Sharing screengrab tools (including how to screen grab a really long post with a single click)
I mark a lot of student marketing assignments. It's good to see students using visuals, but I'm often surprised at how many are still using "Print Screen" to do a full screen grab when what they actually want is just a section of a page. So here, I share three of the many screen grab tools that I use.
1. Windows Snipping Tool
This is an under utilised tool that comes free with Windows. The screen grabs below are self explanatory as to the steps involved:
With this tool you can highlight text or underline/circle etc:
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8 hacks for common email tasks
In the spirit of working smarter, not harder, here are eight tools that can maximize your email marketing efficiency.
1. Scope - Go behind-the-scenes of an inspiring email
Have you ever wondered how that beautiful email in your inbox got so beautiful? Scope creates a web-based version of any email you choose and reveals its HTML source code, mobile rendering, and desktop and plain-text views.
The free tool, created by the email marketers at Litmus, comes as a bookmarklet and works inside supported email clients like Gmail. Open an email, click the Scope button in your bookmark bar, and start inspecting.
2. Premailer - Convert HTML design to email-ready inline CSS
The retro nature of email design—heavy on tables, blind to external…
A Wordpress plugin that shows how everyone can manage their content calendar
In a previous post I wrote about an editorial calendar spreadsheet which we have created to help marketers manage their content marketing. While the spreadsheet allows you to plan and manage different types of content within a team, operational tools are useful too.
In this post I wanted to share a tool we use with it for managing posting on the Smart Insights website - The Wordpress Editorial Calendar plug-in. It will be particularly interesting for Wordpress bloggers who don't know about it, but may also interest others since it shows how you can make your editorial process more streamlined. I first heard about this plugin through Chris Brogan who describes how he uses it.
About the Editorial calendar plugin
The plugin works with the basic blog functionality you have come to know and love in WordPress.…
A content marketing productivity tool for faster content marketing
[caption id="attachment_23960" align="alignleft" width="257"] Little Bird - a great way to find and learn about key people online fast[/caption]
If you spend time like I do, writing content for special interest groups online, then you probably love to hear about content marketing productivity tools that can help you optimise your time during the different stages of the content marketing continuum, and improve your return on content marketing effort (ROE).
After years working as a publisher, I’ve now got a new job as a startup CEO, managing a content marketing agency, as well as doing the digital marketing for a…
Social media campaign tools can save you from developing and maintaining bespoke social apps
Popular social media management tools such as HootSuite are great for posting simple social media updates, interacting with your followers and tracking responses. But their capabilities can be lacking when you want to use more interactive tools like surveys or contests to engage your audience on Facebook and other social networks.
I've recently written a report for Smart Insights members where I compare social media campaign and community-building tools which reviews the options in detail. In this post I give a flavour of what some of these tools offer. In the guide we review the alternatives and give examples of campaigns created with each tool to inspire campaigns.
The benefits of using social media campaign management tools
The main purpose of the tools featured is to help marketers and agencies go beyond basic status updates to launch promotions…
4 tools that give you a fuller view of your online marketing spend
If your business receives a high volume of inbound sales calls referred from your website, then tying your telesales function into your marketing metrics is absolutely crucial to ensure you understand the overall performance of your online marketing spend. This key marketing requirement has led to different call tracking measurement tools being created and made available to marketers which I'll introduce in this post.
Why integrate call tracking?
Call tracking measurement has often been something restricted to a sales manager giving them an understanding of volume of inbound calls and then looking at the conversion rate to sale, generally broken down by agent. However as marketers, we need to understand what made a customer call in the first place. When we understand this we can make (more) educated decisions on marketing spend.
Without call tracking in place, if we look purely…
Using AlternativeTo to find better ways of working
If you are anything like me, you like to find new tools and ways to improve what you are doing. Software, apps and online services are often ways to aid in process changes, but searching the web, looking for reviews etc can make this task very boring and costly (from a time perspective).
In this post, I'm recommending AlternativeTo (www.alternativeto.net), a site recently introduced to me. For any service you're already using, it will give you a user rated list of alternative apps, software and services to trial and use instead.
Another example of where this tool is relevant is if you are making the switch from PC to Mac (one I would recommend) you might want to find a similar tool you use on the PC for a Mac. Using the search, filters, categories & tags it is easy to what you are looking…
Use Social Crawlytics to compare social sharing with competitors
Following on from our post last week showing tools for comparing competitors' use of online marketing, Dan Barker recommended I take a look at Social Crawlytics, a tool for benchmarking social media that I hadn't seen. I've completed a quick review, so this alert gives some background on the tool and you can decide whether it's relevant for you.
Our review of Social Crawlytics
Value: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Social Crawlytics
This is a free, simple tool that is aimed at showing you how popular your content based on how much it is shared across the main social networks as Likes, Tweets and +1s. It’s produced by Brighton-based SEO Yousaf of Elevate Local (@yesekand) and I think is a great effort given it doesn't have the backing many services have.
Although it’s free, it’s based on credits and I found myself…
New report shows the level of amplification you should expect from Facebook
I’ve written before that “fans are vanity, engagement is sanity” in relation to Facebook brand pages. A new joint report, The Power of Like 2: How Social Marketing Works produced by comScore and Facebook has been published that further stresses the effectiveness of engaged fans to a brand’s return on investment. It states
“While the vast majority of large brands today have an active social media presence, there continues to be an over-reliance on simple counting of Facebook Fans as a key performance metric.”
Whilst I am inherently sceptical of any report funded by a platform which stands to benefit financially from many of the activities it recommends, there are some genuinely useful data and insights in this report. It also digs a little deeper into Facebook’s Insights data – available to any Page owner and specifically references the metrics that…
Three examples including the new Smart Insights digital marketing 'health check'
I've been meaning for some time to write about using interactive tools within your digital marketing. I think it's something that's hugely effective; I've used these for years and it still seem surprisingly uncommon given their potential.
[caption id="attachment_14593" align="alignleft" width="385" caption="The new Smart Insights Health Check"][/caption]
My reminder to talk about this is since we've just finished our new interactive, our digital marketing health check - which you can try it here.
It's designed to give you immediate ideas by helping you quickly evaluate areas to focus on within your digital marketing. Its core purpose is to signpost key content on our site that's going to be most relevant to you at that moment. It's simple, quick and focussed on defining your priorities.
That aside, we wanted to bring…
