Remote work has been increasing rapidly over the past five years, and in this peculiar time, more businesses than ever before are in WFH mode, and finding the best marketing tools for remote working teams has become a need.
Many are quickly learning that working from home has its own unique benefits and a few drawbacks.
As a freelancer who works exclusively remotely and as a third-party contractor with a large number of clients, I’ve gotten familiar with these tools and can vouch for their effectiveness.
In this post, we’re going to take a close look at five highly effective and easy-to-use marketing tools that facilitate remote work for team members.
Let’s be honest: communication can be a little more difficult if you’re trying manage intricate work with multiple team members from a distance, especially if everyone is used to being two cubicles apart and able to check in with each other effortlessly.
The Best Marketing Tools for Remote Working Teams
If you’re struggling to facilitate teamwork with your marketing crew while remote working, you can rest easy knowing that there are some great tools and solutions available that can help.
Here are our experts’ Top Five picks.
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is an outstanding social media management tool, and it was created to help facilitate social publishing, scheduling, and community management while you’ve got multiple team members hard at work trying to connect with your followers.
With Hootsuite, you can upload posts for multiple platforms months in advance, create a cohesive content calendar, create queues of evergreen content to fill in any gaps, be alerted to all new engagement (including private messages and public responses), and more.
This is useful in and of itself, but it’s team-oriented features are exceptional.
You can customize your brand’s individual account so that one member (like a supervisor, or you) has full oversight of the account. Team members can create posts for the calendar, but then submit them for your approval. Those posts can only be published once you give them the okay.
You can also have a manager assign different interactions from customers– including incoming messages or questions on a post– to individual team members. This ensures that absolutely no inbound communication from followers (or potential followers) goes unanswered, and it prevents your team from scrambling trying to figure out who needs to answer what.
Social media management can absolutely be downright chaotic as your business grows and the number of channels you’re on increases.
Using a tool like Hootsuite consolidates some of the chaos into one, easy-to-follow dashboard. This is crucial for successful management even if everyone was working together in the same office, but it’s even more important when they’re not.
Oh, and Hootsuite is joined up with AdEspresso, so if you’re a subscriber using both tools, make sure you’re taking full advantage of that collaboration to better manage your paid Facebook and Instagram Ads in addition to your standard social management, too.
2. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a must-have marketing tool for teams who are doing any kind of content marketing work with remote workers, especially if you have multiple freelance contributors and a busy content calendar.
When you create a new post through CoSchedule, you can sync up your account with your site’s WordPress. While creating each post, you can assign an author, add the headline, and set up categories.
When you do this, you can use their native Headline Analyzer to get feedback on how effective your headline will be at capturing audience attention. (It’s dead useful, and you can use this feature for free here).
In addition to easily uploading and scheduling (and rescheduling, if needed) your content to go live on certain dates, you can also set up posts for each social platform that you’re on.
Social sharing is often a key part of most brand’s content distribution strategy, this is a huge advantage; you can set up a social sharing schedule right there while you’re editing the post.
Like Hootsuite, CoSchedule was designed to improve the content marketing and distribution process for teams. While you can definitely use this tool even as a single-member team, it’s extremely easy to use for larger crews, too, and can help you create a cohesive content calendar even if everything feels a little chaotic.
3. Lucidpress
Lucidpress is a pretty impressive tool, especially for businesses who need a little help with design work. It offers a ton of Cloud-based templates that you can use to quickly design everything from content marketing materials like whitepapers to direct mail print outs and brochures. And best of all, this tool is all about collaboration.
These templates are all drag-and-drop, so they’re unbelievably easy to use even if you have absolutely no design experience.
You can incorporate standard brand elements, like specific colors or fonts that you use regularly, and create a new template from scratch or upload a previously-made design.
Every step along the way, team members can submit documents and designs for approval, allowing project managers or team leaders to sign off before anything goes to the next stage.
For teams working remotely but still needing to work cohesively to create resources like physical print-outs or PDFs, this is a great tool to consider.
You can even leave comments in real-time, just like you would in a Google Doc, speeding up the communication process significantly.
4. Salesforce
Salesforce is a fairly extraordinary, all-in-one lead generation and sales management tool. And it’s just as effective when your teams are using it remotely as it would be if they were all communicating in-office.
This CRM tool uses machine learning and predictive algorithms to improve forecasting and help your team with automation features, making it easier for you to nurture leads and convert leads into sales.
One of the best things about Salesforce is that it allows you to track every interaction with every potential customer coming your way.
Your sales team is able to view their profile to see when they were last in touch, what their objections were, and what they were interested in.
There are automated follow-ups and canned responses that can speed everything up, but the personalization features are outstanding and can make the difference when you’re trying to convert a sale.
The teamwork features are great here, allowing groups of team members to work together on a single account (called account teams), offering great customer service and prompt responses.
Salesforce is a comprehensive tool, which is one of the reasons it’s so popular.
If it’s not a 100% perfect fit for what you need, however, there are plenty of great CRM tools out there. Look for one that fits your budget but that also offers great analytics and teamwork features.
5. MailChimp
There are a lot of big email software options out there, and I’ve always said that MailChimp is my personal favorite. That’s partially because it has a great, intuitive interface, and partially because it’s got amazing collaboration features that make my job as a third-party freelancer much, much easier.
When someone is currently working on an email, other team members can see who’s in the email editing it (much like WordPress, if you’re familiar with that). This can help you make sure that no one is actively and accidentally undoing the work of someone else.
You can also send test emails to multiple users.
Which is great if you want to have a team leader sign-off on the final design and to ensure it’s working on multiple types of devices before you send it out to your entire subscriber base.
When you do this, you can include instructions, like “please confirm receipt” or “please click through to landing page.” 
Team members can also leave comments on a single campaign, making collaboration much easier, especially if you’re working with a large volume of emails that you’re working on at any given point in time (which is almost always the case).
Which of These Marketing Tools for Remote Working Will you Try?
There are plenty of great marketing tools out there that can increase the impact of your campaigns. Our experts think these are the best ones, those that we love and use on a daily basis.
Every tool on this list can help you do that while also encouraging your team to work together while still working remotely.
This is crucial, even if the remote work is temporary or you only want to work with some freelancers, consultants, or agencies remotely part-time.
Having marketing tools that facilitate remote work is essential to keep everyone on the same page (and your marketing campaigns successful) no matter what your team members are.
And right now, we all know that’s a win.
What do you think? Have you used any of these remote-friendly marketing tools before? Did we miss any of your favorites? Share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below!