. If looking at this makes you feel like popping an aspirin, you’re not alone. But, the market has grown because marketer’s needs have grown. We have more options for more specialized solutions than ever. In theory, this should make life easier, right? The answer is a resounding â€Å"kind of.† Marketers are still left using tools that weren’t made with marketers in mind. To make matters worse, purpose-built marketing solutions often don’t integrate with one another, either. This means: Marketing tool stacks are disconnected. When tools can’t talk to each other, keeping things organized gets difficult. Inefficient tools lead to inefficient work. For marketers, time is money, and time wasted due to tools that don’t scale is unacceptable. Managing projects and campaigns across multiple tools increases odds for errors. Copying and pasting content out of a static calendar into a CMS? Tracking progress between a spreadsheet and two team management apps? The more manual effort required to move data, the more opportunities exist for things to go wrong. Referring back to the marketing tool map above, it all leads to one question: Do you really need (at least) one tool from each of those product categories? With so much work to do and software to manage, marketing teams need one version of truth to guide them. Something that can consolidate the tools they use most day-to-day. A platform that’s actually built for marketers. One that can replace copy-and-paste processes and end the tyranny of countless spreadsheets. That platform is . Im replacing my copy-and-paste marketing processes with @How Can Help Beat Makeshift Marketing? is built to empower teams to push past makeshift marketing for good. Let’s take a deep dive into some key areas where streamlining marketing workflows with makes more sense than doing things the old-school way. One Place to Start Every Project With a makeshift marketing approach, projects live in several different tools. That makes it tough to know where to look, for what, and when. With as your team’s go-to marketing hub, you have one place to start planning every project and campaign. Visualize your entire marketing strategy. With Custom Content Types, mapping out every piece of content you’re working on it simple. See every project and campaign on one calendar. becomes your marketing team’s single version of truth  to see what’s ahead. Stop switching tabs between multiple apps. Eliminate confusion over which projects live in which app. Bring them all home into one cohesive marketing hub. With @as your team’s go-to marketing hub, you have one place to start planning everyOne Place to Manage Every Workflow From planning to execution, managing marketing workflows  isn’t easy. There are plenty of ways things can go wrong. Odds are, you’ve experienced a lot of them yourself. Part of the problem stems from tools that aren’t built to support smart marketing workflows at all. That’s why is designed to organize every phase of your marketing processes. Communicate. With Discussion Threads, you can keep all communication attached to every project and piece of content. No more missing messages or email threads. Collaborate. Pass comments, exchange files, and manage version control. Create. With key integrations, you can execute everything in one place. @is designed to organize every phase of your marketing processes.Content: One Unified Editorial Calendar. enables teams to manage every project on one calendar. This gives everyone full visibility into all your marketing efforts. No more missed deadlines or last-minute surprises. It’s also easy to drag and drop entries from one day to another. Plus, with our WordPress integration, you can schedule blog posts to publish automatically. Write content in Word, Google Docs, or the built-in text editor, and you can even convert your docs directly into WordPress posts, or convert and download them as HTML (to be imported into another CMS). @enables teams to manage every project on one calendar. Heres how:Social Media Marketing: Schedule. Publish. Measure. Bringing your content and social media calendars together yields several benefits: Manage all your content in one place. Create content and schedule social promotion, together. Curate content from anywhere on the web with our Chrome extension. Stop switching between multiple platforms. You need to know what’s publishing, and when, regardless of the medium or channel. Instead of managing content in one place and scheduling social posts in another, bringing both under one roof makes it easier to get the full picture on your publishing schedule. Save time automating scheduling and reporting. Use ReQueue  to reshare top performing posts. Use Best Time Scheduling  to post at optimal times without manual effort. Use deep social analytics  to measure performance and produce visually appealing reports. Stay on top of all your social media conversations with Social Conversations Inbox. Reply, message and engage directly from your account. Instead of using multiple tools, manually building posting schedules and reports, you can save tons of time automating everything with a purpose-built platform. Plus, with our mobile app, you can easily manage social scheduling no matter where you are. @helps marketing teams save time creating, scheduling, and measuring social media postsMarketing Project Management: Stop Herding Cats. Get More Done. Creative professionals are hired because they’re good at what they do. Sometimes, they’re not the best at getting organized, though. In fact, it’s not unusual to see a writer or designer with a desk that looks like this: What looks like chaos, is actually a sign of a genius at work (or, at least, that’s what they’ll say). 