Tools of the Trade: Helping Marketing Agencies Succeed
Here at Torx, we wear a variety of different hats, from web development to social media, brand development, and so on. This means we need a variety of marketing tools to keep us on track and to function at peak efficiency. Check out a few of my favorite sites and programs I’ve used to keep myself and my work environment up to par.
Communication is Key: Keep in Touch
Slack
Slack offers a bunch of easy ways to keep organized and in touch with everyone in your agency. The channels function allows agencies to organize conversations by team, project, and so on so that information is always in the right place. If you need to reach everyone in a pinch, you can tag the entire agency by prompting a push notification instead of hoping they’ll see your email.
Slack is also great for allowing you to pin files and messages, create private channels, react to messages, and, most importantly, use the giphy function. Everyone loves a good GIF, and they are super easy to send via Slack.
Project Management
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Trello
Trello is an awesome project management application that easily allows agencies to choose their own organization structure. For example, you can create boards for specific projects or teams, and then completely customize all of the lists and cards within. For large scale projects, Trello is a great way to break down phases and individual steps of each project. Some of the notable features include advanced due date and calendar functions, checklists, progress monitoring, time tracking, and labels. These functions just scratch the surface though. Trello can be customized between an incredibly simple base format and complex, detailed functions; it’s all up to the user!
Check out some of their tutorials to see more.
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TeamWork
Here at Torx, we use TeamWork to keep track of all our ongoing projects. TeamWork takes a straightforward approach to project management, with a clean-cut structure and clear establishment of task hierarchy. The great thing about TeamWork is the ability to schedule automatically-generating tasks such as quarterly WordPress updates or social media reporting. Some other notable features include the overarching calendar, milestones, time tracking, task assignment, and company-wide view of tasks.
Tools for Learning and Development
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Lynda
Lynda is an awesome resource for anyone trying to accrue some new skills in their industry (or outside of it!). This website offers a ton of tutorials on various subjects, from coding to photo editing, graphic design, and analytics tracking software. Within each of these subjects are various video tutorials arranged by type and skill level, progressing viewers from intro to advanced.
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Google Analytics Academy
Google offers a free analytics class for anyone looking to learn more about their web traffic. This class takes a minimum of about eight hours and takes viewers through the information step by step using videos, tutorials, and tests. This class provides a good base understanding of the power of analytics, as well as a look at the vast capabilities of such information. At the end of the class, the participant receives their Google Analytics Certificate.
Keeping Things Fun
Bacon Ipsum and Hipster Ipsum
If you’ve ever had a print piece or website put together by an agency, you may have seen something to this effect. Lorem Ipsum is a randomly generated written copy in Latin, used by developers and designers as filler content until they are ready to populate their project with the actual, finalized content.
As we all know, however, critiquing designs can sometimes get a little bit dull. That’s where Bacon Ipsum and Hipster Ipsum come in. These two generators act much the same as a Lorem Ipsum text generator, only they comically use words and terms that describe meats or hipsters, as their titles suggest. Try these out and be sure to give your clients a laugh the next time they review your designs.
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About the author:
Megan Hamlin
Senior Digital Marketing Specialist
Megan is the Senior Digital Marketing Specialist at Torx. She is responsible for social media marketing, search engine marketing, content marketing, and email marketing. Getting clients qualified leads is her biggest goal. When she isn’t on Facebook or writing a blog, she can be found analyzing data to see how she can improve her digital marketing efforts.