As a Marketing Consultant who has limited time with each client, I need to make the most of every moment, so I’m all about using tools that make my life easier and help me be more productive. Below you’ll find a selection of my favorite tools that I use weekly, daily, or hourly!
This is part one of two (to come) in a two-part series on my favorite tools as a marketing consultant.
Kanban
It’s great to have a clear long-term strategy and goals, but if you’re not able to break those down into monthly, weekly, and daily desired results and tasks, your team will feel lost and overwhelmed, and not experience a sense of achievement and fulfillment.
In order to make that exercise of breaking down larger strategic goals into smaller, digestible to-dos and results, I like to use what’s called a Kanban. Born out of Toyota for the industrial age, and repurposed by tech teams for managing their development sprints, Kanbans have now found their way into the toolkit of many types of teams, including marketing teams.
The basics of a Kanban are that goals are broken down into the smallest tasks possible within columns of backlog, to-dos, currently doing, and done. Tasks are moved forward along these columns as tasks progress. Everything is visible to the team and it’s easy to see when something is not moving along as planned.
My favorite Kanban tool happens to be Notion as it’s fully-customizable, but there are many Kanban tools out there, including Trello, Asana, Jira, and more.
A Kanban is best used in conjunction with sprint planning and retrospectives, and really is a foundational tool for getting your marketing team and efforts on track.
I wrote more about using sprints and Kanbans as a CMO Consultant here, so feel free to take a look if you want to learn more!
Project Success Plans
When getting short-term projects or events off the ground, it’s important that a Marketing Consultant makes use of organizational tools to make sure everyone on the team knows what they’re responsible for. Not as granular as tasks on a Kanban, for this wider “who does what by when” purpose I like using what I call a “Project Success Plan”.
I created my first Success Plan when working on quarterly in-person weekend-long events with 50 to 60 people in attendance. There were so many moving parts, from promoting the event, to organizing speakers, arranging cleaning services, and more. And because it was a recurring event, it made sense to have a template of everything that needed to be done and when.
Fast forward years later and I use a similar version of this Success Plan for any kind of project, event, or campaign launch. Basically, it has the area of responsibility, who is responsible, the deadline, and the current status (to-do, doing, done, overdue). It is a more high-level version of the Kanban.
As an example, “secure catering” might go on the Success Plan, while on the Kanban, you might add specific tasks such as, “research and put together a list of caterers”, “review proposals”, “send questionnaire to attendees regarding food allergies and intolerances”, and so on. I would say that the Kanban is more for your team, and the Success Plan is more for you as a CMO Consultant.
Miro
When I first discovered Miro, a visual collaboration/diagramming/brainstorming/mapping/anything tool, I immediately fell in love. It’s so intuitively easy to use, and extremely flexible.
Best of all? It makes you look like a genius. Miro comes with all sorts of out-of-the-box templates to get you started with whatever visual project you’re thinking of embarking on. Want to work on a brainstorm for marketing channels for a new product launch? Miro’s got fun, creative brainstorming templates you can use with your team. Want to mimic an in-person design thinking activity you would normally do with post-it notes and whiteboards? Miro has a design thinking templates up the wazoo.
I can go on and on about the benefits of using Miro as a collaborative visualization tool, but the best you can do is simply try it out for yourself!