My Favorite Tools for Digital Marketing & Productivity
These are the products, apps, tools and resources I use every day and recommend to my clients.
Some of these links are affiliate links. If you make a purchase using one of my links, I will receive a commission.
Marketing Platform: Hubspot
Hubspot is an all-in-one software designed to make your marketing efforts more successful. It includes content management, blogging, SEO, email, social media, and dozens of other tools to manage your entire marketing funnel (plus a great sales and service hub!). After using dozens of different marketing platforms, this is the only one I recommend to my clients.
Email Marketing: Hubspot or MailChimp
Once again, Hubspot is my top pick for email marketing. You can use it on its own or with their marketing and sales tools. You don’t need a designer or IT expert to send beautiful emails. It’s loaded with tools that will help you boost engagement, including customizable templates, calls-to-action, personalization, and A/B testing. And, you can analyze the results in intuitive dashboards. Hubspot’s email marketing tools are free up to 2,000 emails per month.
If you want to explore other options besides Hubspot, I’d recommend taking a look at Mailchimp. Of all the standalone email marketing services I’ve used (and I’ve used many), it’s the most flexible, intuitive, and affordable. It’s a good choice for startups and anyone looking to build their email list. Mailchimp is free up to 2,000 contacts, with paid plans starting at $9.99.
Editorial Calendar: Asana
I’ve recently switched from Trello to Asana for my editorial calendar. I’ve found it offers more options for collaborating with clients and managing the revision process without sending a single email. Here’s a great article on how to create a content calendar in Asana.
Content Creation: Airstory
Airstory is a writing software that lets you create big content faster by dragging and dropping idea cards into an outline. (Cards in Airstory are like digital sticky notes.) It’s incredibly helpful when I’m writing research-heavy content like whitepapers and long-form articles.
There are tons of SEO tools on the market but the two I use most are Semrush and SpyFu. Semrush is the most comprehensive, allowing you to do SEO, content marketing, competitor research, PPC and social media marketing from just one platform. The downside of having so many great features is that it can be pretty overwhelming until you learn your way around.
Although Semrush includes competitor research, I still find myself going back to SpyFu. It’s the best tool I’ve found to see what your competitors are doing and discover whitespace in the market.
Design: Canva
Designers swear by Photoshop, but I prefer Canva because it’s so easy to use. Canva’s drag-and-drop feature and professional templates let you create beautiful designs for documents and graphics.
Stock Photos (Free): Canva, Pixabay, Unsplash, Startup Stock Photos, FoodiesFeed, Stocksnap, SplitShire
Social Media Management: Buffer
Rather than logging in to each of your accounts individually, Buffer lets you publish content for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram all in one place. You can create content in advance and schedule your posts throughout the week or month. And, you can see all the content you have lined up in a calendar.
Appointment Scheduling: Calendly
I use Calendly to schedule meetings without playing email tag. My clients appreciate that they can book a meeting with zero hassle, and I like the clean, user-friendly design.
Project Management and Invoicing: 17Hats
Making sure projects run smoothly is important to me, so I use 17Hats to manage all my client projects from start to finish. You can create quotes, sign contracts, send invoices, manage your books, and reply to email in one app. Plus, there is a password-protected portal so clients have convenient access to their documents.
Automation: Zapier
Connect over 1,000 apps to automate time-consuming tasks. For example, you can set up a “Zap” to notify you when your brand is mentioned on social media. Here are 50 more ways marketers are using Zapier.