Posts in Digital Marketing Tools

5 Close Friends of a Digital Marketer

In our real lives we, need friends who are a go-to option for us and every time whenever we need anything we simply go to them for solutions. Similarly, for a digital marketer, there are quite some tools & platforms that are nothing but friends of a digital marketer to help them excel, help them grow and become a better marketer. In this post, I am going to list some tools and platforms that I use every day and that helps me, my team and I am sure they help a lot of other marketers too. They stand by with us as friends and that’s the reason I am calling them “close friends of a digital marketer!

friends of a digital marketer

1. The Inspiring Friend of a digital marketer:

This friend like in real life is always inspiring, keep us motivated, helps us to do one extra mile to achieve better and bigger. So who could be a friend of a digital marketer that inspires? I won’t just mention one friend in this category, I have a list of friends who keep inspiring me. Some of these friends might appear in multiple categories as well. So just use them whenever you need.

  1. Think with Google Keep yourself inspired with the latest trends in digital advertising (especially what’s happening with Google and related products (Ads, Analytics, YT, etc))
  2. Creative Hub Facebook Keep yourself inspired with amazing design ideas for Facebook advertising and stay ahead in the game.

I feel these platforms are very important in the overall journey being a digital marketer. They not only provide first-hand information with case studies and new tool updates, they also help us to stay connected and inspired. And that’s the reason I have included them in my list of “close friends of a digital marketer”.

2. The Guru Friend of a Digital Marketer:

Don’t you have one guru, who keeps you teaching new stuff? Not talking about the friend who just does blah blah but an actual Guru who you needed the most in your Practical exams, the one you needed just before the paper to revise the syllabus quickly. Yes, I talking about the actual Guru Friend. Well, for a digital marketer there are plenty of such friends, who would never let you down, when it comes to learning something, or if you are stuck with something. They will always give you the latest information about digital marketing or social media.

  1. Digital Marketer for overall digital marketing.
  2. Backlinco For SEO
  3. Social Media Examiner – Social Media
  4. Sorav Jain – Social Media Marketing Tips, Digital Marketing & Blogging
  5. Gary Vaynerchuk – For Social Media, Blogging, Business
  6. Neil Patel – For everything digital

3. The Support System of a Digital Marketer

We all have that one friend who is a support system, we always rely on him/her to have our back. We leave a lot of work on them and just relax as they will take care of it. Wondering, who could be that for a digital marketer? Again, I have a list of such friends who are the support system, without whom I think a digital marketer can never function.

  1. CRM Yes, a CRM is everything a digital marketer needs. Added with automation, a CRM helps you work even when you are sleeping. That’s the beauty of it. I am not gonna share a list of CRM vendors, however, Salesforce and Hubspot are the two I have been recommending to people.
  2. ChatBot – A chatbot if created well helps you to engage with your audience in real time and collect data at the same time. It is always a good idea to have an AI chatbot added to your website.
  3. Email Automation: Get your entire email notifications, thank you emails and even followup emails automated. This helps you relax as you know every new signup will get an automated email and the activity will be tracked for the next action. This as well becomes possible with the use of a Good Marketing & Sales CRM software.
  4. Social Media Scheduling & Automation: It could be Hootsuite, or Sprout Social or any other software that you use, which helps you relax for the month or two once you have scheduled your entire calendar for social media, no hassle of going and posting every day on each of the platforms. It becomes your one-stop solution for all the social media channels.

4. The backbone of a Digital Marketer

Do you think, you can survive without that friend who holds you every time when you are in need? No, we all have those close friends who will do anything for us no matter what and will stand by whenever we need them. Can you guess which tool could be those friends for a digital marketer? Let me list it for you:

  1. Google Analytics – Everything we do online, need to be measured. Analytics helps us to track the traffic of the website, a number of sessions, from where these people are coming, how much time they are spending etc. Which is actually very useful for every marketer.
  2. Search Engine Console –  The best free tool to see your Google indexing and ranking status. You can see which keywords are ranking, what is the click-through rate, which titles are working better and optimize your content accordingly.
  3. Google Ads –  You can’t totally rely on organic traffic, you need to beat your competition by being on top with Google Ads. It is not just about search ads, Google Ads is the platform to let you advertise on Google Display Network & Gmail Sponsored Promotions. (Previously called Adwords)
  4. Facebook Ads – Organic only strategy does not work on social media too. You need to buy ads to reach out to targeted people. Facebook Ads is the best platform to help you achieve that. There are different types of ads you can run to reach out to your audience on Facebook & Instagram.