😉 Now, this isn’t to say marketers are inherently disorganized. Far from it. But, even the most coordinated amongst us need tools to keep our work days, weeks, and months straight. Marketing project managers know this. And, if you’ve ever tried managing multiple teams or clients in numerous toolsets (a common headache for agencies and enterprises, in particular), you know the pain is real. Instead, is made to make corralling creatives and marketers easier. Here’s how we do it: Organize complex campaigns with Marketing Campaigns. Keep every piece of every campaign organized on one visual timeline. Use Task Templates  to build project checklists. Maintain consistent workflows  with these reusable checklists. Plus, approve (or reject) work with Task Approvals. Measure productivity with Team Performance Reports. See who’s crushing it, who’s falling behind, and adjust workloads accordingly. Plus, with our Zapier integration, you can easily sync popular project management tools including Asana, Trello, Basecamp, and Wrike with your calendar. Email Marketing: Schedule Newsletters With Your Favorite Email Service Provider. Email marketing drives 4,000% ROI. With Email Marketing from , you can: Seamlessly integrate with your *favorite* email marketing platform.  You already have a kick-a$$ email platform you know and love, so why give it up? With Email Marketing, you can easily connect your preferred email platform to with just a couple clicks. Write click-worthy email subject lines†¦every time.  With Email Marketing, you can use ’s *exclusive* Email Subject Line Tester to optimize and perfect every subject line to drive  more  opens,  more  clicks, and  more  conversions. Get full visibility into your ENTIRE  marketing strategy.  Say â€Å"buh-bye† to disjointed marketing content (and constantly jumping from screen to screen). With Email Marketing, it’s easy to see how your email campaigns relate to the rest of your marketing strategy and quickly make adjustments if necessary. And when it’s this easy to manage + optimize your already-powerful email marketing strategy†¦ †¦imagine how much  more  ROI you can drive with everything in one place.  Ã°Å¸Ëœâ€° currently integrates with MailChimp, Constant Contact, Active Campaign, and Campaign Monitor. How to Overcome Makeshift Marketing Buyers Guide Marketing  departments are busy places. Everyone has too much to do, and not enough time. Plus, there are always competing deadlines to meet, metrics to monitor, and channels to manage. None of this makes keeping teams organized any easier. In fact, sometimes, it feels downright impossible. Naturally, most marketers rely on a variety of tools to keep things under control. From planning to execution to measurement, there’s a tool or ten for everything. They’re supposed to make life easier. They’re supposed to make marketing management feel, well, manageable. Except they don’t. Not as well as you’d like, at least. Everything feels scattered, and your disjointed workflows don’t seem to work at all. So, what gives? In an ironic twist, your tools could actually be killing your marketing team’s productivity. Fortunately, this problem has a name, and you can fix it. How to Overcome Makeshift Marketing: The Buyers GuideWhat Is Makeshift Marketing (And How Does It Hold You Back)? Marketers often do marketing with non-marketing tools. Like spreadsheets. Too many spreadsheets. For everything. Or, they choose single-solution tools that do one thing †¦ but don’t integrate with other software. This is what we call makeshift marketing, and it’s no way to work. What makes this approach so painful? It makes developing efficient workflows impossible. Switching between multiple tools that don’t sync with each other leads to a lot of tab-switching. It necessitates a lot of inefficient hacks and workarounds. Tedious copy-and-paste processes aren’t fun, and they leave too much room for error. It makes collaboration feel like a trip to the dentist. Clunky tools lead to clunky processes that lead to dreading going into the office. Fortunately, there’s a better solution out there: . Free Pitch Deck: Are you sold on but need help educating your team? Grab your free slide deck to pitch to your boss. What Is ? is the  industry-leading marketing suite  that brings all your content, social, asset management, email, and marketing project management tools together on one unified platform. It’s mission control for your marketing team, making it easy to plan and execute your entire marketing strategy. In short, it’s the all-in-one answer to makeshift marketing. Could makeshift marketing be blocking your marketing teams productivity?Who Is For? Anyone in marketing who needs to get organized. That includes †¦ Professional Marketing Teams Keeping in-house teams focused and collaborating effectively isn’t easy. With , managing everything from small projects to full-fledged multi-channel