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Half of a Digital Strategist’s job is staying on top of which tools and apps that are available, and make our jobs faster, better, smoother and easier. And while there are a ton of articles about the perfect tools of witchcraft and wizardry, the right combination of tools can really make you look like a superstar.
Whether you’re a freelancer, strategist or account manager, these tools can be groundbreaking if you’re working with clients on any sort of digital marketing.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is the ultimate tool to find influencers online and develop robust content strategies. It’s also useful in conducting competitive research on topics and trends. You can also discover what kind of content gets more shares than others in different topics and segments. This can guide your own efforts. You can also use filtering tools to tweak the display ‘til you get meaningful data for your own content strategy.
Pro tip: Find, listen, respond and build relationships with top influencers as a long game strategy with @BuzzSumo.
Canva
Canva lets you easily create and edit graphics at any size for any purpose. It’s super user-friendly and is especially useful for social media work and creating SEM display ads. Canva also has preloaded templates for you to work with sized to almost any social network’s required file sizes and formats. It’s a must have for any digital marketer who needs graphics on the fly while working on a budget.
Pro tip: Save room on your Mac or PC by deleting PhotoShop.
The right combination of tools can really make you, or your clients look like a superstar.
SEMrush
SEMrush gives you an analysis of your clients’ competitors in SEO, SEM, and more. The premium use of this tool can be quite costly, but the information is super valuable , especially for high revenue clients. Pull an SEMrush search up during a client meeting for some serious cool points – like information on roughly how much a company is spending on Adwords, and how healthy their SEO rank is compared to industry-wide averages.
Pro tip: Try to match a significant dip in organic search traffic with a Google algorithm update, which may indicate that a competitor was in violation of Google’s design, technical or quality guidelines.
SEO SiteCheckup
What used to cost thousands of dollars can now be done in minutes with this SEO SiteCheckup. It will crawl any site and give you an indepth analysis of its search rank vulnerabilities. There is a lot of information provided, and the beauty is that it will give you detailed instructions on how to fix a problem. Keep in mind, there will always be vulnerabilities, and some used to be more detrimental in the past.
Pro tip: Casually send an @Seositecheckup report to a prospective client and look like a pro…and probably get the biz.
If This Then That
If This Then That is a powerful automation tool that connects with almost any social network, plugin, API and site to do a lot of grunt work for you. Of particular benefit is its ability to autopost Facebook updates to a Google+ page via Buffer. Not that many people use Google+, but Google will reward brands posting regularly in search, which is relevant.
Pro tip: @IfTTT will eevn send you instant notifications from the CDC in the event of a zombie apocalypse.
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About the author: John Morton is a Digital Strategy Lead with Data Made Human – a full-service digital marketing agency specializing in marketing automation and lead generation.
Which tools are in your Digital Marketing toolbox? We want to know! Tell us in the comments section below.