Marketing Tools For Today’s Marketer

Buffer

This is a guest post written by Kathleen Smith, Marketing Director at Visual.ly. Find out more about her at the end of this post!

Today’s marketers have to wear many hats: web developer, systems integrator, publicist, social media manager, email expert and so forth and so on. The good news is that the marketing tech industry has seen an overwhelming number of new vendors and tools to help marketers handle all of these roles efficiently and successfully. The even better news is that many of these new tools are empowering marketers to become even more self-reliant, limiting the number of additional resources such as developers or designers that they would rely on.

Here’s a sample of some of the best tools and vendors to help you be a faster marketer:

 Web Development

Wix, Squarespace, WordPress — These are all user-friendly content management systems that make it easy to create and maintain your web presence.

Lander, Unbounce, LeadPages — These tools provide you with simple interfaces for creating and optimizing landing pages for your website. You can use them in conjunction with any of the CMS platforms mentioned above.

 Systems Integration

Kevy, Podbox, Zapier, IFTTT — The first two are heavy duty options for integration of disparate data sources and probably require someone with technical chops to help deploy. The second two are lighter weight and can easily be set up by anyone.

 Publicist

TalkWalker Alerts, Mention, Google Alerts — These tools allow you to closely monitor your brand’s reputation.
PR.co, PressKing, — These tools help you create a press room for your website as well as create pitches and releases.
HARO, PressFriendly, Hitwake — These three tools are for media outreach.

 Social Media

Buffer, Hootsuite, Edgar — All three will help you manage your social media posting schedule but each has different strengths. Buffer helps you “queue” your posts and establish a pre-determined number of posts per day with a healthy set of analytics to boot. Hootsuite is useful for managing your own posts and responses. It also has a scheduling functionality as well. Edgar is a brand new contender that offers you the ability to store your posts for re-use in the future.

Followerwonk, SumAll, Topsy — These are some great tools for analyzing your channels’ followers and performance.

 Email Marketing

Mailchimp, Goodbits, Email Monks — Mailchimp is a best-in-class email marketing provider with top notch design functionality with many integrations which help you sync with other services…including Goodbits. Goodbits is a lightweight, easy way to curate and send email “newsletter” digests. Email Monks is a great way to get your email’s design coded so it’s ready to import to your email providers.

 

About Kathleen

Kathleen is a driver of marketing strategy, a brand storyteller and a product enthusiast. She’s equal parts creative and analytical. Kat is a firm believer in thinking outside the box when it comes to amplifying the impact of marketing resources.

As a true full stack marketer, Kathleen has a wide range of skills and expertise: inbound & lead generation, marketing automation architecture, content marketing, event marketing, digital evangelism as well as speaking and partnership development.

Kathleen Smith is the Marketing Director at Visually. Follow this space for more of her content marketing hacks and let her know what you think: @katsmithtweets.