We’re spending the holiday season giving thanks to our employees, our clients, and our community. We also wanted to give thanks to some of our favorite tools that make each day a little easier. From easy ways to edit social videos to tracking paid media competitors, these are tools we can’t live without and are worth incorporating into your workflows in 2021.
Creative
One of the creative team’s favorite tools of 2020 is Adobe Premiere Rush. It’s more advanced than iMovie but not as complicated as Premiere Pro. Suppose you’re looking to maximize your video output but spend less time editing, then Premiere Rush might be for you. The team loves using it for editing quick video content for our social feeds, and just about anyone can use it because it doesn’t have the steep learning curve of Premiere Pro. Premiere Rush is perfect to use on the go and gives you an all in one option directly on your phone. The best part is if you’re a creative cloud member, it comes with your subscription. If you aren’t, we still think it’s worth the $9.99 a month price tag because it’s a robust, easy-to-use tool for editing video.
Media
A tool that the media team likes to use is SpyFu. We see a lot of competition, especially during this time of year, and SpyFu is a great tool to use for paid search competitive research. The team likes to use SpyFu to keep track of every competitor bidding on our brand and find any new competitors. By learning which keywords we share with our competitors and discovering our most valuable keywords, we can improve our search strategy. In addition to competitor research, SpyFu has other features including keyword research tools that are helpful when building out new paid search campaigns or adding new keywords.
Development
A tool that the development team uses that is not part of a standard development toolkit is TinyPNG. Website speed and performance are huge factors in online conversion and in our effort to make fast and responsive websites, having images that load quickly is a must. We always run all images that get uploaded to the web through TinyPNG, and it can even resize them on the fly. When a website is live and our clients start adding new fresh content, there is an extension API that is hooked up on the site so all images are automatically optimized for best performance!
Analytics
Our analytics team has lightened quite a few tasks this past year by using Supermetrics. They provide a wide variety of tools to pull marketing data together into one place. Each tool is sold separately and by volume, so you can just buy what is needed. Google Data Studio easily imports all Google-branded platforms, but we take advantage of Supermetrics to also pull in from platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. The integrated interface makes the process similar to using Google data alone. We also use Supermetrics Uploader to automatically import other platform data (like impressions, clicks, and cost from Bing Search) directly into Google Analytics. This eliminates the need for a manual process while including all metrics for the various platforms. Overall, Supermetrics tools make things simpler for us and give us a better big picture of our clients’ data.
Client Services
It might sound cliche this year, but the tool that has helped Client Services the most has to be Zoom. In a year of virtual meetings, virtual happy hours, virtual team building, we needed a tool that would quickly help us move to the virtual world. Connecting with the team and recording meetings to review back made working remotely easy. In addition to internal access, we were able to give our clients a reliable and easy to use platform to keep work moving as normal. We used other platforms at the beginning of the year ultimately landing on Zoom right before the pandemic hit. The transition to full remote wouldn’t have been half as smooth without the Zoom platform.
