Everyone loves a good life hack. Something that helps save time and streamlines a process. We’re no different. We love hacks that help us get work done more efficiently, within deadline, and tools that add a little extra flare to our deliverables.
Whether it’s finding a new way to organize data, a quicker way to schedule social media posts, or design features that make creative assets shine, we can’t get enough of all the technology that’s available to us.
An Integrated Mix of Tools
We have our different departments, employees working on a variety of projects, couples with each person’s individual style, there are countless tools, programs and features that our team uses every day. We polled our creative, media, and project management teams and here are their favorite tips and tricks.
General Marketing
- eMarketer
Founded in 1996 as a market research company, eMarketer is used for gaining valuable insights into market trends. The membership includes a client facing portal, analytics, industry trends, and countless statistics, forecasts, and case studies.
A member of our team says they recommend eMarketer because:
“eMarketer provides national and global insights on market trends in the digital space. It provides quarterly averages/benchmarks for the majority of digital channels and has industry reports, trends, and presentations you can share with a client or your team.”
As the national and global outlook continues to evolve daily, eMarketer is a valuable resource for formulating data driven strategies based on real world statistics.
- Zest Google Chrome Extension
This tool is so popular at Lamark that it spread across the office like wildfire once teammates found out about it. Zest is a news aggregator for everything marketing in the form of a chrome extension.
In addition to the great articles, the content filtering system is simplified, while still feeling clean and intuitive. Users can choose every marketing category or drill into each specialty.
- Loom
Loom is another favorite general marketing tool here at Lamark. Efficiency is key to time management at an agency, and the Loom software affords easier communication with clients, especially when working remotely.
Not only can you record presentations, but knowledge sharing sessions are made simple with this extension.
- The Great Suspender
Another extension, The Great Suspender simply suspends tabs based on inactivity. Websites can be whitelisted ensuring that you never lose any work due to a timeout. This improves browser performance considerably.
Social Media
- Later
Later is an Instagram-specific tool that allows you to schedule and auto-publish content with built-in analytic features.
When a user lands on your Instagram profile, either organically or from a paid advertisement, their first impression determines whether they engage with your brand and become a follower. It’s important to use assets wisely to put a voice behind your brand. Later saves an incredible amount of time with simple features like visual planning.
A member of our social team says, “It’s the best platform for scheduling Instagram content, feed, and stories. They save all of your hashtags, you can preview your feed before it publishes, and it can auto-post your first comment (of hashtags).”
- Planable
Planable is great for planning content before it’s even created. The marketing software speeds up approval and any revision processes seamlessly, allowing our social teams to thoroughly plan long-term strategies.
- Grammarly
Grammarly is a simple chrome extension that can be used across a variety of platforms. Using AI and language processing to test grammar, spelling, and semantics, the program has even evolved to have a “Tone Detector.”
The love for Grammarly is echoed across departments. A member of our creative team says, “Grammarly offers many writing tools all in one platform. It checks for plagiarism and duplicate content which can hurt web rankings, helps create clear and concise sentences, and checks for passive voice, among many other things. Whatever you write Grammarly can help make it better!”
- Moat
Moat is a free service that allows you to see your competitors or industry advertisements. This is a great resource for standing out among competition within the paid ad space.
“Moat.com is a great site that helps familiarize you with competitor’s digital advertisements. You can see how other companies in the industry are writing about their products and services. You can search for any brand and competitors are auto-generated.”
Digital Design
- Adobe PhotoShop
First released in 1990, this design program still holds as one of the top programs for raster-based images. PhotoShop is a program that is constantly evolving and adding new features.
Some of the many reasons our designers love photoshop: “PhotoShop offers what seems to be an endless amount of options, tools, and more for image editing, retouching, creating image compositions, website mockups, and adding affects. It works great coupled with Adobe Illustrator!”
- Adobe After Effects & Character Animator
After Effects is a program that is always top-of-mind for our video production team and is the industry standard for all things motion and digital. Like all Adobe products, After Effects has an endless array of features to learn.
As one team member says, “It provides film-quality animation.”
Another department favorite is Adobe Character Animator. While just five years old, this application won an Emmy for technology & engineering. Character Animator allows you to animate designs using Adobe programs Photoshop and Illustrator.
SEO & Data Analysis
- Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is an essential tool when understanding and analyzing the infrastructure of a website. As our SEO team’s favorite tool they say, “It’s frequently updated to reflect evolving SEO best practices, is a long-lasting industry standard, and remains more affordable year after year versus competing tools.”
- SEMRush
SEMRush is hard to compete with because it’s more than an SEO or data analysis tool. Social media experts, content writers, and paid specialists can all benefit from this tool as it offers an array of features to better your performance.
The SEO component has many robust capabilities for understanding how a website is performing. It’s an ideal tool for analyzing the competitor landscape and client visibility within search engines.
- Google Analytics & Data Studio
Google Analytics (GA) is the go-to for measuring performance on Google as it displays analytics on every channel that brings traffic to a website. Google does a great job of engaging and teaching users how to use Google Analytics to better improve performance.
Google Data Studio (GDS) is a breakout program that piggybacks off of GA. GDS is similar to Google Analytics, with one key difference- you can import data sources from multiple analytics programs. With the opportunity to create customizable, automated reports the possibilities are endless. The program allows you to combine data from various platforms to get an overall view of business performance across channels and platforms for free.
Web Developement
- PhpStorm
An ideal program for efficient programing, PhpStorm is a PHP and front-end editor with built-in developer tools for debugging and clean coding. Our developers say the built-in features of FTP and Git, as well as smart code suggestions, make the development process faster and more organized.
- Chrome DevTools
Google Chrome built a set of development tools call Chrome DevTools to help edit pages for everything from quick mockups to diagnosis programs, and helps individuals better understand how websites are being read and served. This enables developers to build faster, better websites to aid Google’s #1 goal of being the most used search engine application.
Project Management
16. Wrike
Wrike is a favorite tool for many of our team members, as it makes life more efficient and helps with time management. One of our project managers says, “Wrike helps keep our teams organized and has given me back time.”
At a marketing agency, efficiency and time management are crucial and Wrike masters the art of helping you schedule, communicate, and execute projects.
Tools for Days
We are constantly on the hunt for the best, most innovative programs and tools. And once we find them, we’re quick to share them with our co-workers. We love to point out awesome program features and shortcuts and discuss upgrades to current platforms.
To learn more about joining our team or working together, give us a shout