As marketers, we spend a lot of time looking for “free” tools. We’re trying to stay within a budget, maximize return or avoid the corporate approval process.
And I’ve been there too.
When I decided to open my own business, I was so worried about money that I hesitated to spend $10 on a domain name. Now, I spend hundreds of dollars a month on software, tools, and resources that have enabled me to be a better marketer and do ultimately do a better job for my clients.
These are some of my favorite tools.
Worth Every Penny: Tools That Will Boost your Marketing Effectiveness and Efficiency
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Worth Every Penny:
Tools That Will Boost your
Marketing Effectiveness
and Efficiency
@ysilver
#SMSsummit
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@ysilver
#SMSsummit
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2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
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2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
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Hope
Need
Fear
Doubt
Drive
Action
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Hope
Need
Fear
Doubt
Drive
Action
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Hope
Need
Fear
Doubt
Drive
Action
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Why am I sharing
this story with you?
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Why am I sharing
this story with you?
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Quality
Time
Efficiency
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Quality
Time
Efficiency
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Content
Ideation +
Creation
Design +
Development
Email
Marketing
SEO +
Analysis
Project
Management
Productivity Communication
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Content
Ideation +
Creation
Design +
Development
Email
Marketing
SEO +
Analysis
Project
Management
Productivity Communication
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CONTENT DESIGN / DEV EMAIL SEO + ANALYTICS
PROJECT
MANAGEMENT
PRODUCTIVITY COMMUNICATION
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CONTENT DESIGN / DEV EMAIL SEO + ANALYTICS
PROJECT
MANAGEMENT
PRODUCTIVITY COMMUNICATION
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CONTENT DESIGN / DEV EMAIL SEO + ANALYTICS
PROJECT
MANAGEMENT
PRODUCTIVITY COMMUNICATION
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CONTENT DESIGN / DEV EMAIL SEO + ANALYTICS
PROJECT
MANAGEMENT
PRODUCTIVITY COMMUNICATION
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CONTENT DESIGN / DEV EMAIL SEO + ANALYTICS
PROJECT
MANAGEMENT
PRODUCTIVITY COMMUNICATION
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Project Management
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Project Management
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Project Management
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A
B
C
D E
F
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A
B
C
D E
F
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A
B
C
D E
F
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Productivity
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Productivity
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Productivity
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/opinion/sunday/hit-the-reset-button-in-your-brain.html
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Productivity
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/opinion/sunday/hit-the-reset-button-in-your-brain.html
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Productivity
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/opinion/sunday/hit-the-reset-button-in-your-brain.html
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Productivity
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Prevent or Address Scope Creep
Gather Data to Assist Decision Making
Learn About Work Habits
Align Business Growth With Goals
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Prevent or Address Scope Creep
Gather Data to Assist Decision Making
Learn About Work Habits
Align Business Growth With Goals
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Prevent or Address Scope Creep
Gather Data to Assist Decision Making
Learn About Work Habits
Align Business Growth With Goals
69. Tweet questions to @ysilver #SMSsummit
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Prevent or Address Scope Creep
Gather Data to Assist Decision Making
Learn About Work Habits
Align Business Growth With Goals
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Communication
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Communication
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Communication
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Communication
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72%ENGAGEMENT
13%ENGAGEMENT
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Content
Creation
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Content
Creation
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Content
Creation
CONCEPT
CONTENT
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Content
Creation
CONCEPT
CONTENT
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Content
Creation
CONCEPT
CONTENT
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Project Reading Ease Score
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Project Reading Ease Score
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0.
1.3
2.5
3.8
5.
6.3
BOUNCE CTR CONV. ENG.
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0.
1.3
2.5
3.8
5.
6.3
BOUNCE CTR CONV. ENG.
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“If you can’t explain it simply,
you don’t understand it well enough”
- Albert Einstein
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“If you can’t explain it simply,
you don’t understand it well enough”
- Albert Einstein
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SEO
OK
PROJECTS
Text…
Text…
SEND
DESIGN + DEVPRODUCTIVITY
CONTENT
SEARCH
EMAIL
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SEO
OK
PROJECTS
Text…
Text…
SEND
DESIGN + DEVPRODUCTIVITY
CONTENT
SEARCH
EMAIL
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@ysilver #SMSsummit
www.yosefsilver.com/marketing-tools
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@ysilver #SMSsummit
www.yosefsilver.com/marketing-tools
Hinweis der Redaktion
My name is Yosef Silver, and I run a marketing agency based in Kansas City. I am originally from the UK, am a dad to three adorable kids, and I have over 10 years experience in the world of digital marketing. At my core, organic search is my passion, followed very closely by email marketing. I love to focus on driving results for my clients with a holistic approach to digital marketing.
A little over a year ago, my life, and my career, took a drastic turn.
