It’s the start of a new year and aside from losing the holiday weight (thanks to all that extra pie), you’re focused on making this year a better, more productive one than the year before. There’s a lot of work when it comes to digital marketing, and it can get overwhelming. To make things easier for you, we’ve compiled a list of our six favorite online tools to help improve your marketing strategy and streamline your daily tasks. Cheers to a more productive new year!
Trello
Marketers don’t usually work alone. They need input on their strategies and a way to share their ideas with others. Trello offers a forum for staff to collaborate with each other. You can organize projects large and small, create checklists, and track your progress. If you have different groups to work with, you can create special boards for each group. And you can get started for free (extra features cost more).
Google Analytics
You can’t be productive if you don’t know how many visitors or pageviews your website receives. Google Analytics helps you monitor how well your website is performing, and whether you’re achieving your online goals. It’s free and it gives you detailed reports on SEO, web traffic, and more. For a starting point, read our tips for beginners, and then move on to our guide for local businesses.
Hootsuite
Being productive means using your time efficiently. Constantly logging into all your social media profiles to write posts and update statuses is a definite time drain. Hootsuite lets you manage all your social media profiles in one stop. You can even schedule your social media updates ahead of time and analyze their effectiveness. There’s a free and paid version, so you can try it out before spending money. (Check out our guide to using Hootsuite.)
Canva
Good marketing content has engaging images and graphics. Canva provides simple graphic design options for social media, presentations, and anything else you might need to incorporate visual content. But don’t let the word “simple” fool you: the graphics are highly professional, so it won’t look like you slapped something together last minute. Bonus: you don’t need a degree in graphic design to use it and it’s free so it won’t strain your budget.
Rescue Time
To increase your productivity, it helps to know when you’re not being productive. And as sad as it might make you to learn you spent 10 hours last week watching cat videos on YouTube, it helps to have that information so you can figure out when you should be doing real work. RescueTime Lite is totally free and still gives you usable information. The premium version charges a monthly or annual fee, but you get more detailed information and website blocking. So maybe next week you’ll only spend 2 hours watching cat videos.
Connectivity
Staying top of mind for your customers is exhausting because it means constantly reaching out to them. Fortunately, Connectivity offers automated campaign messaging, so you can stay in touch with your consumers without manually sending them an email or call.
Digital marketing can seem a bit like going down the rabbit hole—once you get started you come across so many other options that it gets overwhelming. But these six tools can help you keep your marketing efforts focused, efficient, and productive, so you can still set aside time in the evening to watch those cat videos after all.
Top image credit: sergign/Shutterstock
Dylan Lake is a Demand Generation Manager for Connectivity.
