:format()//media/how-to-get-your-marketing-team-out-of-a-rut-RQ.png)
Your higher education marketing team is populated by creative types.
Brand and advertising experts. Social media managers. Writers. Web and content designers. Media relations specialists. To name a few (and we love them all!).
These professionals tap into the right side of their brain to continually find inventive ways to effectively promote your educational institution to potential students and their parents, prospective donors, alumni, and the broader community.
At some point, though, creatives need to recharge their mental batteries and refresh their imagination.
As a higher ed marketer, you've also got to be on the lookout for better ways to collaborate with colleagues to increase productivity.
Thankfully, there's a wide choice of digital tools available to reinvigorate your marketing team's creativity and boost their output.
How, then, can you find the ones best suited for you and your team to develop their skills to their full capacity and support your brand?
This week, we're going through some of the top online resources to help you identify the best solutions for you and your team, and empower them to work together more efficiently so they can deliver the best marketing impact for your institution.
Background noises, conversations by colleagues, food smells—these and other office-life realities can prove highly distracting and detract from your team's output.
To put it another way, reducing mental overload increases attention span.
Focus@Will offers a clever solution: it provides scientifically designed music that will enhance your team members' concentration and productivity during work hours.
It's a valuable tool for maintaining sustained focus in busy or noisy environments.
The service provides a wide selection of instrumental tracks that aim to minimize distractions and promote a focused mental state, ideal for tasks requiring deep thinking, like content creation or strategic planning for your school.
Focus@Will provides scientifically crafted instrumental tracks that
minimize distractions and promote sustained mental focus
Pomodoro technique
Poor time management can be a major hindrance to even the most skilled professionals, especially university and college marketers who juggle several projects at the same time.
One proven solution is known as the Pomodoro Technique.
This time-management method breaks work into focused intervals—commonly 25 minutes—followed by short breaks.
Luckily, there's an app for that!
Pomofocus uses the Pomodoro Technique to help you stay disciplined and concentrated by encouraging working within these manageable short time periods, boosting your productivity and preventing burnout.
TomatoTimer allows your team to stick to these intervals.
By preventing fatigue, it encourages intense focus on work and can help your output and creativity.
It also instills a sense of urgency and accomplishment as you complete tasks within each focused session.
Like all work teams, higher ed marketing teams benefit from effective project management to facilitate your planning, organizing, and handling resources.
The project management tool Trello takes a visual approach that can help your team stay motivated and inspired by immediately seeing their work progress.
Trello uses Kanban-style boards, lists, and cards to organize tasks, ideas, and campaigns.
With it, your team can easily track their progress by moving cards through different stages, such as "Ideas,” "In Progress,” and "Completed,” providing a clear overview of project status.
It's got collaborative features so your team members can comment, attach files, and assign tasks, increasing their transparency and supporting their ongoing communication—while keeping everything centralized.
Trello is a visual project management tool that can help your team
organize, track, and collaborate in real-time
If the saying "a cluttered desk means a cluttered mind” is true, then helping your team members declutter both their online and actual workspace can only make them more productive.
(One of our team members here at Terminalfour frequently quips that if the above saying is true, what does an empty desk mean?)
Notion, this all-in-one workspace, helps keep ideas centralized and accessible, reducing clutter and promoting continuous creative thinking.
Notion combines notetaking, task management, databases, and collaboration into a customizable platform.
With this tool, your team can create templates for brainstorming, content calendars, wikis, or project trackers, helping streamline workflow and encourage creativity.
Your team can use it to organize content intuitively, embed multimedia, and share work seamlessly.
That makes it ideal for encouraging collaboration and innovation in a busy higher ed marketing environment.
Notion is a customizable workspace that combines
note-taking, task management, databases, and collaboration features
Many work teams still use physical whiteboards for presentations, planning, and other group exercises, but digital whiteboards offer some advantages, notably for remote teams.
The interactive digital whiteboard platform Miro is designed for collaborative brainstorming, mind-mapping, and visual planning.
Its flexible environment can help you spark innovation in your team by providing a space for the free-flowing exchange of ideas.
