101 Marketing Tools and Technology Tips for 2017

Are you tired of all the fluff you read on marketing?

Want a list of tried and tested marketing technology tools and tactics you can immediately implement in your business?

I’m sure you’ll pick off a couple of tips from the list below.

 

Social Media

The successful people on social media build relationships and add value. They are there for their community and make them feel appreciated and connected to a brand on a more personal level. The key to social media success is consistency, but achieving it is incredibly time-consuming.

Luckily, there are so many great tools on the market now to help you build your audience, analyze results to see what’s working (or not working), and save time on the tasks you really don’t have time for.

1. Use a social media management tool. Social media management tools can help you streamline all your day to day activity on social media. With the right tool, you’ll not only save time but also get better results over time and maximize your social media ROI.
   Ideally, you’ll find a tool that allows you to manage all your social accounts from a single dashboard. Agorapulse is an excellent management tool that supports a broad range of platforms with a lot of great functionality, including in-depth analytics, scheduling, and reporting.
2. Optimize your website content for sharing on social media. When people share your content from your website to social platforms, you need to make sure that it’s shared in the best possible way. Use know.em social media optimization tool to check how well your website is optimized for sharing via social media. You’ll get a rating out of 100% for each social network with recommendations on how to fix the issues.
3. Automate sharing of evergreen content. Evergreen content is content that is always relevant to your audience and never goes out of date. When you have valuable content with no expiration date, why not share it continually? Use Agorapulse or a similar tool to set this up.
4. Use automated Twitter DM’s strategically. Last year I ran a content marketing conference with my buddy Mark Schaefer and over 25% of the ticket sales were from Twitter. I targeted a very relevant group of followers on Twitter and sent a personalized DM. DM’s are only useful if they are personalized and highly targeted. You can use a tool such as Audiense to run automated DM campaigns.
5. Analyze your results. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people don’t analyze the results they get on social media. There are great platform tools and third-party tools that can help you analyze and optimize your social media efforts. Here is a link to our top article about social media analytics tools: http://www.razorsocial.com/social-media-analytics-tools/
6. Implement a monitoring solution. Using a tool such as Talkwalker will help you track social conversations across social media channels and the Web. We need to listen to our audience to understand their needs and to inform our decision-making with relevant customer insights.
7. Create Facebook Ads with a warm audience. A warm audience is an audience that is already familiar with your brand. They are less expensive to target with ads, and since they already shown an interest in your content/product, it’s easier to get engagement. More engagement equals cheaper ad costs. Set up a tracking pixel from Facebook on your site and track your visitors. Then create a custom audience to target some of these visitors.
8. Use SocialQuant to grow your Twitter following. SocialQuants lets you specify the keywords that are relevant to your brand/industry and then searches Twitter based on those words for the most relevant accounts for you to connect with. It follows those users on your behalf, and if they follow back – you make a new connection! If not, Social Quant will unfollow those accounts for you. This is a really effective and targeted way to get more Twitter followers
9. Use Rival IQ to track your web and social media activity. Rival IQ is a great tool to compare your social media presence with your competitor’s. You can monitor your performance across Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube, track important SEO metrics, and understand what type of content drives the most engagement.
10. Scale up your Facebook ads with AdEspresso. This is a great tool to help you manage larger Facebook ad campaigns and get more value from them. AdEspresso allows you to create multiple A/B tests (you can test ad headlines, images, and audiences), and more importantly, it lets you create campaign rules so you spend less time managing your campaigns. This capability will also minimize the risk of spending your money on non-performing campaigns. You can read our detailed article on how to use AdEspresso here.
11. Use UTM tracking on social media campaigns. The success of any social campaign relies on tracking and measuring. UTM tracking enables you to track social campaigns or ads in Google Analytics and understand which ones are driving traffic to your website based on specific parameters. You can add 5 UTM parameters to your website links: campaign name, source, medium, term, and content. By setting up these parameters, you can determine how specific campaigns perform in terms of driving site traffic and conversions.
12. Implement Social Warfare on your website. Social Warfare is an excellent social sharing WordPress plugin that will help you get your content shared by more people. The plugin lets you customize the look of your social share buttons, and with its Custom Tweets feature, it allows you to share a unique message on Twitter.
13. Use Feedly to track blogs you want to read on a regular basis. Want to collect and read content from all your favorite blogs in one place? No problem! With Feedly, you can subscribe to multiple RSS feeds, categorize content, and then curate for sharing on social media. It’s awesome on both desktop and mobile.
14. Participate in Twitter Chats. If you’re getting involved in Twitter chats (which I highly recommend), then Tweetchat is a great tool that will help you manage your Twitter chats. It lets you filter a Twitter chat conversation by hashtag, and provides a share button that allows people to promote the chat directly from the app. It also enables you to pause Tweets so you have a chance to read and respond.
15. Create a pinned post on Twitter and Facebook. A pinned post is a post that appears on the top of your feed for a longer period of time. By pinning a specific post, you’ll drive traffic and customers to your website.This is the first post that new fans/followers see, so make the most of it!

