As a marketing professional your life is in a state of perpetual motion. The introduction of digital marketing just added to the frenzy. Print marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing….when will it end?
Stop! Take a Deep Breath. Whew.
Now, here are some tools that will keep you on track while keeping your sanity. Seriously, you should not be marketing without them.
For Planning and Strategy: Evernote (Free and Paid Versions)
Evernote is so much more than a note-taking tool. Yes, you can use it for that but it’s what Evernote does with your notes, and anything else you put into it, that makes it an indispensable tool for planning and monitoring your marketing strategy.
Here are the things you can put into Evernote:
- formatted text – save articles to read later, type notes
- web pages – ideas and resources for content
- parts of web pages - (yes, you can “clip” part of a webpage rather than keep the whole thing)
- photos and images
- voice memos
Here is what you can do with those notes:
You can title the notes however you like. You can create customized tags for each note. Then you can save the notes in a notebook that you name; you could have a notebook for every topic under the sun. All of your notes and notebooks are stored in the cloud instead of your computer; you can load Evernote onto multiple devices and synchronize the notes between them. You can share notebooks with other team members. And, of course, you can search your notes by tag or by keyword search.
It’s so much better than your overstuffed planner full of scribbled notes and pieces of paper. Or an Excel spreadsheet with no place to put a lot of text.
Use Evernote to brainstorm blog posts, keep running lists of possible content topics, organize your thoughts, and more.
Organization: Google Calendar (Part of Google Apps for Business)
What does every great content marketer need? An editorial calendar. And Google Docs in eminently suitable for creating and sharing it. Planning out your content for the next three to six months or longer takes some up front time but saves you a lot of headaches down the road.
Like Evernote, Google Docs can be accessed on any web device. It can be easily shared with others. And you can have multiple calendars for different purposes.
Google Docs comes loaded with tools to create and organize calendar entries including color coding and setting notification alarms. There is plenty of room to put text notes within an entry so you can put reminders and links to resources, phone numbers, addresses, and anything else you need right in the entry. There’s even a place for attachments like images and documents.
Once the calendar is created, decide on the frequency for posting or sharing in your various digital strategies. Then brainstorm some categories of content you want to cover and follow up with post ideas for each topic category. A calendar can also help you keep your message consistent across channels.
Finally, put your task list into the calendar and block out time to create the content. Task list items can be assigned to team members and the calendar made available to everyone or just to a select few.
Spelling and Grammar – Grammarly (Paid Subscription) and Microsoft Word (Spellcheck)
According to the Grammarly website, this application checks for over 250 types of spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors as well as increases the size of your vocabulary and suggests citations. You use it by copying and pasting your content into the Grammarly editor or you can get a plug-in for Microsoft Office. Grammarly then provides mark up to identify problems and suggest corrections. This is a paid service.
You can get a similar service through Microsoft Word. Occasionally MS Word’s grammar checker is not entirely correct and it can be difficult to determine and fix the problem. The spell checker has a limited vocabulary, although you can add words to the list yourself. Just be sure you have the spelling correct and understand that MS Word considers Bat, bat, and bats three different words and will flag Bat if only bat is in the vocabulary list.
Marketing Automation – HubSpot
HubSpot customers have access to some incredible automation tools, including a blogging platform and marketing Workflows. Within Workflows you can:
- set up emails and lead nurturing
- send internal notifications
- perform lead scoring
- personalize web content to the specific viewer
Workflows can be created from the ground up or around your personas and goals. All information about each lead is aggregated and integrated into the workflow best suited for it so you can run entire personalized campaigns.
HubSpot’s blogging platform isn’t just a blank editor; it will provide instructions as you type to maximize your SEO efforts. You can easily add calls to action inside the blog platform and turn it into a conversion tool. Plus you can customize for individual email subscriptions. Mobile optimization is built in.
Everything throughout HubSpot gets fed into an analytics engine to help you monitor and improve performance.
Content Sharing - HootSuite/Hootlet (Free and Paid Versions)
It seems like a new social network crops up every day. Not all of them are critical to your business but you probably have more than one social media account to monitor and engage with.
Hootsuite is a social media management tool to help you keep up with all your social channels inside one platform. This is a great way to monitor mentions of your company or specific topics and trends. It’s possible to watch and post to multiple social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ from Hootsuite.
Hootsuite also allows the service to be shared across team members. It is device agnostic and perfect for minimizing the time you must spend managing your social channels. Hootsuite provides a browser extension called Hootlet. This extension allows you to schedule messages, optimize delivery times, and share links. It is extremely simple to install and use.
Most of these tools are available through a free service or for a reasonable subscription. You can demo with free trials and decide if the tool will work for you before committing.
Today’s marketing professional just has too much to do and not enough time or resources to do it. Tools like these ease that burden considerably, freeing up time for other endeavors.