With Miro, your team can add sticky notes, drawings, diagrams, and templates in real-time, making it ideal for generating and refining creative ideas collectively.
It's got some versatile features for remote collaboration, such as sticky notes and mind maps that can be shared in real-time or with flexible timing.
These allow teams to explore concepts visually, use workflows, and develop new strategies or campaign concepts efficiently.
The digital whiteboard platform Miro can facilitate
instant collaboration, brainstorming, and visual planning for your team
Ah, where would marketing teams without skilled graphic and web designers be without Canva?
Not everyone has the skills or budget for programs such as Adobe InDesign and Photoshop. Canva is a popular solution to this.
The intuitive graphic design tool makes it really easy to create visually appealing content quickly with drag-and-drop features and customizable templates.
It's especially useful for higher ed marketers who want to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, and marketing materials but might not have advanced design skills.
And you can use Canva's extensive library of images, fonts, and elements can be used to accelerate your team's creative process to enhance your brand storytelling.
You can also use it as a team for design reviews and edits.
Canva is a graphic design platform that lets your team quickly and easily create
professional-looking visuals, social media content, presentations, and more
Creative individuals often are overflowing with new ideas. How will you capture these fleeting thoughts before they slip away?
Evernote is a popular note-taking application that lets you keep thoughts, research, images, and audio notes in a centralized digital notebook system.
Evernote's organizational features lets you tag, search, and categorize notes so you can have them at hand during campaigns or brainstorming sessions.
It's also a great place to collect spontaneous ideas and keep research and inspiration organized, whether for solo use or collective creativity and streamlined project management.
Note-taking app Evernote can help your marketing team capture, organize, and search ideas, research, and multimedia content in a centralized digital workspace
Mind-mapping is a great method to visually organize ideas and concepts using digestible, interconnected diagrams.
It makes it easier to get more creative, organize complex ideas, and discover new connections and solutions.
MindMeister can help your team explore, organize, and develop ideas graphically—and that can often help create fresh insights.
Whether it's creating complex diagrams that illustrate relationships, brainstorming new concepts, or outlining strategies, facilitating deeper understanding and innovative thinking, the collaborative features mean that your team members can contribute simultaneously.
These features let your team members contribute in real-time, adding ideas, comments, and edits directly to the shared mind map.
This will ensure that everyone on your team can lend their voice to shape the project, making it easier to gather a range of perspectives and build on each other's thinking.
Your team can more easily collaborate, brainstorm, organize, and develop ideas through interconnected diagrams by using visual mind-mapping tool MindMeister
Many teams use Adobe Creative Cloud Express (Adobe Express) because it's a user-friendly design tool that lets you really quickly create memorable visuals, social media posts, videos, and web pages without needing extensive graphic design skills.
Simplifying the design process can enable your team to experiment with new ideas and produce engaging visuals faster, ultimately augmenting their creativity and productivity.
Your team can use the resulting new designs to create templates that will speed up and ease future design.
The platform can help your marketers maintain a consistent brand aesthetic while saving time on content creation.
Adobe Creative Cloud Express's pre-designed templates, drag-and-drop interface, and extensive library of assets make it easy to produce professional-quality content efficiently.
The value of social media marketing for higher education is hard to overstate.
Yet managing social media content across Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, X, BlueSky, and others can be challenging and time-consuming.
Buffer makes it easy to manage all your social media in one place, with tools to schedule posts, automate workflows, and keep an eye on everything from a single dashboard.
By taking care of the repetitive stuff, this platform (or others like it) gives your team more time to focus on creating great content.
And with built-in analytics and reporting, it's simple to see what's working and adjust your strategy to get better results.
Schedule, publish, and monitor content across multiple social networks
from a single dashboard with social media management platform Buffer
Each of these digital tools targets a different aspect of the creative process workload management of busy marketers.
Incorporating one, several, or even all of these tools can help get your team out of a creative rut and encourage teamwork and sharing ideas.
Have you used any of these before in your team? Any other digital tools you've successfully worked with to elevate your educational institution's marketing team's efforts? Let us know in the comments!