The Secret Weapons Every Marketer Needs
A breakdown of the newest tools, apps and services marketers can use to make their jobs easier.
By Kathleen Smith •
This story originally appeared on Visual.ly
Today's marketers have to wear many hats: web developer, systems integrator, publicist, social-media manager, email expert and so forth. 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 helping to empower marketers to become even more self-service, limiting the number of additional resources like development or designers they need to 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.
Related: 5 Simple Hacks to Make Your Content Way More Shareable
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.
Related: 3 Benefits in Personalizing a Website for Visitors
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 are three tools for media outreach.
Social Media
Buffer, Hootsuite, Edgar -- All three will help you manage your social media posting schedule but each has a 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 as well as responses and has 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 analytics 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 and many, many integrations available to help you sync it 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 choice of email providers.
Looking for more categories and solutions? We're working on a directory to share the newest and best marketing tools with our readers. Enter your email below to be notified when we launch it.
Related: Choosing Your Marketing Weapons
