I thought I’d kick off my “Digital Marketing Tools Review” category by sharing a list of the programs I have open and running day to day on my desktop that help me to do my job in B2B tech marketing. I will follow soon with my top ten favourite mobile apps as well as a different post (or maybe a few) dedicated to various social media sharing sites, but for now I’ll share what keeps me going during the 9-5:30 Monday to Friday spot.
If you like the post and want to share, I’d love to hear about the tools you can’t live without.
These are a bit of a random mix of desktop applications and web based apps (they are not in any particular order):
1. Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is my preferred app for tweeting because I need the multi-column view. I tweet from my own account and two other business related accounts, and I need to be able to see the activity in all of them all of the time. I also want to see my mentions, direct messages and the results from any given #hashtag I’m following.
2. Bitly
Bitly shortens links for my tweets and provides me with analytics so that I can who has clicked on my links.
3. Linkedin
I’ve been a member of LinkedIn since 2004 and I use it more than ever. I like the news feed stream featured on my home page and I am actively involved in several LinkedIn Groups (I will list these in
another post!) Once or twice a week, I make time to get involved in group discussions – this has been a great way to learn about everything from marketing automation to SEO. I run a LinkedIn Group for my business and as a business, we do use LinkedIn to gather intelligence on people who’ve recently made job moves or people we’d like to invite to industry events. I often “hear” about events relevant to me via LinkedIn which is useful because I can see a list of everyone attending. Lastly, I use LinkedIn for its original purpose, which is to make connections with like minded business people – I’ve been contacted and have met some extremely useful connections using LinkedIn.
Google Analytics stays open on my desktop all day, every day.
I monitor the traffic of three different websites and produce daily reports to review not only top content, but also top referral sites. For a *free* tool, I have to say, Analytics is pretty impressive. I can monitor which browsers my audience use, whether they are accessing the sites via mobile devices, and how long they stay on the site. I can also identify keywords and content that are causing high bounce rates.
Continue reading “What’s on my marketing desktop? Here’s 10:”