ShareIn this month’s episode of Coast TV, Online Marketing Executive, James Clark shows you how to determine which tools are the right for your digital marketing toolkit.
When it comes to digital marketing, there are countless choices available when reviewing tools to assist with your objectives. As a result, it can sometimes become quite daunting to ensure you selecting the best tool for the task. That’s the problem that this episode of Coast TV is aiming to solve for you today!
Video Transcription
Hi and welcome to another edition of Coast TV, my name is James and if you couldn’t tell already by the shirt I’m an online marketing executive here at Coast Digital and what I want to talk to you about today is Digital Marketing toolkits and essentially how to build the right one for you.
Now as digital marketers there are a ton of options out there in terms of software and services that are available to us that are really going to help make our lives easier and it can be a bit daunting when it comes down to actually choosing the right ones for you and for the job and its that purpose today that I’m hoping I’m going be able to help you with.
So, let’s dive in, at point number one and we’re going to want to decide which channels we need these tools for. As a digital marketer you might only be looking at a couple of channels, you might be looking at a whole slew of them. So figuring out whether you’re looking at SEO, social, PPC, content marketing, blogs, all of those combined or just a couple of those, is going to be really handy in deciding which tools are going to be the right ones for the job. Its also worth considering in the future which ones you might be looking at and then you can save yourself some money that way as well by getting a tool that’s offering maybe not just some single channel support but multi channel solutions.
So moving on we want to decide which features we want to get out of this tool kit so are you looking at getting some analytics some monitoring, maybe you’re looking at some organic rankings and checking those or maybe some competitor analysis or maybe you’re looking at getting some reporting features out of there or maybe some optimisation for your social strategy, you’re content marketing strategies or your paid search campaigns. Maybe you want something that’s actually going to offer multiple features. So It’s worth considering those as well.
The next point here is paid vs free, so weighing up those two options, now some features in paid software you might only find in that software you might not find in the free services, however, you could potentially mix and match some of these free tools and work out that you can actually get what you wanted from that paid tool, by using maybe 2, 3 or more of the free services. It also might be the case that although you’ve got a free trial or a free version and it does have some limitations it might actually be ok for what your using it for so, Screaming Frog is a great example there its actually got a crawl limit but it might be the case that you haven’t got a massive website or you haven’t got this huge project and that crawl limit isn’t going to impose on what you need to do with that piece of software, so that might be handy for you and its going to save you a lot of money.
Also it goes without saying that a demo or a free trial is going to be a fantastic way for you to get your hands dirty with the software and really find out whether it’s going to be of use to you. As well, things like AdWords, things like Google Analytics these are services that you should already be using anyway and you really just want to think about am I getting enough out of these services, is it really the case that I need a tool for this job or is it something that I could actually do manually, could I do this keyword research for this website that I’m trying to manage just using the free services or do I need to actually put my hands in my pocket and spend some money on this and its worth considering.
So once you’ve done all that, once you’ve gone through those points you’re ready to do some research now you should already be getting involved in industry leading websites and blogging and reading articles and forums anyway and its these places that are going to be the right time to ask people what are the best tools for this. Maybe you’ve got a certain feature, a certain thing you need to do, you can go on blogs you can go on these forums and you can ask people, I need to do this, what is the tool, is there a tool out there that can do that. So going on blogs, or going to the websites themselves, getting involved in some forums. Also going on these potential [tool] websites and looking at their testimonials, looking at some reviews seeing what actual users are saying about them. So that’s great once you’ve done all of that you are ready to do the final stage which I think is really handy, its getting this big spreadsheet and then dumping all this information in there.
The way I like to set up mine is that I would actually have a list of all the features that I want and this might not necessarily be features that even these tools offer its just that these are the things I want to do and you list them down the side and its handy to do that in terms of priority so most important is at the top. Also, if you are looking at multiple channels you can group those as well here, so you might have SEO, social, PPC, etc down the side here. Across the top you’ve got your tools.
Now some tools will offer free services as well as paid, some tools even have multiple tiers of payment so you can actually group those out here individually as well. What you are going to want to do is to plot these features that these tools have got, just so you can visually compare them really nice and easily. You’re going to want to think about the ones that are paid and the ones that are non-paid and you’re going to want to mark those out there so it’s nice and clear and obvious. You’re going to want to consider as well do you need to look at a suite of these tools? Do you need to look at a bundle of these tools? Or do you want to pick out these individual tools together. It might be the case that you can look at one of these individual tools and its going to do everything you need it to and you might not need some of these extra services so you’re going to save some money that way as well.
And finally, the biggest question which ties all of this together is do I even need this tool? And it links back to the paid vs free point. You’re going to be using adwords or analytics you’ve already got all of these great services out there, do you really need to be spending money on this tool or is there a way to do this for free already and is it worth it. I hope that’s been of some use to, as usual please, like, share and comment below and we’ll see you again next time. Thank you.
