More play and less work this summer with these online apps

In the past few years marketers have faced large-scale and accelerating change in their profession, and it’s showing little sign of slowing down. Today’s modern marketer faces a new paradigm of inbound marketing programs driven by digital channels, served by multiple methods and measured by sophisticated technologies.

It’s a brave, new world that marketers are negotiating, and often with limited budgets and staff. Today’s marketers wear many hats, manage a slew of different projects, and can be responsible for most, if not all of clients’ online marketing campaigns including social media, email marketing, content, SEO, etc.

And on top of all that we still have to marketing ourselves!

But there’s good news for the contemporary marketer; there’s an abundance of online tools that can help us control the workload. The following apps can help us manage our daily tasks and responsibilities allowing us to be more productive and ultimately, open up our schedules to do more of what we love.

 

Project Management/ Collaboration

Mavenlink

Mavenlink has a robust feature list. It assists in managing tasks, tracking projects (both internally and those with clients), sharing and receiving files and tracking time and expenses.

One of the standout features of Mavenlink is the ability to delegate tasks to both clients and employees, assign deadlines and view when the task has been started and completed.

Basically, Mavenlink is an all-inclusive project management tool and it is integrated with Google Apps.

Alternative apps: Basecamp; Trello

Search Engine Optimisation

Moz

This tool is extremely easy to use and navigate. You can see how your keywords rank, compare keywords side-by-side, and see which search engines are sending traffic to your site. And all can be done from your dashboard.

Alternative app: Google Insights; Optify

Landing Page Creation

Unbounce

Unbounce allows you to build, publish and A/B test landing pages without the help of IT. It empowers marketers to act independently from technical teams to improve efficiency and their ability to generate sales. Even if you don’t know how to code in HTML, Unbounce’s landing page builder is much faster.

File Management

Dropbox

Dropbox allows you access to all your files in the cloud, which means you can be anywhere and still access the file you need. Your files are stored online and are accessible to all members of your team for editing or reviewing purposes.

This application is especially beneficial if your company is spread out over several different locations. It saves you and your employees from having to email files back and forth — after you’ve dropped it in, it’s accessible to everyone.

Alternative app: Google Drive

Social Media Management

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a great tool if you manage multiple social media networks for an assortment of clients. You can pre-schedule posts for a specific date and time and you can preview how it looks before it goes live.

One of the best features of this app is the Hootstuit “Streams,” which allows you to view all your posts on all your networks in a visual format, making it super easy to keep track what you are posting and where. Additionally, you can track your campaign analytics, which is handy if you need to regularly report the success of clients’ social media campaigns.

Alternative app: TweetDeck; Buffer

Visual Content Tools

Piktochart

If infographics are part of your digital marketing campaigns, this is a wonderful tool for you. Not a designer? That’s okay; you don’t have to be to use this app. Piktochart allows you to create graphic-design worthy infographics on a user-friendly platform. It also allows you to store them all in your account so you can edit them whenever the need arises, great for clients that require a boat-load of changes!

Alternative apps: Prezi; Flexadex; Passpack; Evernote