 

Marketing Automation / Email Marketing

Smart marketers and business owners use marketing automation to improve customization, relevance, conversions and revenue from their marketing campaigns. According to Emailmonday, roughly 49% of companies use some type of marketing automation, and this is an upward trend.
If you still haven’t implemented the tech, it’s time to get on board!

1. Find a tool that suits your needs. If you are selling products and services online, then the chances are you need a marketing automation tool instead of an email marketing tool. We currently use Ontraport to automate a variety of marketing tasks. It’s a great tool and it’s relatively easy to use. But there are plenty of others, such as Convertkit, ActiveCampaign, InfusionSoft, and Marketo which are better suited for larger businesses.
2. Create an automated welcome series for new subscribers. When someone joins your email list, it is a clear signal that they’re interested in your company’s products or services. You want to give them a warm welcome, which means you’ll want to help them get to know you better, share your best recent content with them, and let them know what they can expect to receive from you in the future. This is a really important sequence and you can set it up with a tool such as MailChimp.
3. Leverage Facebook custom audiences. Find a tool that supports automatic creation of Facebook custom audiences that you can target. Imagine if you could automatically create an audience of people who visited your checkout page but didn’t buy so you can target them with the right advertisements. Ontraport automatically creates these audiences and keeps them in sync, but there are also other tools that can help.
4. Create an exit intent popup on your site to build email subscribers. Optinmonster is the best tool for getting more emails on your website. The exit intent popup is a popup that only appears when someone is going to exit your website – and conversion rates are very good! Optinmonster also supports a wide range of optins, split testing, reporting, targeting based on referring site, and so much more.
5. Create marketing automation sequences. When you want to create your marketing automation sequences or the emails you’ll send to drive people towards the action you want them to take, use a tool such as Lucidchart to map them out.
6. Set up trigger email campaigns. Set up your marketing automation tool to trigger an email to a subscriber that visits an important page. For example, if a subscriber visits your product page but doesn’t buy it, that would be a good time to generate an email.
7. Show optins only to people who are not your email subscribers. When your existing subscribers land on your website, it is pointless to show them an option to subscribe via email. You can use Optinmonster (mentioned already) to display something different for your email subscribers.
8. Set up click tracking to see who clicked links in your emails. When you send a promotional offer via email, check to see who clicked on the link and showed interest in your product. You can create an email specifically for people who clicked on this link. They have shown an interest in your product so it’s worth following up. This can typically be automated in most email automation tools.
9. Implement content upgrades. A content upgrade is a bonus content created specifically for a particular blog post or page. This content is directly related to the topic of the post and your readers can access it in exchange for their email address. For example, if you write a blog post on marketing tools, the optin could be a PDF download of the marketing tools. These optins typically achieve a 10% plus conversion rate.
10. Segment your email list. I got an email from Steve Dotto recently ( a friend and a marketing expert) and he asked me as a subscriber what kind of content/emails I’d like to receive. Based on the responses he collected from his subscribers, he was able to segment his email list based on their specific interests. Segmented email lists mean higher open rates and happier subscribers!
11. Don’t forget the about us page. This is a great page for building optins. When someone visits the about us page on your website, they are interested enough to read more information about you. This means that they are a good potential email subscriber.
12. Retarget people who visited your website and didn’t optin with Facebook ads. When you spend all that money to drive visitors to your website, you need to make the most of them! Facebook retargeting ads give you another chance to turn those visitors into subscribers. Since these are the people who already visited your site, you can target them with highly relevant ads that drive more engagement and higher conversion rates.
13. Be more concerned about click through rates rather than open rates. It’s great if people open your emails, but if they don’t click on the links you provide, then the email was not interesting or relevant to them so they are less likely to open up the next week. Use the analytics provided by your email marketing or marketing automation tool to analyze opens, clicks, and unsubscribes.
14. Check your email deliverability. You need to be aware of how successfully you’re delivering emails to your subscribers’ inboxes. There are many factors that impact your email deliverability, but one of the most important ones revolves around sending relevant emails to the right subscribers, at the right time. If you keep sending emails that result in no opens or poor open rates, eventually you won’t get into their inbox. You can monitor your sender reputation with a tool such as SenderScore.
15. Give unsubscribers different options. When someone asks to unsubscribe from your list, you can give them an option to stay subscribed to particular categories of content. Another option is letting them adjust the frequency of emails instead of unsubscribing completely.

