Team Impressa is a 100% digital team, which means that all of our collaboration has to be done online. When it comes to things like blog posts and social media content, that’s not terribly complicated. But how do we keep everyone on the same page when we’re working on more complex projects like website redesigns and in-depth ebooks or white papers?

It’s simple; we turn to our arsenal of digital tools.

Dreaming up smart and strategic content, well, that part is all talent. But getting that content planned, drafted, scheduled, and published is all made possible thanks to these ten excellent remote content marketing tools. We’ve organized them by category for your viewing pleasure: research, collaboration, project management, and publishing.

Best Research Tools

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is an extremely versatile tool for identifying what’s trending on the web. It’s perfect for researching potential blog post topics as it allows you to search a topic or keyword and identify its most shared articles, popularity over time, and more.

At Impressa, we use Buzzsumo to:

• Research questions people are asking about a topic
• Research trending topics
• Find backlinks to a given page
• Find influencers by expertise
• Monitor brand or topic mentions

Buzzsumo has plans for teams and agencies of all sizes beginning at $99 per month.

Hashtagify

Hashtagify is one of our social media team’s favorite tools. With Hashtagify, you can input a hashtag to analyze its popularity and get related hashtag suggestions.

When you upgrade to one of their affordable paid plans, you can also paste in an entire Twitter or Instagram post and get hashtag suggestions based on your copy. Hashtagify plans start at $19/month.

Best Collaboration Tools

Slack

Slack is probably Team Impressa’s most used tool—it’s the next best thing to a phone call or meeting. Because our team is spread across the globe, we rely on Slack for all of our planning and communication.

Chatting via Slack is faster than email and makes it far easier to organize conversations by project or client. We create a dedicated internal Slack channel for each client, and if the client wants to use Slack to communicate with us we’ll create a shared channel as well.

Slack offers both free and paid plans.

SnagIt

SnagIt is a must for remote content marketing teams! With SnagIt, you can record your voice and your screen as you walk through a process on your computer. It’s a great way to teach a new process to another team member—not to mention that it’s faster and easier than typing out instructions.

License two computers to use SnagIt for $49.95.

Google Drive

We’re sure you already know all about Google Drive, so we won’t bore you with the details. Put simply, it’s a versatile online tool for drafting and organizing shareable documents.

The new Team Drive feature is a simple new way of sharing documents among a group. A Team Drive differs from a regular Google Drive folder in that the documents inside are owned by a whole team instead of just one person. It works perfectly for sharing documents between two teams who both need easy access to them—like the client’s internal marketing team and our team.

Google Drive is free!

Smartsheet

Smartsheet is Team Impressa’s favorite content calendar planning tool. It’s an online spreadsheet app, but it offers more robust functionality than Google Sheets.

Smartsheet offers team and business plans starting at $15.

Best Project Management Tools

Trello

Trello is a great tool for project management, especially for visual thinkers. It allows you to organize projects using lists and cards in a Kanban view. You can assign cards to team members as tasks and add checklists, due dates, attachments, notes, and pictures to them.

We use Trello for two main purposes:

• To create processes to use as we work on projects
• To make lists of recommendations for clients as we do website audits or social media plans

You can use Trello for free, or upgrade for deeper functionality (beginning at $9.99/month).

Pitchbox

Pitchbox is an indispensable and powerful tool for handling influencer outreach campaigns. It allows you to search for influencers by keyword, create outreach templates, and send personalized communications en masse.

Pitchbox offers free private demos before you buy.

Best Publishing Tools

Hubspot

We love Hubspot! We use it to host our own blog and are super happy when our clients use it too. It’s a versatile digital marketing tool that serves as a CRM, blog and landing page manager, email marketing platform, and more. Hubspot also offers terrific online training courses through their Hubspot Academy.

Hubspot plans begin at $200/month.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social makes it easy to manage social media for multiple clients. With Sprout, we schedule social content, research trending topics, and monitor mentions.

Sprout Social plans start at $99 per user per month.

Do you use any of these tools? Tell us what your other favorites are!