By Bridget Flanagan, Published November 1, 2014
I’m all about two things. 1. Generating quality leads and 2. removing unnecessary challenges from my day (and making sure you aren’t failing on LinkedIn). In the nature of making your 2015 as successful as possible, I want to share a few of my favorite marketing tools that I use on a daily basis. They make my make life easier, decisions more data driven, and my content more creative. We all have our own marketing toolbox, here is a look into mine. Here are my top 8 tools that are going to make your life as a marketer easier in 2015.
HubSpot
If you are not alreading using HubSpot that should be your absolute priority in 2015. Plan it into your budget and get ready to rock your marketing in 2015. HubSpot is the base for all of my marketing, it provides a one stop shop for email marketing, social publishing and monitoring, landing pages, CTAs, analytics, blogging… the list goes on. Not only does HubSpot make my life easy by having ALL of my main marketing tools centrally located- it’s easy to use. And for the CEOs that want to see ROI and data, you got it. HubSpot offers a wealth of analytics to drill into how successful you are. Oh yeah, they also now have an intergrated CRM. Your life is about to become that much easier and your marketing THAT much more impactful.
Dlvr.it
Dlvr.it is my content sharing tool of choice. HubSpot’s social inbox makes it easy for you to make some noise about your blog on social media, dlvr.it makes it easy for your team to share that content. Getting your team to set up a dlvr.it account can take your blog views from a handful to thousands. Leveraging the social networks of your team is a great way to grow your audience. Here’s how it works: set up an account and select the RSS feed you’d like to share and boom, your company content is shared across twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. You’ll have more eyes on your content and reach without having to manually share blog posts. It’s an easy way to increase blog views.
Canva.com
Visual content is snackable and shareable. Whether you don’t have a designer in house or your designer doesn’t have the bandwidth when you need it- canva can help. Want a new report cover page? Need a Facebook cover image? Yeah, you can do that too. It gives the non-designer the ability to create some awesome visual content to apply to their marketing. I cannot say enough positive things about canva. You need to be using it right now. And it’s dirt cheap, if not free.
Infogr.am
Infographics are some of the most frequently shared pieces of content out there. Sometimes you have a great idea for a data driven visual but you know powerpoint just isn’t going to cut the mustard or tell the story. With infogr.am you can create free infographics with tons of icons, fonts, and templates to choose from. Want to work on one with a team? You can do that too. Infogr.am allows for document sharing.
Google Adwords Planner
Marketers were heartbroken (and stressed) when Google put keyword data on lockdown. Sigh, that was a hard day for all of us. But they haven’t completely removed your ability to have a keyword focused approach when it comes to content. With the Adwords Planner you are able to generate keywords suggestions to include in your strategy. Want to know what types of keywords to use? Plug a few ideas in and it will give you suggestions based on your input. It also shows the search volume and suggested value (among other things). Find a high volume low cost term and boom, you’ve got a great word to include in your blog post.
Sitealerts.com
Want to get a quick look at the health of your website? Or even better, want to check in on the competition and see where all of their traffic is coming from and keywords they are ranking for? Want to look at their referring sites, have a gander at their social activity? Sitealerts uses open api information and can let you in on some pretty useful data. Part of your business strategy involves understanding the competion, with sitealerts you have a handy tool to keep you in the loop. Oh, and it’s another awesome tool brought to you by Dharmesh Shah, the CTO over at HubSpot and creator of inbound.org (and also one of my personal heroes). You can thank him personally on twitter- @dharmesh. You’re welcome.
Hemingwayapp.com
Don’t tell anyone, but my grammar isn’t perfect. Before this tool I did quite a bit of editing with a red pen, old school style. Hemmingwayapp is a MUST USE tool for content creation. Nothing shakes up you audience like a blog post with grammar and spelling mistakes. It always feels like a speed bump regardless of the error. Write your content and plug it into Hemingwayapp and you’ll know how to clean it up. When you’re using a passive voice, or if the darn thing is just hard to read- you’ll find out. It will take your content from good to great.
Compfight.com
I hate having to worry about photo credits or allocating budget for stock images. Ugh, not fun. Compfight.com is my go-to resource for free stock images. It has a wide selection of photos and never lets me down. With a massive library you never have to worry about finding that perfect image for your blog post only to realize you have to pay for it. It also alleviates the need to credit the image and mess with the flow of your content.
Having the right tools in your toolbox makes a difference. Not only will these tools help you create exciting content but they will also provide the data to do it right. What are some of your goals for 2015? How are you setting yourself up for sucess in the new year? Getting organized in 2015 is a great place to start!
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