Handy Tools for Marketers

Canva makes design simple for everyone. Create designs for web or print: blog graphics, presentations, Facebook covers, flyers, posters, invitations and so much more. This works really well for creating Facebook ads, also, which is where we've used it the most. The free version comes with a bunch of graphics, backgrounds, text blocks, and more. Premium content is available for a small fee. You can upload your own images and logos, or use what they have available. Create what you need and save it to your local drive or your DropBox. Very handy, and very easy to use. The font selections are amazing, too! Love this one! Note: does not work in Internet Explorer.

This is so much easier than making a button in PowerPoint, saving it as a picture, then finding out that it's fuzzy when you upload it. DaButtonFactory is an ugly site but a terrific tool - an online button maker. Design your very own button or use one of the predefined examples. Then download or hotlink the image, or get CSS code. Simple & free! What's not to love about that?

Data.com Connect, formerly known as Jigsaw, can be a great source of B2B lead information. It's a crowd-sourced lead source, meaning that leads are put into the system by users, policed by users, and downloaded by users. When you add a new lead, or update an existing lead, you get points, which you can then redeem to download leads for yourself. When you get a bad lead, go back in and mark it as "email does not work" and get your points back. You can also purchase points on an annual basis. Leads cannot be put into the system without an email address, and many have direct-dial phone numbers as well. Advanced search is quite good, so you can search by location, by industry, company size, and many more criteria, and you can sort your search results. You can get in for free, and packages start at $250 to purchase more points. Jigsaw was acquired a few years back by SalesForce, who renamed it to Data.com.

Don't open Photoshop each time you want to update an icon color. Easily create custom icon fonts with Fontastic! Your icons can be modified on the fly via CSS. Rescale, change colour, add a shadow and more in just a jiffy.

If you don't immediately get how useful this can be, watch the video on the home page. This product is pretty darn cool, and anyone working on a website will love it.

This tool makes matching colors so easy! Install Instant Eyedropper on your Windows-based machine and this little color grid will appear in your system tray. Drag it anywhere on the screen to find out the color code of anything you see. Need to match a logo color? Drag the eyedropper to the logo and grab the color. Want to color-coordinate your emails a little better, and make them more visually appealing? Use the eyedropper to get the code you need. Frustrated because you have the hex code, but now you need the RGB? No problem! Right click the eyedropper to switch it to RGB or CMYK. Love this tool - and it's free! Runs on Windows O/S - the site says up to Win7, but try it on Win8 if you have it.

It feels a little silly, creating a list in List.ly in which I list List.ly as a great tool for marketers (read that sentence again if it didn't make sense the first time ). There are multiple things that are way cool about List.ly. A list can be anything - links (like this one), commentary, videos, graphics, you name it. You can embed a List.ly list pretty much anywhere you can embed code (and it's easy to do). You can crowd-source your list, too. Free version is good, but spend the $10 a month for the pro version to have even more capabilities and control.

This falls into the "content curation" category - a terrific way for YOU to build authority and help YOUR readers sort through the noise and make sense of the deluge of information that is no doubt confronting them.

Photoshop and Gimp are incredible, powerful tools - but oh, so complicated! PicMonkey makes editing your photos super easy. Add filters, frames, text, and effects, crop, resize, add a border, and more with this free online photo editing tool! There's a free version, which is ad-supported, or you can pay a tiny bit of money, get even more capabilities, and get rid of the ads. Terrific tool, and so easy to use!