Up Your Marketing Game With New Tools

Finnegan Pierson

A marketer’s toolkit is constantly evolving. Advances in technology, messaging platforms and data analysis in the past several years have changed the marketing world. Successful marketers need to be able to create genuine connections through personalized communications, creative content and excellent customer service. Here are some new tools for marketers to add to your toolkit.

Create Great Content

Eye-catching content attracts attention across a range of digital marketing channels. Making stunning graphics for social media, crafting website layouts and putting together professional quality videos takes time, no matter your skill level. For small teams and newer marketers, the learning curve that comes with top-of-the-line design software can be intimidating. Adobe Spark helps alleviate some of the stress. The all-in-one design tool offers pre-made templates for social media posts, videos, web designs and other marketing pieces. Free plans come with loads of visually appealing templates. Paid plans let you customize, access premium designs, collaborate with team members and add your company’s branding elements. 

Automate Your Interactions

You’ve landed a great set of leads for your business. Now what? Take advantage of marketing automation to nurture a lead into a loyal customer. Automation platforms allow businesses to coordination their communication across email, social media, web and other systems to send the right message at the right time. These tools pull in data from a range of sources about customer communication preferences, purchasing behavior and other characteristics. For example, when a new potential customer signs up for your email list, an automation tool would allow you to send a series of follow-up messages through email, text and social media. Those messages happen automatically, and they’re designed to move your new email contact through the marketing funnel. Automated messages save time, connect efforts by your sales and marketing teams, and prevent missed opportunities or human error.

Up Your Video Game

Video is a key piece to any marketing strategy. While the ability to tell visual stories has been an important marketing skill since the dawn of television advertising, the format has exploded in the past few years. A recent study estimates people will spend more than 100 minutes a day watching online video by 2021. Marketers who are able to get in front of those viewers have a chance to tell a compelling story. If your video marketing strategy could use a boost, there are several free or inexpensive tools to help with video creation and editing. Headliner is a captioning tool that will automatically transcribe audio into text. That makes it ideal for creating content that can be consumed on social media, where many users are scrolling with volume turned off. Splasheo adds eye-catching frames to videos, and also offers a captioning service. Wistia is an online video hosting platform that allows brands to customize how the final product looks when it’s embedded on your site.

Get Organized

A proliferation of marketing platforms has complicated campaign management. For every marketing push, you need to write copy, craft images, set an audience and get the timing right. A project management tool helps get everything organized and keep team members on task. Trello is a free tool that organizes projects into boards. Teams use those boards to track to-do lists, move project elements through a workflow and share updates. You can upload files, make comments on tasks and assign due dates within the platform. For teams with design-heavy work, a tool like Asana offers more complex project management elements. Depending on your needs, there’s a wide range of management platforms that integrate with other systems you might already be using, including Slack for messaging and Google Drive for file management. Find a system that works well for your team, conduct training and make sure everyone is on board.

Optimize for Search

Search engine optimization is a key piece to any content marketing strategy. If your website runs on WordPress, install the free Yoast SEO plugin. You’ll be able to optimize for focus keywords, upload social metadata to create appealing social media link previews, and customize the article descriptions that appear in search results.