So the tools, I’m going to be showing you here are tools that I use almost on a day-to-day basis and make the work I do as a marketer and a business owner much, much easier. And i imagine if you’re a business owner, who’s managing their own digital marketing campaigns, or if you’re a marketer, who’s just getting started in the industry and you want to find out what tools you can use.
I imagine that most of the tools I mentioned in this post will be incredibly useful to you if you haven’t heard of them before, but the first one were going to talk about here is Zapier.
ZAPIER:
Basically takes that process and makes it much, much simpler especially for people who might not have any background knowledge. For me, personally, it just really makes things easier. There was a video that I made recently on How to connect Facebook lead ads with MailChimp and I did that through Zapier Now doing that with Facebook lead ads and MailChimp, for instance, otherwise would have been very difficult without Zapier, but it made the process of doing that much, much easier.
And if you’re doing similar work, connecting applications like those will be much, much easier. And if I just log in and quickly show you what Zapier looks like, I definitely won’t get into any of the details here, about how you use the platform and stuff because I feel like that’s appropriate for a separate post But if I take the example, I was talking about which was Facebook lead ads you can see Facebook lead ads there and then if I want to type in MailChimp, I just type that in, click it and then what you do is you would add a trigger.
So in this instance, it would be a new lead and then I would obviously want to add a subscriber to a tag, and if I quickly click, try it, this is how it would actually look if you are connecting the applications together Zapier So you would just give it a name and then you would start filling out these forms and then you would just turn it on like you can see up in the top right corner but that is that I don’t want to labour over the details too much here, but it really is a great platform to use especially as a marketer. A lot of marketers now, have to have more of a grasp over development work and being able to do a lot of digital stuff, much better and Zapier is just one of those tools that makes doing that and makes that learning curve much, much easier.
WEB FLOW:
Web flow is probably my favorite tool out of all the ones that I'm going to mention on this list and it's a website CMS. So it's the equivalent to what your WordPress, your Wix your Squarespace are they don't happen to be as big as the likes of Wix or Squarespace but they are most popular amongst marketers and developers and freelancers that want alternatives to those platforms that are more orientated for design and to a point development work.
I’m not going to get into web flow much like Zapier because that is definitely a post in and of itself, but I would highly recommend you check this out. If you’re looking at different website design options, this for me, ranks number one, it’s beat any other tool that I’veused in multiple ways.
One of the downsides to it though is that there is a big learning curve that comes with this platform, you really have to spend time, you have to be patient and you have to just go with it and really put the work in, in order to get good at using it, but when you get there the rewards, are definitely worth it.
LOOM:
Use it nearly on a day-to-day basis, not just for making videos, but I'd say that was probably the primary use of it, but you can use this to manage communications with your team. You can use it for project management, you can use it for outreach sales. You can basically use this platform for whatever you want and I would highly recommend that.So for me, this platform really comes into play because of its ease of use, it's very, very easy to use.
And it’s very, very easy, just to start recording a video and that’s one of the reasons why I love it.And if you’re working a lot, if you’re moving fast, if you’re at pace, if you’re constantly under pressure, this just makes doing this type of work much, much easier. And I would highly, highly recommend it regardless of whether you’re a marketer or not. If you’re making any kind of video.
SEMRUSH:
So kind of, coming in hand and hand with web flow. If you’ve got a website CMS, you’re also going to want to look at an SEO platform to use, so you’ve got bunch of different platforms that you can use, you’ve got SEMRush, you’ve got Uber Suggest, you’ve got Ahrefs, and a bunch more SEMRush, much like Ahrefs is one of the bigger ones, and they are my personal favorite and they have so many features and different stuff you can do with it.
But if you're really focused on your SEO, if you're focused on gaining rankings, if that's what you care about. If you care about gaining organic traffic through Google or any other search engine, then using an SEO platform like SEMRush will go a long way to helping you do that. And again SEMRush is a super big platform.
It’s super complex, its got a lot going on, but one of the key things that I think makes this platform stand out from some of its competitors are some of the added features that come with it so it’s got a lot of great features like social media management, you see an advertising tab here, if you want to manage your ads here, which I wouldn’t necessarily recommend, but if you’re looking to keep everything in one place, that’s a really, really good thing to consider.
