As customers become increasingly cynical towards traditional advertising, a lot of the marketers we work with are on the hunt for alternative ways to get those all-important conversions. One popular approach that’s been gathering followers in recent years is inbound marketing.
But the thing with an inbound marketing strategy is that it can take an inordinate amount of content to get things off the ground. For companies operating across multiple overseas markets, this can be a real headache.
With that in mind, here are some free tools to help you manage your team and keep everything flowing towards success for your international inbound strategy.
Trello
Trello is almost a household name now. It’s a project management tool that allows you to plan out the different aspects of a project, visualising all the tasks that need to be accomplished in chronological order with an overview of what stage they’re at.
The interface is perfect for those looking to plan simultaneous inbound marketing campaigns in different languages. If you’re creating large amounts of content it will let you plan out time for idea generation, content creation and translation services to ensure everything is tailored to each target market. The timeline feature lets you easily see who needs to do what, when, and quickly optimise the process.
Slack
Slack is something of a cross between a social media platform and a file sharing system. It lets multiple people collaborate in a virtual space to discuss and build on ideas, allowing for quick feedback and consequently, quick progress.
If someone’s working overseas, at a conference or a meeting, this is a great place to share spontaneous ideas or files, where a phone call might be unnecessary or difficult depending on time zones and locations.
If you’re building up content, it’s great to get ‘on the ground’ input at the ideas stage as you’re formulating new material for a new audience to ensure there aren’t any red flags that might be a problem in a different culture when it comes to calling on translation services.
Hootsuite
Inbound is all about making the most of your channels to connect with your audience and social media is an essential element in this. But how do you manage dozens of different accounts in different languages?
Hootsuite does the job. Rather than running each account as a distinct entity, you can plan social media posts across different platforms, including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Google+. The scheduling tool lets you plan tweets and posts well in advance and you can break things down for different teams and different individuals so there’s no crossover on who’s handling what.
If you’re managing multiple social media accounts, across multiple platforms, in multiple languages, it’s not hard to see the need for a tool like Hootsuite.
Unfortunately Hootsuite is actually only about half-relevant to the title of this article, since it becomes a paid service after you’ve added so many social media accounts. So you’ll have to forgive us on this one but it is one of the cheapest options out there for social media management on a global scale.
If you’re exploring new markets and marketing techniques, then take a look over our translation services – after all, there’s not much point managing your international inbound marketing strategy if there’s no international content to begin with.