Rest everything is just a story, the life a digital marketer revolves around the above 4 and alone them can help you achieve great results.

5. The Gossip Friend of a Digital Marketer

You would be wondering already if this exists for a digital marketer. Yes, for sure. I believe all the platforms that give you information about awards, campaigns, and ads, in general, are nothing but the gossip platforms in the digital marketing industry or in the overall advertising industry. Would you like to guess this one now?

  1. Social Samosa 
  2. Campaign 
  3. Ads of the World

However, these platforms keep you updated on what’s happening around you or in the industry like that friend who keeps you updated about what’s happening with other friends. These are very important to keep an eye on your competitors, who is doing what, which agency won which client. And that’s the reason I keep them in my list of “close friends of a digital marketer!”

I hope you liked this list about close friends of a digital marketer and you will also add them to your list. There are hundreds of other tools marketers use. These were just based on our use and what tools we use. We are happy to increase our friends’ list. Please comment below the names of other tools, platforms or software as your friends. I will include relevant ones on my list of “close friends of a digital marketer”.

Thank you for reading this post. Please show some love, by sharing it with your colleagues or friends who you think can get benefited. Have a great day/night/evening 🙂

Ma asSalama.

If you are looking for some quick social media tips to follow, you can refer to this post:

13 Quick Social Media techniques to get great results in 2018

Optimize Website Loading Time With Image Optimization

There are hundreds of factors that affect a web page’s loading time. However, the biggest reason is using big size images.

I tried a lot of image optimization tools, nothing worked for me really well. Most of them play with the resolution and layout of the image which I would never adjust with.

I did not use the word high-resolution images. Because in this post I am going to discuss an amazing tool which will help you to keep the resolution of the images the same and yet reducing the image sizes drastically. Can you guess the tool I am talking about already?

Yes, it is TinyPNG or TinyJPEG

The Best Image Optimization Tool

I have been using this tool for ages now. When they only had a website and no photoshop plugin or any other CMS plugin. TinyPNG has been a super amazing tool to help us reduce the image sizes and make them load faster in the browsers for a seamless browsing experience.

Consider your home page is of size 2.8 MB currently, I can bet TinyPNG will help you reduce the size by at least 30% to 50% (this I have seen on an average). And it does not hamper the quality of the image at all. So how does it reduce the image size? Let me just quote them directly on how it works:

TinyPNG

“TinyPNG uses smart lossy compression techniques to reduce the file size of your PNG files. By selectively decreasing the number of colours in the image, fewer bytes are required to store the data. The effect is nearly invisible but it makes a very large difference in file size!”

They have grown in the perfect way as a product company. They initially launched their website to be used for free. (It is still free! with certain limitations) Freemium model looks to be working for them pretty well because their product is super awesome. They had soon launched a plugin that you can use in your Photoshop to simply save images for the web, yes it will produce lighter images than the default “Save for Web” option in your Adobe Photoshop. They even have launched CMS plugins to optimize your websites. And here comes my favourite part.

Like most of the digital marketers, I love using WordPress because it is simple and rich with new developments. Really easy good with SEO and a lot of other features that make WordPress world’s most widely used CMS platform. And yay! TinyPNG has a WordPress plugin too. Which is absolutely free for 500 images a month. That’s cool, right? I am sure many of the bloggers and marketers who use WordPress, this plug will be really useful.

image optimization tool

You can download the plugin for WordPress here on this link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/tiny-compress-images/ 

Please let me know in comments if you have been using this already, or if you have faced any issues or difficulties using TinyPNG. Look forward to your feedback and suggestions.