 

Web Analytics

Digital marketing is all about testing, analyzing, and optimizing your activities to achieve better results. Without analytics, you are simply wandering around in the dark. Thankfully, there are some great tools out there that can help shine some light on your marketing performance.

1. Set Up Google Search Console. Google Search Console is a free service that lets you identify and fix website problems. When Google crawls through your website and finds errors, it reports them in Google search console.  If you haven’t set this up already, you really need to.
2. Use Google Tag Manager. Google tag manager provides a much easier way of managing all the marketing and analytics tags (snippets of Java code) that you have to add to your website from companies such as Facebook, Google, and others. It’s a great tool and you should definitely consider using it.
3. Identify your most popular posts. Use Google Analytics to find your top performing posts and make sure they are regularly updated and frequently shared. To do this, you need to create the Landing Pages report to see which of your blog posts have the highest page views over a specified time period.
4. Identify your Bounce Pages. Finding your top posts is important, but so is figuring out which pages on your website are bleeding visitors so you can do something about it. If your bounce rate on a certain page goes over 50%, something is definitely wrong. Once you identified the bounce pages, it’s time to start working on them to improve your website’s ability to retain visitors.
5. Study Engaged Traffic. It’s important to look at the visitors who stay more than 10 minutes on your website and visit more than one page. This data is important because it shows you the most engaged visitors. You can find this information in GA under Audience Engagement.
6. Track Mobile Visitors. More and more people are accessing the Web on their mobile devices, which means more opportunities for visits and conversions. This is why it’s important to track mobile traffic. You can access this data in GA under Audience > Mobile > Devices. Here you’ll be able to see which visitors are using which mobile devices to access your site, plus you’ll get the data on their average page views, time spent on the website, etc. This data will give you insight into mobile users interests and preferences, you’ll be able to compare mobile vs. desktop conversions, and much more.
7. Create custom dashboards in Google analytics. Custom dashboards are really helpful if you want to filter out information to only see those metrics and statistics that are most relevant to you. For example, you can create a dashboard that monitors your users’ behavior on your website. You can easily set up your custom dashboards from the Reporting section of your GA account.
8. Keep tabs on your website speed. The speed of your website is very important. A lower speed means a higher bounce rate and reduced conversion rate. Google provides a speed test and rates both desktop and mobile version of your site out of 100%. If Google gives you a low score, you can be sure that they will take this into account in search results. Click here to test it out!
9. Create Segments in Google Analytics. Google Analytics allows you to create segments which are basically individual filters that you configure and apply to your reports so you can see specific data. This can be very useful for ad-hoc analysis or ongoing analysis of data. For example, you could create a segment for traffic that was generated from a social media platform.
10. Add annotations to the Google Analytics chart. Let’s say you are running a campaign and you start seeing some massive spikes in traffic. In a year’s time, you won’t remember what caused it. This is where adding annotations to your traffic chart in GA comes in handy. In the future when you look at your reports, you’ll understand why there was a spike in traffic on a certain day.
11. Set up conversion funnels. A funnel on your website is a sales process which consists of multiple pages or steps that your visitors must take to fulfill your goal. When you set up your funnel, you can track the traffic that goes through your funnel and analyze where people are dropping out to correct any possible issues.
12. Set up Intelligence Events. Imagine if you got a sudden spike or drop in traffic, would you like to know about it? Google Analytics Intelligence Events Reports allow you to set up alerts to get notified when unusual or important things happen on your website, e.g. a huge increase in sales on a particular product page.
13. Real-time Google Analytics. Google is tracking your visitors’ activity as it happens on your site, and you may want to take advantage of this and really dig into their interactions, check goal conversions on the website, etc. A common use of real-time analytics is for monitoring the immediate effects on traffic from a new blog, social media post, ad campaign, etc.
14. Compare Historical Traffic Trends. Being aware of what’s happening now is important, but so is looking back at your traffic reports to identify historical trends. Doing this can help you identify patterns and understand how traffic can change over time.
15. Filter out your IP address – When you are browsing your own website this is recorded in GA as a visitor on your site, so it’s recommended to exclude your IP address. Check out the admin -> filters section.

