10 Digital Tools to Supercharge Your Marketing

Regular readers of Elite Agent’s daily e-newsletter The Brief receive a marketing and technology tip every Tuesday and Wednesday. Many of the tools we have talked about are things we use and love ourselves – they keep our website humming, and can help you achieve great results for your digital marketing too. Here are our 10 favourite digital marketing tools of the moment. 1. BUZZ SUMO One of the best content marketing strategies is to find out what works for other people in the same market as you, learning about the content types that work best. Are they long posts, list posts or how to’s? Buzz Sumo is a great tool that does the hard analysis for you, showing you what works for your competitors and industry influencers. You can use this information to plan your content creation efforts and find influencers to help you share it. Find it: buzzsumo.com 2. BUFFER How about scheduling social media posts while you sleep, or while you are doing other important things, like prospecting or meeting clients? Buffer is a social media management application that allows you to schedule your social content and push updates to multiple social networks. You can also track performance analytics directly from your dashboard. Buffer also has an amazing blog with tonnes of digital marketing tips. Find it: buffer.com 3. VISUAL HUNT You need pictures to add visual appeal to your digital marketing content, but professional photography services may be out of your budget, or you don’t have the resources to get it done in-house. Visual Hunt searches free stock photography sources to find CCO, Creative Commons and public domain images meeting your requirements. Find it: visualhunt.com 4. SUMOME Does your digital marketing plan for 2017 include boosting your site traffic? SumoMe offers an easy-to-implement application suite designed to support your efforts. The List Builder tool encourages email sign-ups through a popup or lightbox, heatmaps keep a close eye on the areas your visitors click on and a share box encourages users to spread your content around the internet. One of the biggest benefits of SumoMe is how easy it is to add to your website. You don’t have to worry about configuring plugins in your content management system; instead, you copy and paste a few lines of code and handle everything through the SumoMe panel. Find it: sumome.com 5. BEACON Need a compelling offer to grow your lead-generation efforts? Wonder how we make our eBooks? Easy – Beacon repurposes your existing blog posts and turns them into a smart PDF that your clients can download. Your content goes into a professionally designed template created to engage your audience, and you don’t need to worry about chasing after a creative team. User-friendly customisation options let you brand it for your company. Find it: beacon.by 6. MUSIC FOR MAKERS Video content captures a lot of attention, but it may fall flat due to a lack of music. Music for Makers sends a weekly email newsletter featuring royalty-free, high-quality songs. You don’t pay anything for this service, so your video creation budget stays the same. The company also has a paid production library if you’re looking for additional music. The cost per track ranges from $10 to $25, or you can choose a recurring plan for $35 per month or $100 per year. Find it: musicformakers.com 7. CANVA Wonder where all those funky quote style images with the amazing fonts come from? Blog posts, social media updates and other content pieces shine with the right graphic design, but you don’t want to wait a week for a designer to create a picture for Twitter or a great Facebook cover photo for your business page. Canva streamlines this process through pre-designed templates, an extensive stock image library and a user-friendly design tool. Find it: canva.com 8. COSCHEDULE To be consistent with your content you need an editorial calendar to plan out who is going to produce what content and when. CoSchedule is a marketing and content planner that is a fraction of the price of tools like Hubspot, and it goes beyond the typical editorial calendar. Never lose an idea or piece of content again. Find it: coschedule.com 9. QUILL ENGAGE Google Analytics is a powerful tool when you can understand what the data tells you. However, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the available reports and features offered by the platform. Quill Engage by Narrative Sciences simplifies this information into straightforward explanations in plain English. The service sends your website report via email and highlights the most important insights. Find it: quillengage.com 10. SNIP.LY You don’t have to create every piece of content you share on social media. If you find something great on another website, you can share it with your own unique Snip.ly link and help funnel visitors back to your site. Snip.ly recaptures this traffic by putting a call-to-action overlay on the page you share with your contact details. Find it: snip.ly ...and that's the end of the list! None of us have an endless well of resources to draw upon for our digital marketing strategy. However, with the right mix of tools and the help of automation you can take your marketing up a level in 2017 to meet your prospecting goals. And PS: If you haven’t subscribed to The Brief you are definitely missing out! For more free tips like this and the latest news delivered to you daily, visit eliteagent.com/subscribe

10 Digital Tools to Supercharge Your Marketing

Samantha McLean

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