In this age of information, one is bound to stumble upon new strategies, tactics, and tools marketers should add to their mix. Especially at this time of year, the internet overflows with advice from the greatest of marketers. There now exists an entire army of tools, gadgets and whatnots vying for attention, data and money.

It’s not surprising that marketers nowadays spend about 16 hours each week on routine tasks; email accounts for almost four of those hours; meanwhile, collecting, organizing, and analyzing marketing data from different sources takes up an additional 3.55 hours a week. Although innovative technology solutions from the likes of Real Innovation Group could help make data gathering and analysis more efficient, not every company might be aware of such tools, or may choose not to implement it for a variety of reasons. This has been recently published in an informal survey on HubSpot and the results are totally relatable. When rounded up, it can be said that 8 hours are spent every week on both email and working on your marketing data. This adds up to 416 hours a year spent on these tedious tasks alone without even taking content creation, distribution, and outreach efforts into consideration.

Hence, you need tools that simplify your content creation process without breaking the bank. The thing is, free tools are often overlooked, and sometimes they don’t look like “tools”. For that reason, marketers might think they’re less valuable than paid tools.
Here’s a list of recommended tools divided into different sections that will add efficiency to your workflow, communicate information, stimulate customer interest, motivate action and help improve social media management.

CONTENT

EpicBeat by Epictions – This has got to be the best free (although there are also paid versions) people and content research platform. You can use it to look for trends regarding content, audience, influencers and topic areas. Its capacity to dig deep and find nuggets of interest and insight is quite praiseworthy. The appealing touches and useful features include multi-steam influencer analysis, the ability to drill down into data like ‘popular days to publish’ and alerts.

Feedly – Feedly is the go–to tool for any marketer to look for newsworthy content in their respective industries. It can be used to compile breaking news articles from Facebook news and other top sites in the industry, like Content Marketing Institute and Forbes. If an article proves to be imperative and eye-catching, you can quickly browse through it to make sure it’s top quality content. If required, you can share it with your audience and make a note to cite the article in blog posts. This makes sure that you have a daily stream of fresh content ideas at your very fingertips.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Ryte – Ranging from keyword research, content optimization, or checking your current page rankings, every marketer needs a go-to tool for planning what content to create and how to optimize it for SEO. Google Analytics is a great tool for planning which keywords to rank for, but how does one make sure that the content you create actually meets your goal? Ryte is the ideal tool marketers can use to make sure their SEO efforts are having a real impact on their marketing strategy. Even in the event of hiring a company to help you with SEO, if you notice that your organic traffic stays lower than expected, you might consider doing an SEO audit to uncover the reasons why this is happening. Check out this interesting post here for more information on SEO auditing.

DESIGN

Canva – Images take ample amount of time and expert skill to create. But, one would surely agree that social feed callouts and header images amid others do not require a deigning specialist. All thanks to Canva, which is a great way to make posts (and video beginning/end plates) pop without breaking the bank and taking up time with approvals. You can use it for just about anything from social media images to white papers and presentations. Drag and drop images, backgrounds, and shapes to put together professional-looking layouts. The Webbys hence called Canva “the easiest-to-use design program in the world.” Because it enabled any content marketer to become a designer.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Trello – This proves to be a great project management tool for small teams and individuals. With its Kanban-style setup and fun user interface, Trello lets you set up to-do lists and tag individual cards with due dates, members, labels, and more. Additionally, with time tracking software for trello the aspect of project management can be managed a lot more effectively, therefore giving businesses more time to focus on other aspects. You can attach files, links, images, and more to your cards and easily get a full-view of any project that you’re working on. In short, Trello gives you an overall perspective of your projects, at work and home, in a similar fashion to multiple ppm software such as pmo365 and similar others! It can range from managing a team, writing an epic screenplay, or just making a grocery list, Trello is the ultimate partner for getting things done and staying organized.

TEAM COMMUNICATION

LinkedIn Groups – LinkedIn groups are another way to connect with niche communities, get content ideas, or share your content with the group. It proves to be a friendly and “approachable” platform, and makes it easy to connect with industry leaders. Hence, anyone and everyone can participate and share their expertise. Participation in discussions is imperative before sharing any content in order to build trust and show that you are a team player. After a couple of weeks of engaging, you can share your content which will thereby lead to generate traffic.

Marketers are already acquainted with the fact that they need tools to be more effective in what they do. It is imperative to consistently evaluate those tools, though, to ensure you have the most up-to-date technology. With new solutions emerging every day, brands and marketing professionals that want to remain competitive should be keeping track of the latest trends. Finding content idea, creating absolutely amazing content and promoting it to the target audience would undoubtedly be made easy with proper utilization of these tools. But even with the right tool-set, it is up to the marketer to utilize it to the fullest and create something truly unique and valuable.

Written by

Fabiha Naz Kabir