Top 7 Digital Marketing Tools To Succeed in Business

Episode Transcript

Jake Braun:

Welcome to Kickin' it with Kapok, a podcast about business stories and marketing advice. I’m Jake.

Mirela Setkic:

And I'm Mirela.

Jake Braun:

This is episode 27, “Top 7 Digital Marketing Tools To Succeed in Business.” Today, Mirela and I will be talking about the digital marketing tools we use here at Kapok Marketing and recommend that others consider using.
And I think we're gonna start with Google Analytics.

Mirela Setkic:

Ugh, yes, our fave.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, so you want your website to be your hub for your digital marketing.

Mirela Setkic:

True.

Jake Braun:

That's where you're trying to drive people to with all of your digital marketing campaigns. So you wanna know how many people actually visited your website.

Mirela Setkic:

Right. Does anyone like you?

Jake Braun:

And where they came from.

Jake Braun:

Yeah. So Google Analytics is a great, free and powerful way to do that. You embed a little bit a code on your website and then you get tons of information about who's visiting your website.

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah and also if you're running some type of online promotions and you're posting things and links to other places it helps you track and I guess you can tell us how that helps you.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, they have the Campaign URL builder which is just a one page site you go to and you can punch in like the campaign name, the source and some other information. And that let's you track where people are coming from to get to your website. So when you share a link on Facebook or you share a link elsewhere you use the URL that Google gives you in that builder and then in Google Analytics you can track where you're getting the people from. Did they come from Facebook? Did they come from this blog post that I wrote on another website? And you just get that information by using the URL builder.

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah and you can use that information to decide if you should be doing more or less of a specific activity or promotion that you just did.

Jake Braun:

Exactly.

Mirela Setkic:

It helps you gauge the success rate.
And the next one up is one of my faves. It's Canva and, or canva.com. If you're not a super, like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator ninja and you don't have a whole ton of experience with those two programs then you can use something that's a lot more basic but still kinda cool which is Canva and it's free. You can sign up for an account and Canva has whole bunch of templates that you can use to create images or graphics for Facebook, for Instagram, for Twitter, Pinterest. They even have a template for a newsletter, for presentation slides, even like sales letters. Anything that's kinda popular and you can think of they have a template for it. And they also have a lot of images, stock images that you can use. A lot of 'em are free. Some of 'em do cost money. And I think most of 'em are about a dollar apiece. You can use emojis or you can use like, cool text to add to your graphics. And then if you have a custom graphic like custom dimensions that you have for a graphic that's something that you use a lot you can even create your own custom template in there that you can use over time. And one of the other cool things is that you can share the stuff that you create in Canva with other people in your team. You can send them an email and they can look at it and I think that they can even edit it. I'm not a hundred percent sure. But once you create something in Canva you download it and then you can email it you can upload it to Facebook or whatever the case is. And it's super easy. It's not as powerful as Photoshop. And but it does the job.

Jake Braun:

Yeah and I'm not much of a graphics designer but the one thing that I sometimes use Canva for is making infographics.

Mirela Setkic:

Right.

Jake Braun:

And infographics used to be super popular. They've kind of gone down a little bit in terms of popularity but that also means it's an opportunity if you want to make some infographics. And an easy way to do it is with Canva in my opinion.

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah, I agree. So what's next?

Jake Braun:

Number three, SEMrush. So this is a pretty powerful SEO tool.

Mirela Setkic:

Okay.

Jake Braun:

It can be a little bit pricey. I think it's at least a hundred dollars a month. And they have packages even more expensive than that. But you get lots of good data about SEO both how well your websites doing and also your competitors. You can see how much organic traffic they get roughly, wow much paid traffic they get. You can even see that the ads that they're actually running in Google Ads in SEMrush. And you can also get ideas for content. Thy have a thing where they show you like what sort of questions are popular on the Internet out there to get ideas for writing blog posts. So there's a lot of data available there. And if you want a free option, Google also has Google Search Console or sometimes called Webmaster Tools where you can get a list of who's linking to your website. You can see what keywords your ranking for, what position you're in. So if you want a free tool then Google is probably your way to go. If you want something more powerful where you can also get insights about your competitors then something like SEMrush is probably a better way to go.

Mirela Setkic:

Okay. And then which brings us to my next sort of fave it's Mailchimp or other email marketing services. And whenever someone calls us and expresses interest in doing digital marketing and really getting serious about you know promoting his or her business online we always ask them if they are collecting people's information, email addresses on their website, if they have an email list and if not, then: Why?

Jake Braun:

Mm hm.