 

Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) refers to using analytics and visitor feedback to increase the percentage of your website visitors that convert into paying customers or take any other action you want them to take on a certain page. It is immensely important and, you’ve guessed it, there are tools to help you with that!

1. Use heat map tools. Use a tool such as Hotjar to do heat map analysis, form analysis, and to monitor visitors as they scroll through your website. This type of analysis helps understand the behavior of your users so you can adjust your site accordingly.
2. Always run split tests on your email optins. When you create an email optin you really don’t know how well it will convert, so you’ll need to try multiple variations. Optinmonster and similar tools allow you to easily create and test multiple versions.
3. Use a proven landing page tool. We use LeadPages to create landing pages, and although the pages may not be the prettiest, they do convert very well. LeadPages tracks conversion rates of their pages on all their customer sites, so you can apply a filter to find the highest converting ones.
4. Set up goal tracking in Google analytics. Let’s say you have an optin on your website and you bring people to a thankyou page after they optin – that can be set up as a goal in Google Analytics. Now you can check to see how many people converted and where they came from (e.g. Twitter,Facebook, other referred site etc).
5. Implement Tawk.io or a similar tool on your checkout pages. This is a tool that allows your website visitors to interact with you via chat message. My friend Jason Swenk recently implemented this on his checkout pages and saw a significant increase in conversion rate.
6. Use Visual Website Optimizer for A/B and multivariate testing. This tool makes it a lot easier to test the changes you want to make to your website – you can set up and run tests in minutes without any coding experience. With VWO you can easily track revenue, signups, clicks, or any other conversion goal.
7. Drive traffic to the page you want to do an A/B test on. Make sure you send enough visitors to your site to work out which variation of any page/form is working. If you are running tests comparing 2 different pages, the number of people you need to send to the page depends on the difference in conversion rates between the pages. If the conversion rate is very similar, then you need to send a lot more people to the page. Use this tool provided by Visual Website Optimizer to understand how many visitors you need to send to your pages – Click here
8. Use a survey tool to get feedback from visitors to your site. Surveys are one of the best ways to get into your website visitor’s minds. The feedback you get from them will be invaluable to informing your CRO strategy. You can use a tool such as Qualaroo to create different surveys and gather feedback from specific groups of website visitors.
9. Don’t forget to test the CTAs on your landing pages. When creating your landing pages, you want to make sure that your CTAs are actually doing the job of driving people to the action you want them to take. Your A/B testing tool (such as VWO mentioned earlier) should allow you to personalize, test, and optimize your CTAs for maximum conversions.
10. Use compelling images on your landing pages. Great images that are relevant to your message and that can spark an emotional buying response from your visitors are one of the best ways to increase conversion on your landing pages. We already mentioned LeadPages, and this tool offers an image widget that lets you easily add photos, logo, and other graphics to your pages.
11. Track All Your Conversions. The goal of your CRO strategy should be improving both macro conversions and micro conversions. Macro conversions, such as a product sale, should be your main goal, but it is also important to track the performance of your micro conversions, such as eBook downloads, product demo requests, etc.
12. Test upsells and cross-sells. This is a CRO must if you are in the e-commerce business. When someone is ready to buy one item from you, they’re much more likely to make an additional purchase. E-commerce platforms, such as Magento or Shopify, offer plugins you can use to add upselling/cross-selling to your e-commerce store.
13. Perform usability tests to get live feedback from your users. Usability testing is a great way of finding out which features on your website are confusing or difficult to use. It provides you with much-needed clarity so you know where to focus your conversion optimization efforts. A tool like UserTesting.com can help you with this.
14. Monitor and test news features on social media platforms. If you are using social media to drive traffic and leads to your website, pay attention to the new features that the platforms you’re using are launching. You can use split testing tactics to optimize your social media campaigns, taking into account all the features that are available to you.
15. Don’t Forget To Monitor For Impact. This one goes without saying – you need to measure, test and monitor the performance of your CRO efforts to learn what’s working and what’s not, and why. Regular monitoring allows you to change course and improve your CRO strategy if it is not helping you achieve your goals.

