We’ve all heard the phrase “time is money”. In business terms, it’s as true as it was back in the 1700s when it was said to have been coined by Benjamin Franklin. Our time is valuable, and we want to make sure everything we’re spending it on is worthwhile – especially when it comes to digital marketing.
Everyone’s looking for a way to win more business in less time, without the hassle or commitment of some of the slightly outdated, more traditional marketing techniques. It might feel like an impossibility to you – there’s no way you can succeed in digital marketing without dedicating a substantial amount of time and effort into your project. This, of course, is true, but there’s no reason why you can’t help yourself out by using the tools that allow you to be the most productive at your tasks.
Take a look at the top 10 productivity tools used by the most successful digital marketers today to save time:
If you want a fast and easy way to keep track of your business and your competitors, Google Alerts is a must use. The service sends emails to the user when it finds results that match a particular search term, enabling the user to be alerted whenever there is news and information on trends and topics that are worth knowing about.
There are so many ways to make the most out of Google Alerts from a business point of view, aside from tracking your company and your competitors. You can also monitor your keywords, track references to important names, build links for SEO, and much more.
2. Hootsuite
There is very little point in dedicating separate chunks of time to posting to your business’ different social media outlets when Hootsuite allows you to schedule and post to them all at once. The social media management platform enables users to view multiple social channels at once in the form of an on-screen dashboard, track performance and share insights.
3. Slack
Collaboration doesn’t have to be time-consuming, and there’s no need to spread your communication across multiple platforms. Slack allows users to save time by securely collaborating across teams, departments, offices and countries, all on one hub.
Users can share files, message and call one another from anywhere, reducing the need for multiple meetings and emails to get the job done. If you regularly collaborate with external partners in your marketing efforts, Slack can save you time and improve your marketing skills by bettering your coordination and giving you the option to join Slack’s free “communities” and browse channels.
4. Canva
Why spend hours working on a design project when you can save time with a simple drag-and-drop style template? Canva offers its users access to photographs, vector images, graphics, and fonts, allowing professionals and non-professionals alike to quickly and easily produce impressive graphics and print media designs for website and social media use.
5. Owler
As the world’s largest community-based competitive insights platform, Owler prides itself in providing real-time news, alerts and company insights to help businesses stay ahead of the competition. Owler’s automated updates make it easy to keep up with what’s happening around you, with emails sent directly to your inbox, so there’s no need to do the hard work yourself.
6. HubSpot
Marketing and sales platform HubSpot provides a full platform of tools for social media marketing, content management, web analytics and search engine optimization. The free automation service allows you to save time by focusing directly on CRM, marketing, and sales to attract new clients and convert leads to increase sales.
7. MeetEdgar
Another popular social media scheduling tool is MeetEdgar. You can use the platform to access all of your social channels and manage scheduling and posts from one location rather than going to each site separately.
MeetEdgar is slightly less straightforward than Hootsuite, but you can do more with it. Namely, you can directly take content from your website and schedule it to be shared on a frequency determined by you, so that those who may have missed a post the first time round have the chance to see it when it’s posted again in the future.
8. IFTTT
IFTTT is a platform that allows you to bring together your apps and devices, including Twitter, Dropbox, Evernote, Nest, Fitbit, Amazon Alexa, and Google Assistant, into “Applets”. These Applets allow your apps to work together in new ways and produce results that they wouldn’t be able to produce on their own.
The idea of IFTTT is to get all of your apps collaborating together on the same network for more seamless and efficient phone or PC usage. This can be an incredibly handy time-saving tool from a marketing perspective, giving you the option to automatically share your blog posts to your social media channels, save your Instagram photos to your Dropbox, archive your social posts to a spreadsheet, and much more.
9. Mailchimp
Email campaigns are one of the most effective forms of digital marketing, but they can take up hours of time if you’re not using a scheduling tool to get the job done. As one of the most popular email marketing tools, Mailchimp allows you to schedule and pause regular email campaigns, enabling users to create and save templates for the simplest, quickest way to communicate directly with their audience.
10. StayFocusd
Sometimes the best time-saving tools aren’t the ones that necessarily assist you in your work. StayFocusd is designed to prevent you from getting distracted online, which, let’s face it, is far too easy to do when there’s so much available on the internet these days.
If you need to knuckle down on a particular project, or you simply want to improve your productivity levels, StayFocusd is a Google Chrome extension that restricts the amount of time you can spend on typical “time-wasting” websites, blocking you from being able to access them for the rest of your working day once an allotted time period is up.