campaigns isn’t only possible, but it might actually be fun. Learn More: For Professional Marketers: One Calendar to Rule Them All Marketing Agencies Instead of managing multiple clients with multiple tools, get all your clients into . You can finally stop trying to manage tons of different platforms and get everyone on the same page. Learn More: For Agencies: Every Client. Every Project. One Platform. Small Businesses SMBs have enough things to worry about, without worrying about keeping marketing organized. Our marketing calendar keeps things together so business owners and small business marketers can spend their limited resources doing work that matters. Learn More: For Small Business: The #1 Marketing Calendar For Your Growing Business and Keeping Your Sanity Solopreneuers When you’re a solo marketer, you’re responsible for everything that needs to get done. Fortunately, there’s one tool built to keep your life in order, so you can focus on building your business. Learn More: For Solopreneuers: The #1 Editorial Calendar For the Solopreneuer Who Does Everything Universities When managing marketing campaigns and communications across multiple departments, there’s a lot that can do wrong. That’s why top schools like American University and the University of Georgia depend on to keep everything organized in one place. Learn More: For Higher Education: Mission Control For Higher Education Teams Why Use ? Most marketing teams use a wide array of tools to get work done: Editorial calendars  to plan pieces and content themes in advance. Google Calendar  to manage meetings and events. Social media management platforms  to wrangle multiple networks. Email platforms  to schedule and deliver newsletters. Spreadsheets  to build reports. More spreadsheets  to track project progress. Yet another spreadsheet  to store future marketing ideas. †¦ too †¦ many †¦ spreadsheets. You have nightmares about endless color-coded columns. Analytics platforms  to prove your work is driving results. Communication apps  to keep inner-office chatter out of your inbox. Numerous publishing and execution tools  for different types of content. Note-taking apps  for storing memos and documentation. Project management tools  to keep creative teams organized. If that sounds like a lot of software, this list is only scratching the surface. Here’s a visualization of the martech landscape from back in 2011: Of course, the marketing industry has matured since then. The number of tools we have to choose from has grown accordingly. Here’s a similar visualization from 2017: That is an overwhelming number of tools and services to choose from. If looking at this makes you feel like popping an aspirin, you’re not alone. But, the market has grown because marketer’s needs have grown. We have more options for more specialized solutions than ever. In theory, this should make life easier, right? The answer is a resounding â€Å"kind of.† Marketers are still left using tools that weren’t made with marketers in mind. To make matters worse, purpose-built marketing solutions often don’t integrate with one another, either. This means: Marketing tool stacks are disconnected. When tools can’t talk to each other, keeping things organized gets difficult. Inefficient tools lead to inefficient work. For marketers, time is money, and time wasted due to tools that don’t scale is unacceptable. Managing projects and campaigns across multiple tools increases odds for errors. Copying and pasting content out of a static calendar into a CMS? Tracking progress between a spreadsheet and two team management apps? The more manual effort required to move data, the more opportunities exist for things to go wrong. Referring back to the marketing tool map above, it all leads to one question: Do you really need (at least) one tool from each of those product categories? With so much work to do and software to manage, marketing teams need one version of truth to guide them. Something that can consolidate the tools they use most day-to-day. A platform that’s actually built for marketers. One that can replace copy-and-paste processes and end the tyranny of countless spreadsheets. That platform is . Im replacing my copy-and-paste marketing processes with @How Can Help Beat Makeshift Marketing? is built to empower teams to push past makeshift marketing for good. Let’s take a deep dive into some key areas where streamlining marketing workflows with makes more sense than doing things the old-school way. One Place to Start Every Project With a makeshift marketing approach, projects live in several different tools. That makes it tough to know where to look, for what, and when. With as your team’s go-to marketing hub, you have one place to start planning every project and campaign. Visualize your entire marketing strategy. With Custom Content Types, mapping out every piece of content you’re working on it simple. See every project and campaign on one calendar. becomes your marketing team’s single version of truth  to see what’s ahead. Stop switching tabs between multiple apps. Eliminate confusion over which projects live in which app. Bring them all home into one cohesive marketing hub. With @as your team’s go-to marketing hub, you have one place to start planning everyOne Place to Manage Every Workflow From planning to