 

Content Marketing

Yes, there is a technical side to content marketing. And the sooner you get a handle of it, the sooner you can start creating a high-performing content marketing program. Here are some handy tips for getting started.

1. Update older posts. Do you have content on your site that is a little out of date but was very popular with your audience? Update the content, change the publish date, and re-release the post. You’ll get more links, shares, traffic and a new post that won’t take you too much time to do.
2. Optimize your content. SEO hasn’t actually changed that much over the last couple of years. Create great content, promote it, build your network, and get some good links. Of course, you still need to optimize your content so Google can index it correctly. I use Yoast SEO plugin for content optimization and although it’s not perfect, it’s the best that’s out there that I’m aware of.
3. Include internal links to your content. When you create blog content make sure to link to at least three posts on your own site. Also, find some older related posts on your site and link them to the new posts. Spread the link juice around!
4. Linking to external sites. You may be hesitant to link out to any external sources because people may leave your site. However, Google expects you to link to other relevant, high authority sites, so you need to do it!
5. Use Google Search Console to check the ranking for your blog content. Find articles that get a lot of impressions/clicks but are outside the top 10 in Google search results. You can do a little bit of optimization to creep onto page 1 of Google. Revisit how you optimized the content and improve it, and also try and generate a couple of good links to it.
6. Find best performing content with BuzzSumo. You can use BuzzSumo to discover content that performs best/is shared most for any topic related to your business, both on your website and your competitors’ websites. This can be a good way of finding content ideas for the types of content that have already proven to be popular.
7. Build on your competition’s success. SEMRush allows you to analyze your competitor’s site to find out what keywords are bringing them the most traffic. You can then create content that targets those keywords to drive more traffic to your website.
8. Use KWFinder for keyword research. KWFinder is a great tool to help you identify the best long tail keywords to target for your blog posts. In addition to providing keyword suggestions, it will also give you a difficulty score to show you how difficult/easy it will be to rank for those keywords.
9. Check Domain Authority of your website. It is useful to know your Domain Authority as well as Page Authority for certain pages, both for your website and your competitors’ sites. DA and PA are scores (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predict how well a website, or a specific page, will rank on search engines.The higher the number, the easier it is to rank.  Read this post which explains domain/page authority.
10. Create compelling Infographics. Infographics are great for getting your content shared and also for getting valuable links. The good thing is, you don’t have to be a designer nor spend a lot of money to create them. Use a tool such as Piktochart to create engaging infographics with just a few clicks by choosing a template and then customizing it with specific text, fonts, and colors.
11. Create interactive content. Interactive content is one of the best content types that you can create to get more engagement, and consequently more conversions, from your customers. Use a tool such as Qzzr (it’s free!) to make nicely looking customizable quizzes, or if you are looking for a more advanced solution, check out Ceros for creating high quality, interactive e-books, infographics, microsites, and more.
12. Use a Content Idea Generator. After producing content for a while, you will find it more difficult to come up with new blog post topics or content ideas. Fear not, there are a couple of free tools that can help you beat the writer’s block quickly. Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator is a very useful tool that returns 5 blog post ideas based on a few nouns that you previously specify. Or, you can enter your keyword in Portent’s Content Idea Generator to get some interesting title suggestions.
13. Syndicate your content. Content syndication will allow you to reach new audiences, increase the exposure of your brand, and drive referral traffic back to your site. There is a growing number of content syndication platforms, most popular being Outbrain, Zemanta and Taboola, which allow you to use their existing network of sites to syndicate your content to.
14. Promote your content through outreach. Outreach campaigns, if done correctly, can deliver impactful results in terms of inbound links from influential sites, as well as an increase in relevant traffic. With a tool such as BuzzStream, you can find influencers, websites, and blogs for your content based on the keywords or topics relevant to your business/industry, and perform organized outreach campaigns.
15. Create an Editorial Calendar. Without a plan and a structured process, content creation can become a messy business. This is why every good content marketer keeps an editorial or content calendar to centralize their planning efforts. CoSchedule is a feature-rich tool that you can use to build an amazingly useful content calendar (they offer a 14-day free trial), or you can get your hands on one of the many available Editorial Calendar Templates, such as this one from the Content Marketing Institute.
16. Write like Hemingway. Hemingway Editor, a proofreading tool for content writers, clears your copy of all unnecessary fluff. Just paste your text into the editor and you’ll get an analysis that highlights lengthy, complex sentences, adverbs, passive voice, and common errors.

