Marketing has become increasingly dependent on tools and apps. I’ve vetted my share of tools in 13 years of business. Here are six apps I’ve stuck with and can’t live without:
- Allocadia – When you are trying to juggle an ever-changing marketing department, spreadsheets are cumbersome. Projects change, trade shows are added, and you “borrow” budget from one project with extra funds to make room for another. This is hard to capture with spreadsheets. Two years ago I thought of an idea to create a cloud-based marketing planning and budgeting tool and found it already existed. Allocadia is an amazing tool for planning campaigns month-to-month, budgeting and tracking marketing ROI with links to Salesforce, Sugar, and other popular CRM tools. It’s not cheap and there is some learning curve, however, we found the functionality so impressive it outweighs the downsides. Allocadia’s slow data entry issues are being fixed by a new HTML version rollout this quarter.
- QuoteRoller – Before QuoteRoller, we wrote proposals in Microsoft Word and converted them to PDF. Clients would return signed proposals via email, however, they would often only sign the signatory page leaving our agency open to legal risk. The only downsides I’ve found are: 1) you need to know HTML if you want really polished proposals and 2) the system doesn’t handle range bids well which has caused confusion.
- Hootsuite – I was a beta tester and haven’t looked back. I couldn’t be on Twitter without Hootsuite and it’s Chrome plug-in. If you’re serious about social marketing, you use Hootsuite.
- Moz – Our entire agency uses Moz’s SEO, social media and website quality tools. If you work in improving organic rankings, their Open Site Explorer tool is the best in the industry. Their discussion forum and Q&A sections are also super helpful.
- WordPress – Our agency’s first three sites were in .NET and then I saw the easy content management system wave coming. We evaluated Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. We chose WordPress. Every member of our team can access the site and write blog content, which is very efficient. I can’t believe there was a day when I had to email all change requests to our webmaster. Some folks knock WordPress because they are concerned with security vulnerabilities, but we haven’t seen any issues since we’ve implemented some basic security protocols and started using security plug-ins. Is it the most secure platform in the world? No, but for most small to midsize companies, it’s good enough.
- Basecamp – Our entire agency uses Basecamp for a myriad of things from brainstorming through timekeeping and historical documentation. The only features I wish Basecamp would offer is seamless Gantt charting and native QuickBooks integration. However, since 37Signals is selling off their other products to concentrate on Basecamp, we hope to see great things, including Gantt charting, QuickBooks integration and enhanced time tracking, in the near future.
Bonus Tool – 15Five. Although it’s not technically a marketing tool, I couldn’t live without 15Five. This organizational tool lets me survey our remote team each week and enables team members to give feedback, improvement ideas, or point out where they are just plain stuck. It’s amazing how much this simple tool surfaces with regard to projects and our culture. I believe every remote team can benefit from this tool.
Disclaimer: I am not personally compensated in any way by any of the aforementioned companies. I just like the tools and use them!