The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing, says Tom Fishburne, Founder of Cartoonist.

But behind every seamlessly conceived and executed digital campaign is a hard-working, driven, and, above all, tired marketer with a hectic schedule.

Today’s digital marketing involves a lot of simultaneous projects, running multiple campaigns on different channels, tracking results, and a great deal of client reporting.

Luckily, the software industry keeps pace with the digital marketing landscape and its demands, which means that there are numerous useful tools that can pick up the slack and make your life much easier.

1. Boost your productivity with Google G Suite

The average employee is interrupted every 3 minutes and 5 seconds.

What’s even worse, it takes up to 25 minutes to focus on that same task again.

Switching between tasks, devices, and different tools results in a 40% drop in productivity which costs corporations $450 billion globally.

Digital marketers say that one of their biggest challenges is finding the data they need in different folders, accounts, and applications, and that’s exactly what G Suite can solve.

This cloud-based set of apps is divided into four different categories:

● Communication

● Storage

● Collaboration

● Management

With all the functionalities these apps provide, it’s easier than ever to manage a remote team of employees and share documents and other files.

The best thing is that all the apps are mutually connected which means that you can schedule a meeting via Calendar, automatically notify all the participants via Gmail, and host a video meeting via Google Hangouts Meet.

Given that face-to-face requests are 34 times more effective than emails, it’s clear how you can contribute to this video conferencing feature.

Also, G Suite’s integrated AI and ML tools act as a personal assistant which additionally helps you perform all the above-mentioned tasks.

Important projects can be created, edited, and easily located within Docs, Sheets, and Slides, and they can be accessed from different devices (and parts of the world).

Each document is refreshed in real time so that every team member can see the latest version.

You can store up to from 15 GB in an individual package, while Business subscription offers unlimited storage. All the documents and files on Drive can be edited, while Vault allows you to store completed documents securely.

Admins can handle sharing and storing permissions so that you can invite even someone outside your organization to participate.

All this can be done without leaving G Suite and juggling between various tools which can save you and your team a lot of time.

2. Optimize your time management with Clockify

When it comes to digital marketers, spending too much time on the internet and social media goes with the territory.

No wonder that time management is a critical skill if you want to get things done. It’s hard to resist the latest celebrity gossip, funny memes, super cute cat photos, and other distractions while creating your campaigns.

And what’s even worse than that, you’re so busy every day and yet your to-do list doesn’t seem to shrink.

Keeping track of how much time it takes you to complete every single task is a good way of improving your time management and productivity.

Clockify makes all this possible as it allows you and your team to:

● Have an overview of your work week as well as where you spent most of your time. This way you can, for example, cut down on meetings and prioritize profitable and important tasks.

● Identify the profitability of your projects regardless of the fact whether you work for a fixed salary or charge per hour.

● Report to your clients how much you worked over a certain period. This reliable time management app shows your clients a detailed breakdown of your time and itemizes your activities, all of which makes billing much easier and more transparent.

● Monitor how your team performs and organizes their time, how efficient and effective each member is, and what they have been working on. Their reports can facilitate the process of calculating payroll. You can even lock timesheets and prevent editing past time entries.

3. Improve brand monitoring with Mention

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and only 5 minutes to ruin it, said Warren Buffet.

People talk about brands online and if you want your campaigns to work, you need to know how they feel about the way you communicate branded messages.

52% of consumers expect brands to know when the right time to communicate is, while 48% want brands to understand their needs and offer them find the best solutions to their problems.

To achieve this, you need to feel the pulse of your audience.

Besides that, brand monitoring is one of the best ways to prevent a PR crisis before it snowballs into a full-fledged disaster.

A mention is a tool which can help you

● Collect relevant information about your audience through social media listening.

● Track your mentions and the impact of your campaigns. If a brand you manage receives a lot of mentions, take advantage of Boolean Query to filter and narrow your search to the tiniest details.

● Keep an eye on your competitors (and steal a couple of tricks from their sleeve).

● Get to know your audience and learn to speak their language with the help of relevant, targeted keywords.

● Use different filters to make yourself heard in the clamoring crowd of other digital marketing campaigns.

● Analyze your results and fine-tune your outreach accordingly.

All this can be done directly from your dashboard, which saves you time and boosts your efficiency.