A routine Sunday-afternoon birthday party for my friend’s daughter led to me breaking my leg. I shattered my tibia, fibula and ankle, and spent a week in hospital.
At the time, I had no idea that it would be more than 9-months before I would walk again.
Just as I started to adapt to the reality of taking client-calls from my bed, or balancing deliverables with pain meds, I got a call that I’d never forget.
My boss, my friend, had decided that my broken leg didn’t align with his corporate goals.
Just like that, I was out of a job.
It didn’t take me too long to reach out to recruiters, or friends in the marketing industry and have some leads on a couple of projects.
I felt hopeful, but I was panicked because this was nothing close to a full-time salary and my mountain of medical bills meant this was the worst possible time for me to be looking for work .
It took going on just one interview for me to realize that I didn’t want to be an employee again.
Perhaps it was the fact we spent the entire interview talking about my injury rather than my skill set.
Perhaps it was the thought of adding a commute to my day.
Or perhaps the fear of investing my own business faded had faded away because everything else I knew to be stable to true had crumbled away.
As I sat in traffic on the way back from that interview, I knew that my injury, was the silver bullet that would empower me to to become an entrepreneur.
So why am I sharing this story with you?
As marketers, we spend a lot of time looking for “free” tools. We’re trying to stay within a budget, maximize return or avoid the corporate approval process.
And I’ve been there too.
When I decided to open my own business, I was so worried about money that I hesitated to spend $10 on a domain name.
Now, I spend hundreds of dollars a month on software, tools and resources that have enabled me to be a better marketer and do ultimately do a better job for my clients.
So, today, I want to get everyone away from the practice of doing this:
Don’t check the cost of a tool before you evaluate it.
So many people find a tool they like, and before they finish learning about the pros and cons, they are checking the pricing. Before you’ve even learned about the efficiencies you could enjoy, you’re distracted by the fee.
If a piece of software truly makes your more effective, or more efficient and you decide NOT to buy it, the opportunity-cost will far outweigh the fee.
When it comes to being a master of your craft, the best marketer for the job, whether your focus on strategy or execution, you need to have the best tools for your job.
Ask yourself if the tool increase your efficiency or add quality to your work.
What else can you accomplish if you were to to pay for this tool?
How much time will you save?
As marketers, we make data-driven, smart decisions every single day. Apply that skill to making decisions about your marketing toolkit.
In preparing for this talk, I reached out to fellow marketers and friends to see which tools they need to meet their goals.
Which part of their marketing toolkit was essential to their success.
As the tweets and replies rolled in, I noticed a pattern.
Most of the tools we need to meet our goals, and keep our clients happy, fell into one of these broad categories.
Design and Development
Email Marketing
SEO & Analysis
And when we find a tool we love, we become evangelists for it.
And when we find a tool we love, we, as marketers, become evangelists for it.
I got to think about all the tools I use during an average week, and the list was huge.
I couldn’t have grown from zero to 25 clients in my first year if I my marketing stack didn’t include this tool set.
And some of my favorites were introduced to me by friends in the industry, or speakers at conferences.
Obviously, I didn’t launch my business with this massive stack of software, but at this point, there’s no turning back.
For the sake of our conversation today, I am going to focus on five tools that have had the biggest impact on minimizing opportunity cost and maximizing my effectiveness as a marketer.
These are the tools that have made me more efficient, and are worth every penny spent on them.
I am sharing this from an agency perspective, but I do believe that the insights I will share today will result in efficiencies whether you’re in-house, at an agency, or a solo consultant.
In the interest of transparency, I am not being sponsored by, or receiving compensation from any of these brands. I’m sharing these insights with you because I believe they’ve fueled my business growth.
Let’s start with Project management.
Until you find your groove, the method that becomes YOUR guiding light, project management can be a pain in the ass.
I have found and a method that works wonderfully, for me.
My clients have their own systems that work for them. For some, it’s different software. For others it’s whiteboards or paper lists.
Ultimately, we needed to get on the same page without forcing our methods on each other.
I struggled with this, until I came across Untio
Unito is the key to platform agnostic project management.
It allows you to keep all your project information in one place.
It’s like IFTTT or Zapier for project management. Here’s how it works.
You keep doing it your way. For me, it’s Asana.
I am an Asana junkie. My client projects, personal projects, even ideas I want to shelve for the future live in Asana.
If a client emails me, Asana.
Following up on a lead? Asana.
But one of my largest clients uses Trello.
For the first couple of weeks, I was reliant on email notifications so I could make manual updates and stay on top of things.
Then I found Unito.
Setting up the integration takes less than five minutes, and then you have perfectly synced data, wherever you need it.
Not only is this an excellent product, allowing you to sync between Asana, Trello, Basecamp, GitHub, Microsoft Projects (and basically any tool other than TeamWork) their support team are outstanding and incredibly responsive.
