Online marketing is a many headed monster. The average marketer has to balance social, content, email, and other inbound marketing tactics. All while making sure to monitor the most effective, in order to constantly tailor their strategies to improve results quarter by quarter. Anyone who has done it, whether with or without a team, knows how exhausting it is.
Productivity becomes key if you want to juggle these correctly. The right tools are crucial, so you can automate as much of the process as possible, and cut down on the time spent doing the rest.
1. Text Optimizer
How does it make your team more productive?
- Quickly find topic ideas
- Find relevant questions on any topic to determine content structure
Text Optimizer is a semantic search analysis tool that helps you better understand your niche by giving you a list of concepts and entities that constitute it.
The tool is the ultimate content research tool as it lets you create content by using pre-built sentences and discover popular questions on any topic.
2. Mailchimp
How does it make your team more productive?
- Automate email marketing
- Track your marketing performance
- Take advantage of user profiles to build up your buyer’s performance
Mailchimp started out as an email marketing platform, but it has become much more.
Recently they have unveiled their automated marketing feature, landing pages (customized and optimized for your brand), and webinars that can be viewed by hundreds or thousands of people, depending on your plan.
That makes it a much more expansive platform that touches on multiple marketing avenues, not just email marketing.
Add that to the fact that their email templates and scheduling systems are actually easy to use, and you have a definite winner. No more frustrating and overly complicated drip templates! You never have to create, delete and recreate email lists, only to find the initial settings were wrong and it won’t let you edit. The platform won’t suddenly go down and leave you stranded.
Mailchimp can also be a powerful lead management platform. It makes it easy to monitor how your subscribers are responding, where it needs help and how to optimize the process.
It also stores all your leads, interaction history and all the records you may need. It’s your ultimate email marketing productivity toolkit.
More resources:
- If you are looking for alternatives, there are quite a few email automation tools you can choose from based on your requirements and budget.
- Megaphone Marketing also has a very detailed article on lead generation where they offer a helpful screenshot on how to create an effective email automation workflow:
3. Namify
How does it make your team more productive?
- Quickly find a cool brand name for your new site or project
- Build your brand’s visual identity by accessing free logos
Are you planning to launch a new project, a (recurring) event or a new site? Finding a brandable (“snappy”) name is getting harder and harder.
Namify is a cool free app that I use any time I am planning to start a new venture. You need to type your target keyword and choose your niche, and the tool will generate a list of names that will be easy to remember and create topical associations. With each brand name, you will get a free logo:
They offer a list of generated business names for you to see some examples.
4. WebCEO
WebCEO is your SEO productivity tool. It includes lots of features, from a handy keyword research solution to position tracker (which also works for Youtube!)
Search engine optimization includes lots of tasks to carry on and data to track. It is nice to be able to keep everything under one roof which certainly helps productivity. I like this set of tools because they have everything a business needs without costing a fortune.
5. Google Spreadsheets
How does it make your team more productive?
- Store your data, lists, notes in one free dashboard
- Create an effective collaboration routine
Ugh, data. It is important, it helps us, and yet it is a bane for every marketer in the world. Isn’t there an easier way?! Well, yes, and this tool is that way. Google Spreadsheets is where I store and organize just about any data or lists or records I have.
Google Spreadsheets makes collaboration a breeze: You can share progress with clients and bosses, your team, and keep them for your own uses. This one really does cut down on a ton of time and effort, not to mention stress.
In case you don’t want to use another Google tool, there’s a solid variety of note taking and sharing apps.
6. Viral Content Bee
How does it make your team more productive?
- Get your content promoted across high-quality social media accounts
- Easily find high-quality content to keep our social media feeds active
It would be great if you could just post your content on social media, and everyone shares it out for you just because you have a call to action. But we all know that isn’t how it works. If you want to reach new audiences you need a more direct approach.
Viral Content Buzz works by putting you in contact with other social media influencers of varying audience sizes. You and those others exchange content, with each posting on behalf of the other. This gives you access to a whole new viewer pool, who will become aware of your brand from another that they trust.
It is a convenient and effective tool, and can lead to long term connections that can benefit yourself and the others you network with.
7. Finteza
How does it make your team more productive?
- Access web traffic analytics without spending hours trying to figure out settings and options
- Easily share multiple data points within one handy dashboard
Finteza is a web analytics platform with a strong focus on conversion optimization. The tool allows you to track and analyze your traffic sources, set up events to track and share reports among your teams.
Finteza helps you track all kinds of website performance metrics, from organic search traffic to website security.
The unique feature here is creating promotion and engagement campaigns based on your users’ location, or previous interactions with your website. This means a certain amount of brand loyalty already present to drive it. But if you have a foundation of support for, this is a great way to expand on it.
8. CoSchedule
How does it make your team more productive?
- Create your content marketing calendar to create a detailed plan and to-do lists
- Give access and assign tasks to different team members and track the workflow within a single dashboard
CoSchedule is a platform I have been using for a long time, and I love it. It makes planning content and scheduling it on social media so much easier. It works as a WordPress plugin, creating a section in your dashboard where you can plan posts, assign tasks, give details, schedule posts to auto-publish, and update social media.
This has not only cut down on content marketing tasks for me, but it has made running a team easier, and editing tasks easier.
9. Mention
How does it make your team more productive?
- Monitor your brand mentions without daily checking social media feeds
- Get alerted of mentions that need immediate attention
Reputation management requires you to keep up to date on all mentions of you and your industry. In the past I used Google Alerts and Hootsuite for that. Now I still use the first, but instead of the second I use Mention.
It sends alerts and lets you reply in your dashboard. But it is a lot more straightforward and cleaner than other social media dashboards I have used.
10. Buzzsumo
How does it make your team more productive?
- Find content ideas and evaluate how you can outperform your competitors
- Find popular niche search queries and questions
- Monitor industry trends
I have been a big believer in Buzzsumo from the beginning, and it still has no peers when it comes to sheer feature amount for the price. It is an all-in-one business platform that works by giving you all the power over the tool.
You can use the tool for just about anything: sales, CRM, support, social media, marketing, analytics, and a dozen others. You are only limited by your imagination.
Buzzsumo is a super awesome platform that works by taking information from across the web related to content, and offering it to you to use for targeting your own content campaigns.
Research content from any brand or competitor, see how it is performing, and find out how you match up. Buzzsumo is one of the greatest discovery tools on the web. They offer free searches and data, but it is worth paying for their pro services if you are really serious. Honestly, their agency package is probably the best deal, unless you are a really tiny brand or start up just beginning in the industry.
Do you have a tool you think deserves to be on the list? Let us know in the comments!