WordPress

WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system, and for the obvious reasons. It is easy to setup, manage, and update, and it’s completely free to use. Here we’re going to share some lesser known tricks to help you get the most out of it.

1. Uninstall plugins you are not using. How many plugins do you have on your site that you never use? More plugins equal higher security risk and lower performance.
2. Set up a good WordPress backup facility. Creating regular WordPress backups is the best thing you can do for your website, and for your own peace of mind. There are several backup plugins for WordPress, but we recommend Vaultpress. It is fairly easy to use, provides some great security features and backup, and it comes at a reasonable price.
3. Use a staging server when you’re making changes. A staging server is an environment where you have an exact copy of your website for testing purposes. When you are installing a new functionality, plugin, etc. it’s much better to add it on a staging server to verify it doesn’t break anything before you copy over. Any good hosting provider  will provide staging e.g.
4. Create WordPress contact forms with WPForms. If you need to create a really good contact form for WordPress, I highly recommend that you use WPForms. It is probably the easiest way to add a contact form to your site, and there is a free Lite version that offers all the basic functionality you’ll need.
5. Use Pingdom to check your website speed. You need a fast website and Pingdom will help you analyze the load speed of your website, as well as show you how you can make it faster.
6. Install a caching plugin. WordPress pages are built on the fly (dynamic) which can cause performance issues. Using a caching plugin like WPSuperCache can significantly speed up your website.
7. Keep your website updated. It is crucial that you always use the latest version of WordPress to keep your site secure and never miss out on any new features or important bug fixes. However, make sure to test out the new release on your staging server first!

 

E-commerce

Here’s our six simple eCommerce tips to help you boost your conversion rates.

