As a follow on from
my previous list post, on digital marketing trends for 2018, this post looks at some new digital marketing tools. There are A LOT of these out there so this is a concise list of some of my favourites. I've also included a few that I'm currently trialing which look promising. New tools like these open up new opportunities, offer new insights and inspire new tactics:
This is a great heatmap application to find out at exactly what point visitors choose to leave your site. By isolating that point you can then make the necessary changes to push them to the final step.
Given that we're planning a redesign for 2018 this is much more powerful than other heatmap tools. Rather than just a visualisation it shows referral information, social media campaign tracking and in depth engagement.
This new free to use tool lets you post a single link (aka your ‘linkkle’) that points to a link hub. Here you can add up to ten links to all your various social media accounts along with some basic profile info.
This is particularly useful if you’re active on a lot of accounts and want to keep things streamlined. At the moment it's in MVP (Minimum Viable Product) stage but is a really nice unfussy alternative to about.me.
We're currently trialling this as a way of planning and scheduling our social media posts. The feature I'm particularly impressed with is the workflow options. Once you’ve added your clients/users, and assigned an approval process, all you need to do it select the new content you’ve written and ‘send to approver’.
It also displays how the content will look across all platforms and you can setup whole campaigns in advance. So far, I've found that the simple UI inspires and motivates me to plan more content - a promising start!
This has been by far my favourite offline reading app for a while now. To keep this blog going I need to do a lot of extra reading. In particular Pocket forces me to have fixed reading time and doesn't kill my productivity. Otherwise I'd get distracted by multiple articles without an easy way to read them later (and especially when I'm travelling).
I have the bookmarklet in my browser too so I can stay productive and save the best of the web in my 'pocket'!
Chat bots are computer programs that mimic conversation with people using artificial intelligence. There are a lot of chatbot builders coming out every day. There may be better than this one but it’s the first one I started using and so far it's so easy to use!
They have a visual drag`n`drop builder makes it easy and fun to setup your Facebook Messenger bot.
No programming required - just connect your Facebook page to ManyChat and you`ll be up in no time.
This was recently introduced to us by an external agency and is a really interesting looking tool. Essentially it's an SEO spider that crawls your entire site and is free for sites under 500 pages. This then gives a full breakdown of pages with 404 errors, missing meta descriptions or broken links.
The results it spits out are great considering it's so cheap and you can also export to Excel to make things easier to number crunch!
This one is great fun - just check out the landing page! This search query data visualisation tool fetches and maps keyword suggestions/predictions that you see when you perform a Google search. After entering a keyword you’ll be presented with questions, prepositions and alphabetical lists related to your query.
If you’re looking for ideas about content creation topics, this tool provides the cues you need to start thinking about particular subjects. It's also fascinating to see what people are searching for and can be exported to a variety of formats.
This is a rival website prototyping tool to
InVision but for me it's the most fun to use. We utilised it for our
Shaping Your World campaign and it excelled for both advanced UX designers and those simply looking to communicate high and low fidelity concepts.
If you're not into heavy collaborative projects, Marvel is the way to go. It's much less expensive and in my opinion it has better tools for prototyping.
I'm by no means an expert in After Effects but this character rigging tool has been amazing in bringing
our avatars to life for Shaping Your World. It's not expensive, it's fast and best of all it converts strokes in Illustrator in no time!
Animation of this type is all new to me where you add 'puppet pins' on your artwork to bring your characters to life.
Finally, we used this hosting solution for the above campaign and where I was originally a little hesitant due to the cost I'm now completely sold!
The load times are lightening quick and the reliability has been essential with the success we've been seeing.
Now we've hit page one of Google for our search terms it's great to know we're in safe hands.
So, there are some of the tools I'm playing with in early 2018. What are some of yours?
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