Mirela Setkic:

And so everyone should be collecting information from people who come to their website and building an email list. And one of the best tools to do that is Mailchimp. It is, it's simple but also powerful at the same time. And if you have fewer than 2,000 subscribers on your list then you can use Mailchimp for free. And you can send up to 12,000 emails a month with a free account. If you want to send unlimited email messages per month and you have more than 2,000 people then it's going to cost you some money to use Mailchimp. And in Mailchimp you can send out newsletters. You can do kind of one time messages. Or you can set up an email sequence or a email like drip campaign where you can write whole bunch of messages and schedule them out to be sent at specific times and at like specific intervals. So you can do a lot. It's super powerful for email marketing.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, the thing I like about Mailchimp is it's really easy for someone who hasn't done email marketing that much to get started. But then when you do want to get into a little bit more advanced stuff they do have segmentation, you can tag people, custom fields, you know, all of the marketing automation stuff you'd want with email marketing. So it's simple but it's also powerful. And you can add on later on when you decide you wanna get, you know, deeper into email marketing.

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah, and we're not getting paid to promote Mailchimp or anything. It's just something that we use in-house. Some of the other email marketing services that are out there are Constant Contact, there's Infusionsoft there's AWeber. So if someone has something else that is more up their alley and they like more it's fine. Most of 'em do a really good job. Most of 'em have been around for a while and they have improved their products so I don't think that, it's way better than doing nothing.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, anything is better than nothing.

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah.

Jake Braun:

And we're not getting paid by any of these companies.

Mirela Setkic:

Right.

Jake Braun:

They're just tools that we've found over the time, gotten recommendations from people. So there's no affiliate thing going on here or anything.

Mirela Setkic:

Right, these are just things that will make your life easier. These are things that make our lives easier. And Mailchimp is the one that we have chosen to use. But we've used other ones and most of 'em are just fine.

Jake Braun:

For sure. So number five, BuzzSumo.

Mirela Setkic:

Oh, this is Jake's favorite.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, and I'm even a little bit late to the party I think on BuzzSumo. I just learned about it, you know, relatively recently. Previously I had used some other tools and also just, you know, manual old research. But BuzzSumo's great. You go in and you type keywords in. And it shows you the most popular articles that have been shared on social media based on engagement. Which is great for a few reasons. When you're posting on social media obviously you want to get engagement. When you get engagement you get more engagement, it snowballs and you end up getting people to ultimately do whatever you're trying to do. So by looking in BuzzSumo you see what has gotten good engagement before which means that if you share that on your social media profiles you'll probably get good engagement as well. And another thing you can do is use that as an idea and then go write your own article maybe on your blog. Put your own spin on it. And then you have your own interesting piece of content that you can share. And you'll get engagement hopefully on that your social profiles when you share that as well. The only caveat being that if you see something that's done really well, you know, from the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or BuzzFeed like, they have a lot more people following them so it's easier for them to get engagement. So if you share that or you come up with something similar and share that you're still not gonna get that level of engagement. You have to be realistic based on how many followers you have and stuff like that as well.

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah, I mean, technically you could go viral. But realistically you probably won't. Like, it's not going to, like, totally change your life. It's probably going to boost, you know, the engagement that you get from your follower base. But it's not gonna turn you into whatever BuzzFeed or one of those places.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, it's just a place to get ideas and maybe do a little bit better than you would do otherwise on your own.

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah, all right the next one I think is, is it Trello or getting organized?

Jake Braun:

Yep.

Mirela Setkic:

So I'm one of those people who is super obsessed with making lists and getting organized. I like to have a calendar, Jake hates calendars that are actually like physical calendars. But I actually have a physical calendar.

Jake Braun:

I love calendars just in the digital world.

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah but the problem with my fancy calendar is that only I can see it. And no one else knows what I'm working on. So we've kind of had to get organized digitally where other people can see what's going on. And some of the project management or task management products that we have used have been, we've used Basecamp we've used Trello which is really good for organizing each person's responsibilities or tasks and assigning due dates and deadlines. And then when you log in you can kind of see what everyone is working on. And it gives everyone a big picture kind of snapshot of what's going on at the company. And then we have kind of taken our situation to the next level and we have moved over to TeamGantt which allows you to kind of have more of like it's kinda like a progress bar look of what's going on. Or everyone has like all these tasks and all of these tasks are presented in kind of a way how they are dependent on other tasks. So for example you have to finish this part in order for me to do my part. So when I log into Gantt I can see like, okay Jake is 50% done with his stuff and that his work is due tomorrow then tomorrow I will start. And then as I'm working on my stuff I can put in how many hours I worked on it what percentage of it is finished. So it's much more like comprehensive way of looking at tasks.

Jake Braun:

Yeah I think most people I talk to Trello or Basecamp is probably the thing that's most suited for them and that people get the most success with in terms of organizing their digital marketing and just other tasks at their business. We use TeamGantt but that's mostly because we have a lot of medium to larger-sized projects going on that we need to report to clients about. So if you have something really complicated going on Gantt charts and stuff like that might be the way to go. But I think Trello, basecamp, those simpler just like to-do lists are--

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah, if it's like routine stuff.

Jake Braun:

Yeah.

Mirela Setkic:

Like, I just want to see what each one of my team members like daily routine is and what everyone's working on. Trello or basecamp are perfect for that.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, I agree.

Mirela Setkic:

Alright what's next?

Jake Braun:

That takes us to the last one, number seven. Grammerly.