Having a bird’s-eye view of all your digital marketing efforts is essential for growing a brand and shaping your audience’s opinion of it, which is why such a reliable tool is a must-have.

4. Create clear, grammatically correct messages with Grammarly

The human mind does not read every letter by itself, but the word as a wrote, according to a research study conducted at Cambridge University.

But, that doesn’t imply that your audience will tolerate typos and grammar errors. On the contrary, you’ll come off as thoroughly sloppy, unprofessional, and untrustworthy.

Moreover, Grammarly, a writing app which can help you improve your writing skills, reported that native English-speaking professionals who failed to be promoted to director level or above within the first 10 years of their career, made 2.5 times as many grammar mistakes as their more successful colleagues.

However, we all make mistakes and spelling errors especially when we’re in a hurry, not to mention that many digital marketers aren’t native English speakers.

With Grammarly, you don’t have to worry about the following:

● Grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes, as the tool underlines all your blunders and provides both the correction and the explanation of the rules you break for future reference.

● Plagiarism and copycatting. Grammarly compares your writing to billions of other blog posts and pieces of content and lets you know if you’ve borrowed too much.

● Your writing style and word choice. Digital marketers have to take into consideration different segments of their audience and adjust their language and style to match different registers suitable for a particular group’s preferences.

It’s worth mentioning that Grammarly checks everything you write in your word processor, web page editor, and, as of recently, Google Docs, which basically means that if you combine it with G Suite, you won’t have to switch between different tools to create the impeccable content for your campaigns.

 

5. Polish your design with Canva

Stock images are OK, but it’s much better if you create your own visuals for the blog or social media posts.

Marketers say that infographics perform best, and research corroborates their statement – these visually-oriented, easily digestible representations of information score 3 times more likes and shares on social media than any other content type.

But, high-quality custom visuals and infographics can be a bit complex to create if you’re not a trained designer. 

However, Canva gives everybody, even people who aren’t exactly artistically endowed, a chance to create great designs without too much hassle.   

With the help of this easy-to-use tool, you’ll be able to access tons of images, cool layouts, graphics, fonts, filters, and icons. Or you can upload your own.

It also automatically resizes your visuals for specific social media channels or presentations.

The search option helps you easily find the images, layouts, or graphics that you like and add them to your designs with the help of the drag-and-drop functionality.

As simple as that.

Another benefit of using Canva is that you can share your designs with your co-workers and ask them for their opinion and advice.

6. Manage your tasks with Taskade

Inefficient processes can hurt your digital marketing business and affect your bottom line.

Failing to meet deadlines, lack of communication between team members, and poor planning can also ruin your professional reputation and lead to financial loss.

You can eliminate all these potential bottlenecks by using a task management tool such as Taskade.

Unlike other similar apps, this one is lightweight and it doesn’t even require you to register or login before you start creating your to-do lists.

Equipped with video chat, deadline notifications, and real-time editing, this intuitive software for collaboration, chatting, and tracking progress can do wonders for your communication and task management efforts.

You and your team can simply start writing down tasks, lists, plans, and ideas and sharing them in your workspace. There are different formatting options, and you can assign new and tick off completed tasks for better visibility.

It’s possible to create different lists such as project overview, weekly tasks, or project roadmap, while visual workflows allow you to switch between different views – list view, board view, and action view.

Keep track of your team’s activities, upcoming deadlines, and tasks directly from your dashboard.

7. Relax with IDAGIO

Being a digital marketer is fun but this profession also has its fair share of stress.

That’s why it’s important to take a deep breath and relax with some calming classical music.

If you’re wondering why the emphasis is on classical music, then it’s should be mentioned that according to a study, listening to this genre can reduce blood pressure and help with stress recovery.

IDAGIO is a streaming service specialized in providing:

● Playlists created and curated by some of the most eminent experts and performers

● Impeccable sound quality

● Access across all your devices

This platform offers a huge classical collection and most popular renditions of classical pieces released by top labels.

It’s easily searchable so that you can find different interpretations of the same work, and you can even create your own playlists and collections. Composers, works, genres, epochs, and performers all have their own pages so that you can dive in and explore classical music based on your preferences.

These 7 tools can help you overcome some of the biggest challenges in digital marketing, and remove different obstacles on your way to success. Save your time, money, reputation, and inner peace while you’re climbing up the ladder.