If one division of your team use Trello and you’re using Asana, you can sync tasks without anyone having to change their platform of choice. If you want to sync Asana tasks with a specific tag to a dedicated project, you can do that too.
Here are two key ways Unito has helped me:
First:White labeling + strategic partnerships.
I am proud to have strategic partnerships with a number of agencies and Untio has allowed us all to remain working with the process that we find familiar, and efficient.
When I start working with a client of another agency, I have access to as much campaign data that I need. If a task is assigned to my team, it happens almost instantly.
The client doesn’t need to change they work.
The agency partner doesn’t need to change the way they work.
I don’t need to change the way I work.
And neither does my team.
Secondly, Unito lets me filter out the conversations I don’t need to be a part of.
I love Asana, but I think their notifications could use a little more customization. By syncing just the tasks assigned to me, or my team, I can cut through the noise of email notifications from scores of projects, and make sure the relevant information reaches me.
Between client projects and agency partnerships, I need to be able to access data that lives on half a dozen Asana Workspaces, a bunch of other platforms. With Unito, I have access to everything in just one place without the need to copy and paste a bunch of tasks between platforms.
I love Asana, but I think their notifications could use a little more customization. By syncing just the tasks or projects assigned to me, or my team, I can cut through the noise of email notifications from scores of projects, and make sure the relevant information reaches me.
Between client projects and agency partnerships, I need to be able to access data that lives on half a dozen Asana Workspaces, a bunch of other platforms. With Unito, I have access to everything in just one place without the need to copy and paste or move content into email threads or text messages.
Getting my projects in order with Unito went a long way towards me understanding my bandwidth. Now, I can better estimate timelines for new projects or client deliverables. So now, let’ talk about getting the work done!
Some people live in their inbox and let that determine their tasks for the day. Others, like myself, prefer to set aside time to get deep into project work.
Some people call this “deep work” or “time boxing”, no matter what you call it, there’s plenty of evidence to support the idea that getting out of your email is good for productivity.
Email, too, should be done at designated times. An email that you know is sitting there, unread, may sap attentional resources as your brain keeps thinking about it, distracting you from what you’re doing. What might be in it? Who’s it from? Is it good news or bad news? It’s better to leave your email program off than to hear that constant ping and know that you’re ignoring messages.
But how?
With countless notifications from all of our devices, it can be hard to disconnect and get focused. Fear of missing out might be stopping you from turning off all those notifications, but they are counter productive. For some, music helps.
You might have your favorite podcast or Spotify playlist, and please, Tweet me a link to your go-to tunes, but for me, there’s one thing that really gets me in the zone.
Brain.FM
Now, this isn’t a marketing tool, it’s a productivity that has become a vital piece of my marketing toolkit.
Brain.fm’s website states that they unlock music’s potential to influence cognitive states.
Now that might sound spook and mind-altering, but I assure you it’s not.
With a unique collection of playlists that can stimulate the brain via unique acoustic features that are woven into the music you can get achieve a deeper level of focus.
When I started using Brain.FM, my productivity shout through the roof. I got my subscription in 2015 and have never looked back.
There is music for focusing, relaxing and sleeping and I have used all three.
Any time I need to get into an incredible focused work mode like writing this presentation, editing content, writing blog posts or building websites I use the focus soundtracks.
You can also set the music to play for 30 minutes, and hour, two hours, or on an endless loop, so you don’t lose track of time while you’re in a deep-work mode.
For the best in-flight rest you’ll ever experience, download the app to save local versions of the music before you fly.
If you have always wished you could grab a quick power-nap and get back to work, but struggled with falling asleep, you’re going to love this too.
The first time Brain.fm appeared on AppSumo, they landed 8,300 new customers. They are also one of Product Hunt's top 20 most up voted products of all time.
The next tool I am going to discuss has had an major impact for my productivity too, but I had to overcome my negative association with time tracking before I could see the value.
The first time I was asked to track time within a company, it had been presented to my by the CEO as a way to check in on what people were doing during the work day.
This was the sort environment that frowned on people writing personal emails, taking calls or checking Facebook in the office, even if they were on their lunch break, so clearly there were some other trust issues going on.
Now, I can’t imagine running my business without tracking time, and my tool of choice is Toggl.
At the end of a day, week or month, I can see exactly where my time was spent. This is helpful for so many reasons.
I can tell if a project looks like it is going to go beyond scope before it happens.
I can gather data on how long specific tasks take me and decide if I should outsource or automate part of the process.
I can start to see patterns about my work habits like the fact I seem to spend Fridays doing a lot of administrative (or non-billable) tasks or the fact I worked 28 hours while I was supposed to be on Vacation in February.
Helps me align my business growth to my goals.
Now if you’re NOT running your own business and you’re part of an in-house marketing team to, tracking your tasks for a month or two will give you a tremendous amount of insight into to the way you work.
- Which projects are taking you too long?