Mirela Setkic:

Oh, I need this.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, so this helps you make sure that you get your grammar correct and your spelling correct everywhere around the Internet where you're typing. So it's a little plug-in, you install it it works with Chrome, Firefox, maybe other browsers. And when you're typing in WordPress doing your blog or if you're in Gmail writing emails it's gonna correct you along the way. And that's gonna make sure that you look smarter on your blog, on your website, talking to clients, talking to customers. It just is looking for, you know, tons of you know, common mistakes that people make. And it's, you know, giving you that little squiggly line suggestion. And then you know, oh I should have used a comma here, I shouldn't use a comma here, just a lot of good suggestions. I think they have a premium version that costs some money. The basic version's free. And the premium one gives you some advanced suggestions. But I've found that the free version is really powerful, powerful enough for me to help me out when I'm writing.

Mirela Setkic:

Well, I actually used to rely on Google Docs. And then I realized that Google Docs is kind of stupid. It doesn't really know how to spell some words it often says that something is misspelled but it's not. Sometimes it says that something is correctly spelled but it's not. So after this I'm gonna install Grammerly on my computer because I don't have it. I just rely on Google Docs or like if I'm writing a blog post and then I'm like writing in, like, WordPress and I'm relying on them, so.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, I don't know what the technical difference is in how it's programmed. But I feel like when Gmail like, they're just giving you spelling mistakes. But in Grammerly it's almost like I don't know if it's using the words around it to determine if that word makes sense in that context.

Mirela Setkic:

So it give, so it has more of the context. Like Gmail and Google Docs it's just like oh this word is okay but I don't know if it fits well within what I just wrote.

Jake Braun:

I don't know but that's my gut feeling from using it is that it must be using something a little bit more intelligent to figure out 'cause it's when you, the word is spelled right it's just the wrong word.

Mirela Setkic:

Right.

Jake Braun:

Like, the auto-correct on your phone. Like, it thinks you're tryin' to say something different than you're really saying.

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah, like "good" instead of "food" or whatever.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, they're both spelled correctly but only one makes sense.

Mirela Setkic:

Okay, alright. Well I definitely need this in my life. So okay, I'm gonna add that to my to-do list.

Jake Braun:

Okay, add it to TeamGantt or Trello.

Mirela Setkic:

Oh my gosh, no I don't need any more items on there. So I guess let's wrap it up. Like, how do these tools help people? Why should people do this?

Jake Braun:

So how do they help?

Mirela Setkic:

I'll speak personally. I think it makes you feel, well number one more organized. Which in my case makes me feel less anxious. You feel more accomplished because you're seeing things get done and then you feel like you're contributing to the overall picture. And you start to feel less frustrated. And sometimes if you're in a hot mess situation, you don't know what's going on, you don't know who's working on what then you start to kinda feel hopeless. And this helps with that. You come in, you know what you should be working on. You know what everyone else is working on and you kind of feel like, okay we're all in this together.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, so can you just unilaterally decide to just use some of these tools yourself?

Mirela Setkic:

No, everyone has to do it if it's gonna work. If, I think earlier I said like, I like my calendar. I mean, I'm still gonna continue to use my calendar on my desk. But if I'm just using that and you're using Trello and then someone else here is using Monday, someone else is using something else, we're all using different things, no one is talking to anyone, we cannot see each other's to-dos so we feel like we're all like on our own island and there's no point. So everyone has to use it.

Jake Braun:

Yeah and it applies to the other tools as well you know, Google Analytics, BuzzSumo. If you don't tell other people about these great tools that you've found then they're not taking advantage of how they improve the processes at your company. So any tool you should make sure that everyone knows that it's being used so that if they have a use case for it then they can use it well.

Mirela Setkic:

Yes, including the people who are in charge of the organization or the owners, the founders. Like, everyone has to use it.

Jake Braun:

They're the most important.

Mirela Setkic:

Yes, like no one is exempt. Like, I would like to be exempt from some of these things but I can't. If I really want it to work I have to do it. So you, people can't be islands. You have to be part of a team. And you have to ask for everyone's buy-in.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, good management comes from the top down.

Mirela Setkic:

That's right. So you just gotta do it. Even if you, I mean, you're not gonna love all of these tools. I don't love all of these but I can learn to like them and I can learn to appreciate them. So that's how I'm approaching them.

Jake Braun:

I love them all.

Mirela Setkic:

Okay, well, okay. I don't know if that's true.

Jake Braun:

So, what, is there anything else that we should a brought up that we haven't?

Mirela Setkic:

No, I think that's it. Just even if you do couple of these they will make your life better so just go out and do it.

Jake Braun:

Yeah. And, with that it’s been a great 27th episode. And definitely, do feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions or comments about anything we talked about today or marketing in general. You can visit us on our website, KickinItWithKapok.com, or on social media. We're on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter as Kapok Marketing.
This has been Kickin’ it with Kapok brought to you by Kapok Marketing. Thanks for listening. We’ll have something just as great for you next time.