1. Focus on conversions at checkout. Use a marketing tool that was created specifically to optimize conversions at checkout. We use ThriveCart, but you can also check out the more expensive alternative Samcart to compare available features.
2. Analyze the performance of your website forms. If you have some forms on your e-commerce website such as order form or a contact form (and you certainly do), you need to analyze their performance. Use a tool like Hotjar to analyze how people interact with your forms and to understand things like user abandonment, user hesitation, and skipped fields so you can learn and improve.
3. When someone is filling out a form on your website, you can automatically capture their email address before they hit submit. This is really useful if they have not paid for your product and abandoned after they entered the email address. You can then follow up with some relevant automated emails to help improve conversion.
4. Build out your sales funnels with a tool like ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels is an online service that allows you to create sales funnels complete with upsells, cross-sells, down-sells, etc.
5. Create tailored offers in follow-up emails. SalesManago is a really smart marketing automation tool and here’s one of the reasons why. If a potential customer was checking out a certain product in your e-commerce store, this tool will include details of that product in a follow-up newsletter. This part of the newsletter is dynamically created based on how the users were interacting with the site.
6. Building a mobile responsive website is not always the best way of generating high conversions. Quite often, a responsive page will have too much content that’s not laid out in the best possible way. Consider building a mobile compatible page focused on conversions on mobile devices.

 

Visual Marketing

With the help of the right visual marketing tools, you’ll be able to create stunning visuals for your marketing campaigns that your audience will love.

1. Use Canva for creating your imagery. Canva is an amazing free tool that you can use to create your own images for your website, blog posts and social media. Even if you have no design skills whatsoever, you’ll find image creation with Canva super easy. The tool offers a variety of templates, custom image sizes for every social media platform, drag and drop editing, and much more.
2. Use Recite to create images from quotes. Quote images are one of the most popular types of content on social media, and Recite is a perfect tool to help you capture your audience’s attention. The beauty of this tool is in its simplicity – simply enter your quote into the editor on the homepage, and then select a layout from a gallery of templates.
3. Create animated posts from multiple images with a tool like Ripl. Riple is an iPhone app that allows you to create images with animated features. You can upload several images to combine into one design and then share it on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as a GIF or a video.
4. Create your own memes. Memes are everywhere, and online marketers are predominantly using them to entertain and engage their audience on social channels. Memes are a great way to generate an immediate reaction from your followers, and you can create them easily with one of the many available meme generators.
5. Use Keywords in Image Alt Tags. When you are uploading images to your blog, make sure you use relevant keywords in your ‘Alt tag’. This helps Google understand what the image is about so it can index it.
6. Use Wordswag for creating visually appealing images with text overlaid on top. Have something clever, funny or important to say to your audience? Use a tool like WordSwag to add a fancy text overlay to your images and draw their attention to your message.

 

Video Marketing and Live Streaming

Videos are all the rage in marketing today, and here we’re going to introduce you to some very useful tools to help you create live/recorded videos to educate, inform, and engage your audiences.

1. Use a tool such as OBS for Facebook live. OBS is a free software that allows you to get fancy with your Facebook live events. You can add a lower third (i.e banner at the bottom of your recording), swap between live and recorded, do demo’s on your PC, and much more.
2. Buy good microphones. You’ll get away with poor video quality, but you won’t get away with a poor sound. Check out our post on Facebook live tools for more tips.
3. Use Animato to create animated videos. You don’t have to spend a fortune on animation when there are affordable tools like Animoto that you can use to create videos from photos, video clips, and music.
4. Use Screenflow or Camtasia for Screen Recording. Screenflow is a screen recording and video editing tool for Mac. It is quite user-friendly, which means you don’t have to be a video production professional to use it. Camtasia (available both for PC and Mac) on the other hand offers more video editing features, but also comes with a higher price.
5. Upload your videos to Wistia. Wistia is perfect for marketing videos because it keeps visitors on your page. When you upload a video, you can add CTA buttons or optin forms at the end of the video. The tool also has some powerful video analytics features to show you how your videos are performing in terms of viewer engagement.
6. Use TubeBuddy for YouTube marketing. TubeBuddy is a browser extension that loads when you log into your YouTube account. It comes with a powerful set of features to help you optimize your videos and keep your audiences engaged. It’s definitely worth checking out, and you can start using it for free.

Summary
I hope this list gave you some useful tools and tactics you can implement in your business.

Do you have any marketing tools to add to this list? Feel free to write your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.