- When you estimate 30 minutes to build a landing page, does it really take you two hours?
- Does that thing you avoid doing for days at a time really only take 45 minutes?
Time tracking allowed me to see how many hours each month I was spending on quick requests that “only take five minutes”.
It helped me better understand where my time was going at the end of each day and Toggl makes time tracking easy.
It’s so easy that it’s become an intuitive part of my workflow. It integrates seamlessly with Asana, Gmail, Evernote, Google Docs, Chrome, Wordpress, and more than 100 other platforms.
Let me ask you something. How many people in this room have ever closed their laptop at the end of the day and said “where did the time go?”
Toggl can tell you.
Try tracking your own time for a month. I was amazed at what I was able to learn about the way I was working, and was able to make significant changes that made me more efficient.
Next up, let’s talk about communication.
I work with clients and contractors in at least six countries so I have needed to find ways to communicate quickly and effectively without me feeling tethered to my phone night and day.
Dealing with time differences and juggling everyone’s time commitments can be a struggle. Then you factor in business travel, or school vacations and it can take two weeks to schedule a call.
Scheduling time to talk is simple when you use calendly.
When I first came across Calendly, it was pretty innovative but thankfully, it’s become much more mainstream.
Calendly eliminates the back and forth that goes into scheduling a meeting by providing an interactive dashboard that integrates with your calendar.
If you send your calendly link to someone, they just needs to take a look at their calendar and pick a time that works.
You can customize the sign up page to collect any information you might need ahead of the call like the topic for the meeting, or whether or not you’ll need to share screens.
And you can use this as part of your sales funnel too.
If like this client, one of your campaign touch points in a phone call, you can create a Calendly link that you leverage through your email marketing campaigns. Or you can embed the form on your website.
The embed looks clean and is as simple as cutting and pasting a line of code.
And when we did this for this client, we saw a six-fold increase in qualified leads.
Similarly, we added the option schedule a call increased in this email campaign.
Engagement on this email campaign increased from from 13% to 72%.
Once the recipient chooses a time that works for them, you both get notifications immediately.
There is a free-version of Calendly but for a small fee, you can choose multiple meeting types or customize the notifications.
Next up, let’s talk about content
When I approach content creation, I’m not just thinking about writing a blog post.
There’s an ideation process, keyword research and editorial planning that all lead up to determining topics.
From there, there’s the need for written content, graphic design to support the article, email content that encourages users to click, social media posts to promote, and re-promote the content.
And as good as I am at writing the strategy or building email campaigns that deliver results, I know that proofreading is one of my areas for improvement.
I rely on Grammarly to check content while I write, and from time to time, I’ll have a virtual assistant such as Fancy Hands proofread content before it goes to a client, but above all else, I am a big fan of Readable.
I want to give a massive shout-out to my friends at Readable and congratulate them on a new version that went live this week. Their website looks a little different now but I’d already submitted my slide deck! Plus, they are from my home town!
Readable goes beyond checking spelling and grammar and measures the readability of your text. The website is easy to use and gives you concreate suggestions for making improvements that will make your content easier to understand.
The metric they use to score your content is called the Flesch Reading Ease test.
If you’ve ever used the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress site, you may already be familiar with this metric. This is the score that Yoast uses to tell you if your content is easy to read.
If you’re using Raven SEO Tools, you have access to Scribe that I believe uses the Readable API so you can score your content without leaving the platform.
This test was originally developed by the Navy in the 1970s, and was then used by the army to assess the difficulty of technical manuals.
In some states, regulations require official documents be easy to understand. For example, in PA was the first state to require that automobile insurance policies must be written at no higher than a ninth-grade level of reading ease.
As marketers, we want to create content that will resonate.
We want people to read, engage with, and share the content we spend our time and effort on.
In Today’s world of instant gratification, this translates into metrics that matter.
Bounce Rate
Click Through Rate
Engagement
Conversions
It’s easy to dismiss a poor readability score by saying your subject matter is too complex or legal won’t let you.
you but in the words of Albert Einstein, “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”. Your readers need to understand the topic well enough to buy.
Best of all, Readable is only $5 a month. At that price, your improved content will pay for itself.
For each of the tools I’ve mentioned today, there are going to be a dozen alternatives.
As I mentioned at the start of this presentation, we become brand evangelists for the tools we love. In researching this topic, I learned about some awesome new tools that I plan to check out so, if there’s a software tool or platform you love and you think I should have mentioned it today, please let me know by sending me a tweet
You’ll find a blog post to accompany this presentation along with my slides on my website at www.yosefsilver.com/marketing-tools, or tweet me later and I’ll send you the link.
There’s no single right way to be an effective or efficient marketer so I encourage you all to learn from your peers, connect with other marketers on Twitter and your wins with each other. When we do that, we learn from each other and deliver the very best experience to our clients.