Marketing can be incredibly overwhelming for even us experts. But, like any other project or job, having the right tools can make you more efficient, and help you with your campaigns. Whether you’re choosing to manage your own marketing, or whether you’re hiring someone to do it for you. I wanted to share my favorite tools that make my life just a smidge bit easier.

1. CRM

   A CRM is a customer relationship manager - if you’re not using one, then you’re wasting time. CRMs allow you to save all your customer and lead data in one happy spot. Personally, I LOVE Hubspot - their free version has come a long way and is much more small-business friendly. Their email marketing integrates nicely which, on their free level is pretty straightforward and basic. Additionally, as you grow, your CRM & marketing automation can grow with you. Hubspot also knows marketing well, so their tools are pretty spot on for a marketing team as well as sales and customer service (because they know they all work together).

   Second choice? Honeybook for my freelance/entrepreneur friends. I’m still learning Honeybook but I LOVE the ease of which i can send proposals, embed forms, and set up a scheduler. I went from 3 tools to 1 pretty quickly once I adopted Honeybook (and I have a place for all my proposal & contract templates which is just a huge WIN!)

2. Social Media Scheduler
   I’ve used so many tools and they’re all similar enough that from a functionality standpoint, you just need to figure out which works with your workflow. For the first year and a half of my business, I used Buffer - which is great, especially the free version for those who need something basic and don’t have a lot of accounts to schedule.

   Earlier this year, I switched to Loomly for the metrics and the client approval feature. It’s been pretty seamless for my clients (and so nice to get away from my previous process of spreadsheets!). It’s pricey for freelancers but for me, it wasn’t a huge jump from Buffer cost wise since i was paying for their extra analytics feature.

3. Graphic Design
   Because not everyone is a designer or has a designer on staff - Canva is a necessity to create stunning, social media graphics that are on brand. I love being able to save branding info and logos for clients so my content creator(s) can easily access them. Not to mention, Canva has come a long way over the past few years so its easy to create animated videos (for REELS!) and resize images you use for say flyers, to social media size.

4. Project Management
   Where do you manage your projects? Or your content/editorial calendar? I save everything in Click-up (sometimes i forget to use it but for the most part it keeps me on track). I LOVE click-up for so many reasons - I’ve tried most project manager tools - Basecamp, Wrike, Trello, Asana, and Monday and by far, my favorite is Click-up. Their free version is super robust for what it is, and you can add users pretty seamlessly.

5. Email marketing

   Once upon a time, I was a big MailChimp fan - and I still am. But for myself, I’ve evolved to ConvertKit. I love the look, the ease of use, and the seamless integration with products in case you’re monetizing. Mailchimp, for what it is, is an immensely robust tool from integration with websites on Squarespace or Wordpress, to its automation capability. If you need a user-friendly email marketing tool - I highly recommend Mailchimp or Convertkit. I think Convertkit is SLIGHTLY more expensive (which doesn’t REALLY matter until you have THOUSANDS of subscribers). I mean, there are dozens out there and the only ones I didn’t LOVE were Constant Contact (mind you, I used that YEARS ago, not recently and I’ve heard it’s gotten a lot better), and Seguno (I used it as a Shopify integration and just didn’t love the lack of customization - Klaviyo is a better Shopify email tool from what I’ve heard).

6. Digital Storage

   Because we’re a digital society, I use Google Drive for most of my clients to share info & content. It’s simple and easy to access. For those who don’t have Google Drive, I use Dropbox. It’s really just a personal preference thing.

7. Other tools

   I use google analytics to measure websites, SEM Rush is a great tool for competitor research and for SEO audits, and finally, Squarespace is my go-to for websites, however, WordPress is certainly up there (though I do NOT design WordPress sites, if you need a Squarespace site though, I can certainly help you out!)

I want to know, what tools are crucial to executing your marketing efforts?

Download our Social Media Strategy toolkit to help map out your social media marketing efforts. Need more help? We’re offering 50% off of our 60-minute strategy sessions for December only. Purchase yours now to lock in the rate before prices go up in 2023!