And you can also do competitive research, and a bunch of other really cool stuff. And yes, I would highly recommend it overall. So, with that being said, let’s move on to something else. So MailChimp, now, depending on what you’re doing, maybe you haven’t already, maybe you’ve thought about it, maybe you’ve just not pulled the trigger.
Doing email marketing, in the 2020's is still quite an important thing. They're still going to gain results from it and it's still an important marketing channel and MailChimp is top of the list.
MAILCHIMP:
When it comes to beginner friendly email, marketing platforms and it is incredibly easy to use. It’s incredibly easy to get your emails firing and it’s what we use personally to manage our email newsletters or any offers we’ve got going because it just works really, really well and it’s super easy to use.
There are definitely alternatives to MailChimp that some people would argue that are better.But if you’re looking at this, in the sense that you’re starting out and you’re looking for tools that are easy to use and are going to save you some time.
Possibly, save you some money, then MailChimp is definitely one of these ones that comes up when it comes to marketing. So, with that being said, let’s move on again.
Canva:
So, in the next one, we have Canva, Canva overall is a design platform, where you can create a bunch of different stuff on Canva, you can create graphics, you can create videos, you can create PowerPoint presentation, you can create virtually anything that comes to mind on Canva. But there are some limitations, it is not as comprehensive as the Adobe suite, which are the top of the range when it comes to design tools.
What I use Canva for and the reason why I like it is its ease of use. So if I’m ever really in a rush for something like at the moment, I’m putting out one video a day for Ambio Media and when I’m creating thumbnails, or in creating content for the blog, and I’m trying to create graphics that look really, really good, but haven’t taken me a lot of time. I use Canva.
If I was taking more time and if I was investing more time on my design, I’d probably stick with the Adobe suite just because it has that extra level of capabilities. But if you’re doing very basic design stuff and you’re just looking for something that’s really quick to use. Canva is definitely top of the list when it comes to that. It has a massive following, it has a massive base.
HOT JAR:
Kind of going hand-in-hand with web flow and SEMRush, HotJar will really help out when it comes to conversion rate optimisation. So when you get people to your site, when you do your advertising, your email marketing, and your social post posts, and whatever it might be, when people actually get to your site, one of the things that you’re really going to want to think about is how can I make sure that they’re going where I want them to go? And the problem is that a lot of the time, you don’t really know.
Where people are going. Yeah, you can setup conversions on your analytics, you can do a lot of different stuff, but HotJar actually allows you to see what people are doing on your site and it actually allows you to see video screen recordings of what people are actually doing on your site,and this can be really useful, because if there’s an error, when it comes to functionality, when it comes to a button, not working, or just some basic error, that may be hurting your site overall. you’ll be able to identify it through, HotJar. Which otherwise would be very difficult to do if you weren’t actually really paying attention to what was going on in your site.
HUBSPOT:
I have is HubSpot, HubSpot is a customer relationship management tool, a CRM and we also recommend our clients use it. It definitely is at the front of market, in the front of people’s mind when it comes to the gold standard for a CRM.
It kind of goes hand-in-hand with MailChimp and some people use MailChimp as a CRM because their not doing too much with the contacts that they generate but if you’re doing more complicated stuff, you have more complicated workflows and you’re just looking to do better work and manage things better then I would definitely recommend HubSpot. Its beginner packages are definitely worth the money.
Trello:
Trello was essentially a project management tool. Now, instead of logging into Trello, if we just look at this graphic here, this is basically what Trello looks like and essentially it allows you to manage different projects you’ve got. It’s really good if you’re looking to just get a lot of information out but you also want your team to be able to see what you’re coming up with and what different things you’ve got going on.
I think this is really useful because a lot of the work that we do as a marketer, a lot of the work you’ll do when you’re trying to implement digital marketing. strategies, is manage your projects and if you’re not on top of things, if you don’t really know what’s happening, if you’ve not got a schedule lined out, if you’re not got these to-do lists in place so that you and your team are all on the same page, things can get very overwhelming very, very quickly.
