10 Tools for More Productive Online Marketing

Online marketing is a many headed monster. The average marketer has to balance social, content, email, and other inbound marketing tactics. All while making sure to monitor the most effective, in order to constantly tailor their strategies to improve results quarter by quarter. Anyone who has done it, whether with or without a team, knows how exhausting it is.

Productivity becomes key if you want to juggle these correctly. The right tools are crucial, so you can automate as much of the process as possible, and cut down on the time spent doing the rest.

1. SalesMate

SalesMate is your lead management platform. It makes it easy to monitor how your sales team is working, where it needs help and how to optimize the process. It also stores all your leads, interaction history and all the records you may need. It’s your ultimate sales productivity toolkit.

2. GetResponse

GetResponse started out as an email marketing platform, but it has become much more.

Recently they have unveiled their automated marketing feature, landing pages (customized and optimized for your brand), and webinars that can be viewed by hundreds or thousands of people, depending on your plan.

That makes it a much more expansive platform that touches on multiple marketing avenues, not just email marketing.

Add that to the fact that their email templates and scheduling systems are actually easy to use, and you have a definite winner. No more frustrating and overly complicated drip templates! You never have to create, delete and recreate email lists, only to find the initial settings were wrong and it won’t let you edit. The platform won’t suddenly go down and leave you stranded.

3. Cyfe

I have been a big believer in Cyfe from the beginning, and it still has no peers when it comes to sheer feature amount for the price. It is an all-in-one business platform that works by giving you all the power over the tool.

You create customized widgets on your dashboard that can run literally anything: sales, CRM, support, social media, marketing, analytics, and a dozen others. You are only limited by your imagination. Best of all, the premium costs $19 per month for all of this, or $14 per month if you pay the annual fee. It is safe to say it is worth the cost.

4. DrumUp

DrumUp is one of the most useful social media productivity tools around. Not to mention one of the cheapest. You just fill up you queue with posts, set times every day you want them sent out, organize them based on order, and it will do the rest.

Of course, you still need to make social media posts meant to engage, but this is a simple way to keep your profiles active.

5. Automated Spreadsheets

Ugh, data. It is important, it helps us, and yet it is a bane for every marketer in the world. Isn’t there an easier way?! Well, yes, and this tool is that way. Automated Spreadsheets is still pretty new, as the link to Product Hunt will attest. But it is a cool little app that allows you to automate data aggregation into usable, simple spreadsheets that are easy on the eyes.

So you can share progress with clients and bosses, your team, and keep them for your own uses. This one really does cut down on a ton of time and effort, not to mention stress.

6. Viral Content Buzz

It would be great if you could just post your content on social media, and everyone shares it out for you just because you have a call to action. But we all know that isn’t how it works. If you want to reach new audiences you need a more direct approach.

Viral Content Buzz works by putting you in contact with other social media influencers of varying audience sizes. You and those others exchange content, with each posting on behalf of the other. This gives you access to a whole new viewer pool, who will become aware of your brand from another that they trust.

It is a convenient and effective tool, and can lead to long term connections that can benefit yourself and the others you network with.

7. Offerpop

User generated content is a tricky thing to tackle, but it is effective when done right. Offerpop takes that process and makes it more reachable, by setting achievable goals and then giving you the outreach features you need to make them happen.

The primary feature here is creating promotion and engagement campaigns based around content your users choose to make you. This means a certain amount of brand loyalty already present to drive it. But if you have a foundation of support for, this is a great way to expand on it.

This is a great tool to help you create a press room (“We are in the press”) page. Here’s an example of one to give you an idea.

8. CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a platform I have been using for a long time, and I love it. It makes planning content and scheduling it on social media so much easier. It works as a WordPress plugin, creating a section in your dashboard where you can plan posts, assign tasks, give details, schedule posts to auto-publish, and update social media.

This has not only cut down on content marketing tasks for me, but it has made running a team easier, andediting tasks easier.

9. Mention

Reputation management requires you to keep up to date on all mentions of you and your industry. In the past I used Google Alerts and Hootsuite for that. Now I still use the first, but instead of the second I use Mention.

It sends alerts and lets you reply in your dashboard. But it is a lot more straightforward and cleaner than other social media dashboards I have used.

10. Buzzsumo

What is your competition writing? What content is performing the best? Buzzsumo is a super awesome platform that works by taking information from across the web related to content, and offering it to you to use for targeting your own content campaigns.

Research content from any brand or competitor, see how it is performing, and find out how you match up. Buzzsumo is one of the greatest discovery tools on the web. They offer free searches and data, but it is worth paying for their pro services if you are really serious. Honestly, their agency package is probably the best deal, unless you are a really tiny brand or start up just beginning in the industry.