Work smarter not harder. That’s one of our mottos at Cloud Cartel. And we’re all for helping our clients do the same, by streamlining their day-to-day digital marketing so they can dedicate more time to the bigger picture.
Keeping on top of your regular digital marketing activities can put a strain on your resources and quickly chew up valuable time. If you find yourself in this scenario, there are ways you can simplify and speed up your daily processes
From sourcing images and creating video content, to monitoring your social media, analysing the performance of your website and more – we’ve captured it all here with our top 10 digital marketing tools. And the best thing is, they’re all free to use.
Pixabay
If you don’t have an extensive image library or budget for stock imagery, then the next best thing is Pixabay. Here you can scour through over 1.4 million royalty free images and video, which you can use for your own digital marketing. How is this possible? The images are classified as public domain and are released under the Creative Commons license, which means they are free of copyright. Attribution isn’t required, but the community of creatives who submit their images for your use appreciates it.
Landscape by Sprout Social
Need to constantly resize images for your social media channels? This handy tool takes away the time you would normally spend optimising images across all your platforms. All you need to do is upload a single image, choose your platform/s and the sizes for each post type, then it automatically crops all the variations you need in one hit. You’ve just saved yourself a heck of time here!
Landscape currently formats images for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and YouTube. But if you’re using other platforms, you can select the custom field and enter the specific dimensions you’re after.
Canva
Let us firstly say this nifty program will never replace the creative genius of a graphic designer, but what Canva does offer is the flexibility and ease of creating simple designs on the fly when you don’t have the resources available. From social media graphics to presentations, you can use the drag and drop editor to create layouts from thousands of templates. The free version provides 1GB of storage use for up to 10 people, and you can also set your colour palettes specific to your brand. Depending on your needs, you can upgrade to a paid plan with unlimited storage including loads more features and inclusions.
Powtoon
These days, creating video content has never been easier. With Powtoon, you don’t need video editing experience to create your own marketing videos. This software has ready to use templates, which u can customise to create simple and professional animations to tell your story and engage your audience.
The free plan gives you 100MB of storage, SD resolution and access to free content. The only downside to the free version is it displays Powtoon branding within your video. If you’re looking to regularly produce videos, we would suggest investing in a paid plan, which offers higher resolution, larger storage options and commercial rights to your video.
Headline Analyser
The headlines you use for your web content, blog or articles is the first thing users see, so they need to grab attention if you’re going to get any look-in. If you have trouble nailing your headlines, then Headline Analyser is your go to source. It determines how effective your headline is by scoring the quality against traffic, shares and SEO value and looks at overall readability to give you an idea if you’re on the right track.
Fatrank
Want to know how well your website is performing in Google against your keyword search terms? This Chrome extension does exactly that, so you don’t have to scroll through the SERPs to find how your website stacks up.
Buffer
If you need a streamlined process to manage your social media marketing, Buffer offers a free service for up to 3 of your social media accounts across one user friendly dashboard. You can create and schedule posts in advance, share content as you discover it via the mobile app and track your performance.
As with all free plans, you’re limited to what features are available. Buffer does offer varying monthly plans depending on the number of social accounts you manage, which includes more advanced analytics and features.
Talkwalker Alerts
Who’s talking about you and where? Talkwalker Alerts monitors the web for mentions of your brand or keyword and delivers it straight to your inbox. Unlike Google Alerts, it also covers Twitter and allows you to customise which results you want to see. So, if you only want to know what people are saying about you in forums you can filter options to only receive these results.
Mixpanel
Discover how users are interacting with your website and app through actionable insights. With Mindpanel, you can better understand users’ journeys by analysing their interactions and level of engagement, based on their actions not page views, which is a key difference to similar platforms.
Suite CRM
Suite CRM is an open source CRM that helps you become more customer focused. Here you can manage your workflow and sales leads, detect new opportunities, improve your marketing and automation, and provide the best customer service, all while gaining valuable insights through real time reporting. With over 4 million users worldwide, it’s no wonder this is the world’s most popular free open source CRM.
These are just a taste of the tools you could be using to help make your digital marketing more efficient. We’re all about collaborating and sharing ideas, so if you’ve come across any awesome tools we’d love to hear about them!
Need a hand with your digital marketing?
Get in touch with Cloud Cartel
– the digital marketing experts in Perth.
