Listly by Dawn Gribble
Whether a business has a small budget for marketing or a massive budget, there are tools that can help with their efforts – and some of them can also be used free of charge. In fact, there are so many tools that you can spend more time looking through them all than you do actually form your marketing efforts. So to help you find the most helpful and productive tools out there, we have compiled a list of our top 10 marketing tools for 2017.
If you have ever tried to master Photoshop and not managed, then you will love Canva. This is a graphic design tool for people who aren’t graphic designers and one of the big benefits of it is that it has a massive bank of ideas to use. Want a graphic for Pinterest to advertise your latest product? Then you can use one of the templates, swap out photographs and change the wording.
Website: canva.com/
Hootsuite is a social media scheduling software that makes it much easier to post to social media on a regular basis. You can use three accounts for free and there are various upgrade options if you need more than this. It has apps to use through smartphones and a browser app that makes sharing content you see on the internet much easier.
Website: hootsuite.com
To find content to share, you can spend hours trawling around the internet or you can use Feedly to collect those RSS feeds into one place and review them from there. The site is free to use although there is a subscription service for advanced integrations and you can store feeds in folders around topics or businesses. It makes it much easier to find the right content to share across social media.
Website: feedly.com
DropBox is a cloud storage site where you can store documents, photos, videos and files then access them across any device that is authorised to your account. It also makes sharing these things much easier and teams can all edit the same document within the software. You can also send files to someone so that they can access them on their own folder if you want a specific person only to receive the document or content. And because it is a cloud-based service, there is no worry about it malfunctioning or data being lost as it isn’t stored anywhere physically.
Website: dropbox.com
Mail Chimp is one of the original and still most popular email marketing software tools and is perfect to help you build your email list. It is free to use up to 2,000 subscribers and up to 12,000 emails per month then there are upgraded options that allow you more subscribers but also access to more features. These features include automation and delivery by time zone that allows you to offer a more personalised experience to your subscribers.
Website: mailchimp.com/
Grammarly is the next step up to the built-in spelling and grammar checker that you find in most word processing software. While it isn’t strictly speaking one of the digital marketing tools, it is crucial to ensuring all your marketing efforts are well written, grammatically correct and properly punctuated. The software is free to use though there are limits and you can upgrade it to get the premium subscription and help such as information about each error.
Website: grammarly.com
MissingLttr is another way to automate your social media marketing and make the whole process less time-consuming. The software takes the posts that you have added to social media and uses them to create a campaign where snippets of the content are used to create unique posts about the topic. So rather than simply re-sharing the same content every time, it shares new content that increases the chances that someone sees a piece they are interested in.
Website: missinglettr.com
Moz offers a range of tools, some of which are free and some are part of their subscription service. One of the most famous is through their Moz Bar with its rating scores for websites – the domain authority or DA is one of the metrics used to see how authoritative any given website currently rates. They also offer a keyword research tool, SEO audit and crawl services and backlink research as well as a range of other marketing resources that can help businesses of all sizes.
Website: moz.com
BuzzSumo makes it onto most lists of the best marketing tools because it helps you understand one of the ever-changing areas of marketing – keywords. You can look at online trends and the performance of keywords across recent and longer time frames through the tool. You can also see things such as social shares and other features that content has received to see what does well. It also helps you to find influencers, a big part of many marketing strategies currently. You can see who is talking about your topics and then look at approaching them to work with your brand.
Website: buzzsumo.com/
Regardless of the type of business you are in, one thing is for certain – the need to schedule tasks and remember to do them. This is where Asana comes in. The software is a project management software and far more advanced than a merely to do list – you can create projects, add tasks and even sections within the project to assign those tasks to. So you can create a section for each customer, for example, and then list the tasks to do for that customer such as publishing a blog post, updating social media or sending email newsletters.
Website: asana.com