The Digital Tools Our Experts Swear By Some of our favorite experts in social media and marketing reveal the digital tools that save them time, hassle and money.
By Linda Lacina
Want to do anything better? Who doesn't? We asked our favorite experts in digital marketing for the tools they swear by to build audience, stay productive and save money, time and hassle. Here's what they're using now.
To save time: Zapier
From Eric Siu, Single Grain
"Zapier saves me a lot of money because it connects the many different web applications as a business. For example, if someone fills out a lead form on our site we're immediately notified in our chat app so our sales guys can jump on it."
To add visuals: Canva
From Brian Honigman, BrianHonigman.com
"I'm constantly creating content to market my business and help my clients reach their customers, but creating visuals was always a weakness for me since I'm not a graphic designer. Canva allows marketers and business owners with no design background to quickly and easily put together stunning visuals for their content, including visuals catered for sharing on social media. Use Canva to boost all of your online marketing with high quality and professional visuals from their custom fonts, templates and images."
To manage payments: Square
From Jason Falls, CafePress
"If you do any type of retail sales, take credit cards for payments for your services or transact in any way other than sending invoices and getting paid, you must investigate Square. You pay less in transaction fees [Compared to some other platforms], your money is deposited from the credit card transactions the next morning, and you can create a custom cash register with product tracking. I passively made that suggestion to a doctor's office I visited recently and they've saved thousands of dollars already in credit card processing fees."
To stay in touch: FollowUpThen, Newsle, News.me
From Peter Shankman, Shankman|Honig
"I live and die via FollowUpThen.com, Newsle.com, and News.me. They all help me connect and stay better in-tune with my world, all within a few minutes each day. Such value."
Related: 5 Ecommerce Mistakes to Avoid: A Newbie's Guide
To save hassle: Timetrade.com
From Ilise Benun, Marketing-Mentor.com
"This online scheduler gives people access to my Google calendar so they can sign up for my free mentoring session without all the back and forth via email. It's a big time-saver."
To get around: Uber
From Jim Joseph, Cohn & Wolfe
"Uber has changed my life. It's hard to manage a tight schedule, and to know in advance exactly when I need a ride. Uber is flexible to my schedule, not the other way around."
To get the message out: FollowerWonk
From Joanna Lord, BigDoor
"FollowerWonk can help you identify influencers in any niche and provide great analytics around them to help you optimize your outreach. In a world where connecting with the right person at the right time over the right story matters so much, this is one of my favorite tools. I also love the team behind the tool – they are authentically interested in unlocking hard to get at social analytics and I'm a big fan.
A bonus tool that I've recently become pretty involved with and I am super excited with is called SparkTrend, which is a startup out of Seattle trying to provide amazing image analytics. I believe the visual web has become our new ecosystem ways and they have created a pretty cool image management software that provides analytics on your images across social platforms. It helps you pick the perfect image for every update, story or page. Given how significant the visual story is for brands today, I have a feeling this tool is going to be huge."
Related: 4 Secrets to Multichannel Success