execution, managing marketing workflows  isn’t easy. There are plenty of ways things can go wrong. Odds are, you’ve experienced a lot of them yourself. Part of the problem stems from tools that aren’t built to support smart marketing workflows at all. That’s why is designed to organize every phase of your marketing processes. Communicate. With Discussion Threads, you can keep all communication attached to every project and piece of content. No more missing messages or email threads. Collaborate. Pass comments, exchange files, and manage version control. Create. With key integrations, you can execute everything in one place. @is designed to organize every phase of your marketing processes.Content: One Unified Editorial Calendar. enables teams to manage every project on one calendar. This gives everyone full visibility into all your marketing efforts. No more missed deadlines or last-minute surprises. It’s also easy to drag and drop entries from one day to another. Plus, with our WordPress integration, you can schedule blog posts to publish automatically. Write content in Word, Google Docs, or the built-in text editor, and you can even convert your docs directly into WordPress posts, or convert and download them as HTML (to be imported into another CMS). @enables teams to manage every project on one calendar. Heres how:Social Media Marketing: Schedule. Publish. Measure. Bringing your content and social media calendars together yields several benefits: Manage all your content in one place. Create content and schedule social promotion, together. Curate content from anywhere on the web with our Chrome extension. Stop switching between multiple platforms. You need to know what’s publishing, and when, regardless of the medium or channel. Instead of managing content in one place and scheduling social posts in another, bringing both under one roof makes it easier to get the full picture on your publishing schedule. Save time automating scheduling and reporting. Use ReQueue  to reshare top performing posts. Use Best Time Scheduling  to post at optimal times without manual effort. Use deep social analytics  to measure performance and produce visually appealing reports. Stay on top of all your social media conversations with Social Conversations Inbox. Reply, message and engage directly from your account. Instead of using multiple tools, manually building posting schedules and reports, you can save tons of time automating everything with a purpose-built platform. Plus, with our mobile app, you can easily manage social scheduling no matter where you are. @helps marketing teams save time creating, scheduling, and measuring social media postsMarketing Project Management: Stop Herding Cats. Get More Done. Creative professionals are hired because they’re good at what they do. Sometimes, they’re not the best at getting organized, though. In fact, it’s not unusual to see a writer or designer with a desk that looks like this: What looks like chaos, is actually a sign of a genius at work (or, at least, that’s what they’ll say). 😉 Now, this isn’t to say marketers are inherently disorganized. Far from it. But, even the most coordinated amongst us need tools to keep our work days, weeks, and months straight. Marketing project managers know this. And, if you’ve ever tried managing multiple teams or clients in numerous toolsets (a common headache for agencies and enterprises, in particular), you know the pain is real. Instead, is made to make corralling creatives and marketers easier. Here’s how we do it: Organize complex campaigns with Marketing Campaigns. Keep every piece of every campaign organized on one visual timeline. Use Task Templates  to build project checklists. Maintain consistent workflows  with these reusable checklists. Plus, approve (or reject) work with Task Approvals. Measure productivity with Team Performance Reports. See who’s crushing it, who’s falling behind, and adjust workloads accordingly. Plus, with our Zapier integration, you can easily sync popular project management tools including Asana, Trello, Basecamp, and Wrike with your calendar. Email Marketing: Schedule Newsletters With Your Favorite Email Service Provider. Email marketing drives 4,000% ROI. With Email Marketing from , you can: Seamlessly integrate with your *favorite* email marketing platform.  You already have a kick-a$$ email platform you know and love, so why give it up? With Email Marketing, you can easily connect your preferred email platform to with just a couple clicks. Write click-worthy email subject lines†¦every time.  With Email Marketing, you can use ’s *exclusive* Email Subject Line Tester to optimize and perfect every subject line to drive  more  opens,  more  clicks, and  more  conversions. Get full visibility into your ENTIRE  marketing strategy.  Say â€Å"buh-bye† to disjointed marketing content (and constantly jumping from screen to screen). With Email Marketing, it’s easy to see how your email campaigns relate to the rest of your marketing strategy and quickly make adjustments if necessary. And when it’s this easy to manage + optimize your already-powerful email marketing strategy†¦ †¦imagine how much  more  ROI you can drive with everything in one place.  Ã°Å¸Ëœâ€° currently integrates with MailChimp, Constant Contact, Active Campaign, and Campaign Monitor.