As an experienced Social Media Manager, I have used many tools, systems, apps and platforms over the years, but these five have proved vital to managing digital marketing for both my own business and my clients.
Trello
Trello is not just a great tool for social media management, but general business (or personal) use. I was first introduced to Trello almost 5 years ago. At first, I used it a lot for personal use. I would create boards for each room in my house and set up ‘To-do’ cards and deadlines to help me organise the interiors of my new property. I would save inspiration I found on social media to the relevant Trello board I had created. When I started using Trello for business purposes, I soon realised it was a platform I could not work without. Trello allows you to set up boards for your business and cards within each board. I often create weekly cards to manage my tasks for the week. You can create checklists, deadlines, coloured labels and invite members into any card or board. The members feature is ideal if you are running a certain project with a specific member of your team. You can both keep on top of individual tasks within Trello, you can add attachments, links and comments to update your fellow members. Trello is also a great tool to store any useful links or news stories you haven’t got time to read but want to refer back to them – a great option to help you plan for your social media content strategy too!
Canva
Canva is a free simplified graphic-design tool website, founded in 2012. It uses a drag-and-drop format and provides access to photographs, vector images, graphics, and fonts. It is used by non-designers as well as professionals. The tools can be used for both web and print media design and graphics. Canva is packed with templates for social media posts, posters, business cards, presentations to get you started, or you can choose a blank canvas and get your creative head on yourself. Canva allows you to upload your own images so you can create a Facebook post using your logo and imagery. Canva is also a great tool for uploading and creating videos at your desired aspect ratio.
There is a paid version of Canva, which I personally use. The paid version allows you to import your own brand style including logos, brand colours and brand fonts to have all in one place and easily accessible.
ContentCal
I have recently signed-up to ContentCal and I honestly don’t know how I managed social media without it. ContentCal allows you to schedule posts to your social media channels as well as planning events, topics and campaigns. ContentCal has the option to integrate with over 200 apps including Google Calendars, Trello, Dropbox, CRM and many others. For SME’s manging only a few social media channels, there is a free version available.
Google Analytics
I have spoken to a number of companies over the past 10 years who invest time and money into their social media marketing, have spent £1000’s on an all-singing-all-dancing website and do not use Google Analytics. Wow! If you haven’t already heard of Google Analytics, it basically is your website traffic hub. Google Analytics shows you how much traffic your website is getting, where your traffic is coming from and even who your audience is and where they are located. Google analytics can show you what your most popular web pages are, how long people are staying on your website for and where people are dropping off. If you want to get more advanced with Google Analytics, you can also set up goals and events to see exactly what is converting and what isn’t. For example; if you have a video on your website, you can see who watches it and how long for. If you have various CTA’s (call-to-actions) including download brochure, contact us, free quote, request a call back and so on, you can see exactly which button is performing, allowing you to re-analyse and improve the least performing areas of your website. If you invest your marketing budget on specific platforms such as as Facebook, LinkedIn, Email Marketing, Google Ads etc you can look at those channels and analyse how well they are performing, again, allowing you to re-analyse if your investment’s are generating ROI or not.
Dropbox
As a digital marketing manager, I work with many customers who each have a lot of images. Dropbox allows me to have everything in one place in an organised way. The Dropbox App is also available and is handy for anything I see on my phone; I can save to Dropbox rather than my phone’s photo stream. A great way to keep business and pleasure separate! Dropbox is also great for large file sizes as you can share links to others using email. High-resolution images have a large file size and some email providers don’t allow emails to be send with a number of large files attached. Dropbox is a great way of getting around this, all you do is email the Dropbox link to the recipient. The best thing about Dropbox, of course, is it is FREE! Although, it is worth bearing in mind the free plan only comes with 2GB of storage so if you think you may need more, look at their price packages before making any decisions.
Added Bonus: Teamwork
Okay, so I said 5 I know, but I couldn’t miss this one out, in fact I could’ve given you 100’s of awesome marketing tools you could use! But for now, I will stick with 6.
Teamwork is a powerful yet easy to use project management platform trusted by over 20,000 businesses and 6,000 agencies worldwide. It is feature rich yet boasts a simple, reliable and intuitive user interface.
Teamwork will allow users to manage multiple projects simultaneously, tracking them using multiple different views and formats of dashboard, other features include gantt charts, individual team member workload management and client permissions management which makes it a great choice for agencies.
What tools can you not live without in your business? I am always looking for new, innovative tools to help me organise my procedures so let me know in the comments below.
