Guess what, marketers! You don't have to split your money and time between a half dozen tools to deal with different facets of your job anymore.
Multi-purpose Internet apps are becoming the way of the future, and you can do two or more tasks with any one of these awesome 9 tools.
1. Rule Your Online Marketing: Getresponse
Email marketing is still the most effective way to build up audience and loyalty. Getresponse can handle everything for you from collecting the leads to creating (automated) campaigns to keep in touch with your subscribers.
But not just that! Getresponse is ruling so many more aspects of your online marketing:
- Create and publicize surveys
- Create and optimize landing pages
- Create email courses (using automated workflows)
- Apply marketing automation
- Create and host webinars
- Recover lost shopping carts
- Identify prospects behavior and buying cycle
2. Rule Your Project Management: Trello
Trello is usually just looked at as a project management platform, and that is its primary function. But thanks to its versatility and ease of use, it can be customized for pretty much everything. From mapping out strategies, to taking customer feedback, you can set it up any way you like.
Making it one of the better tools out there if you want something that relies on your needs, not its feature limitations. So far my favorite use I have seen is a feature roadmap being created by a bootstrap startup I worked for, where they showed customers exactly what was going to be released and when.
3. Rule Your Social Media Analytics: SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured has a very expensive service for enterprise users, and for most reading this article it won't be relevant to their needs. But their free tools are going to be much better received.
From a tool to analyze fan content on Facebook, to analysis for Vine, Instagram, Twitter, Google+ and more, you can really hammer out your social strategy on every level here. My favorites are the traffic and social traffic source analyses. These free tools are already more powerful than many of the paid ones I have found that do the same thing.
4. Rule Your Web Traffic Analytics: Google Analytics
Of course Google Analytics is going to be on this list, it's on pretty much every list. Figure out the next move for your promotions, track traffic sources, plan content based on interest ... do pretty much anything analytics based from this one tool.
It is a bit difficult to get the hang of if you haven't yet done much with analytics, but once you get the hang of it you will be amazed that you ever lived without it. Plus, it's from Google. So you know that it's a high quality tool, thanks to the power of our overlords and Internet masters.
5. Rule Your Contact Management: Charlie App
One of the big tasks for marketers is connection making and networking. This is done both online, and face to face. When you meet with someone new, especially someone who is going to be important to your brand, you want to know everything you possibly can about them.
This usually takes a bunch of digging to manually put together a profile, which you can use to impress them with later. Not anymore! Charlie App works by going through their social profiles and other mentions, and puts together a one page report including a photo. So you can learn their name, their interests, their current projects and more. You will even see your common connections.
6. Rule Your Backlink Analysis: Majestic
This tool takes the pressure off of one of the most tedious tasks we have to worry about as marketers: analyzing links. This tool looks at backlink sources, opportunities for new links and identifies potentially damaging ones all at once.
So you get a pretty well rounded approach to your strategy, and all from one source. I love this one, since I no longer have to manually go through and try and track or narrow links. It makes the process so much faster and easier.
7. Rule Your Editorial Calendar: CoSchedule
Coschedule is an interesting tool for Wordpress blogs that works as both an editorial calendar and a social scheduler.
And as a team management platform, since you are able to assign tasks to users and they will see the information right on their WP dashboard when they login. It is easy to use, you can quickly edit and rearrange posts, plan for months of content at a time, and prepare it to be released on all of your social media primary sites. If you are looking for more better budget-friendly options, go for free buffer alternatives.
8. Rule Your Social Media Sharing: Mavsocial
Social media sharing takes plenty of time: You have to open so many pages, copy-paste your thoughts, make sure it looks good. And multiply that by at least two if you have at least one business page to share to on each social media network.
This is where Mavsocial comes in handy with it's "Master" sharing feature, allowing you to mass share to multiple platforms with on click of a mouse:
- Share to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Linkedin, Youtube and Instagram
- Quickly schedule updates using "Auto-schedule feature"
9. Put This All Together: Cyfe
This is the ultimate all in one tool, and every single marketer in the world needs it. Cyfe is a business platform that allows you to create customized widgets to do pretty much everything you could possibly want to.
Handle social, content, customer service, sales ... seriously, this thing is fully loaded and awesome. Best of all, their pro version costs less than you probably spend per week on coffee.
Bonus: Free Tools You'll Probably Use Once!
Here are my favorite tools you won't need to use continuously, but you'll be thankful you have them bookmarked!
- Bustaname: One of the best tools to find a cool domain name
- Sitegeek: Pick the best and most reliable host
- Website Crawler: A free tool to crawl your entire site and find errors
- Page Speed Tool: Analyze what slows your page down
- Mobile-Friendly Test: Preview your site on mobile
Know something that belongs on this list? Let us know in the comments.
