This year, we’re celebrating 15 years of Wild Fig Marketing! My, how time flies when you’re having fun!
We thought the best way to celebrate this milestone would be to give YOU, our readers, a few fun little gifts in the form of “must-have” blogs. In future blogs, we’ll share our must-listen-to podcasts and must-read professional development books.
Today, we’ve got 15 must-have tech resources our team uses every day. Some are specific to marketing, some are helpful for running a small business, and some are just to make work a little more fun. 😊
First up: HubSpot. Where would we be without HubSpot? We truly don’t want to know.
We use this rockstar CRM for everything from keeping track of client information and task management to building websites (ours and our clients’), blogging, running email campaigns, scheduling meetings, automating marketing campaigns…and so much more.
Flipsnack is a fun little tool that turns any PDF into a digital flipbook. It’s such a great way to display catalogs, reports, brochures, ebooks, case studies…really, any sort of document you’d typically hand out to customers can now be digitized without losing that interactive factor.
Here are a few examples of flipbooks we’ve made using Flipsnack:
Canva is an online graphic design platform where you can create everything from presentations and brochures to social media graphics and digital guides. Basically, anything visual you need, you can create in Canva. Bonus: it’s easy to use and has a free plan!
Just think…you, too, could be creating gems like this image we used for a recent blog:
Have you ever tried explaining something to someone in an email that you wish you could just show them? With Loom, you can.
Loom is a screen recorder that allows you to record your computer screen (along with your face, if you like) so you can walk clients through proposals, quickly train employees on specific tasks, or explain a complex topic using visuals. It’s a communication super-tool, and we love it (so do our clients!).
Whether you have remote or hybrid team members or simply need a better way to communicate with clients on a daily basis, Slack will help you stay in touch.
It’s a great way to check in with one another or maintain ongoing conversations without having to send emails back and forth. Plus, you can share documents, search for previous conversations, and keep everything organized in one place. There is a mobile app option, too, so you can stay connected even when you’re on-the-go.
Toggl is a simple, yet comprehensive, time tracking app. Whether you need to charge clients by the hour or just want to keep track of how long it takes you to complete certain tasks, Toggl is a great (and free!) option.
SEO pros and newbies alike will benefit from Mangools’ Keyword Finder tool. We use Keyword Finder to search for the best keywords to use for our clients’ (and our own) blogs, website content, social media posts, and more. You can also track your keywords to see where you’re ranking and find out which other sites are linking back to yours.
It’s easy to use and has a free option so you can check things out before you subscribe (note that the free option is more limited than the paid version).
Yoast is a website plugin that helps ensure your blogs and website pages are SEO-optimized. This tool is made specifically for WordPress and Shopify websites—if you have a HubSpot website, like we do, it has a built-in optimization tool that works similarly.
If you’re an SEO newbie, Yoast is great because it explains what’s wrong with or missing from your content and what you need to do to ensure it’s ideally optimized for search engines. Their website also has a ton of free training resources to help you learn all about SEO!
If your email subject lines are still of the “Here’s Our Newsletter” variety, we can almost guarantee you’re missing out on clicks. We all get so many emails these days that generic subject lines no longer cut it. You need a subject line that entices people to open your email and read it…and that’s where Subjectline.com comes in.
This tool evaluates your email subject lines, telling you what you can improve to make them more enticing. It also gives you several alternative subject line options to try. Even better: it’s free!
If you’re not using Grammarly, what are you even doing? Grammarly is like a little writer’s assistant that hangs out in your computer, always offering tips to make your writing better. It’s free and can be used both on your desktop in any application you open, as well as online (it even works in Google docs!).
A note from our content writers: Grammarly’s recommendations are usually correct—but not always. So take its recommendations with a grain of salt, and if it tells you to do something that seems weird…maybe get another human’s opinion before you do it.
The Duplicate Word Finder is a cool little tool that helps make sure your writing isn’t repetitive by searching for repeated words in your copy.
All you have to do is copy and paste your writing into the tool, and it immediately gives you a list of your repeated words in order from the most repeated to the least. Then you can easily go through and tweak your most-repeated words to make your writing more interesting. (Bonus tool: if you need alternate wording ideas, check out Thesaurus.com!)
Title Case Converter is just what it sounds like: a tool to quickly and correctly capitalize your titles and headlines. Our writers swear by this tool — because even pro writers sometimes forget if words like “with” and “from” should be capitalized in a title.
You can even choose which style guide you prefer (AP, Chicago, etc). (If you don’t think that sounds exciting, tell a writer you know about it and watch them light up. 😂)
Our Marketing Coordinator and Graphic Design Queen, Amy, highly recommends the Squoosh app to compress and optimize images for your website. Smaller images = faster load times, which leads to a better user experience overall. (Plus, they take up less storage space.)
Everyone on the Figgy team loves a good GIF, and GIPHY is our favorite place to find them. We use them in our Slack chats and emails (to each other and to clients). You can even download the GIPHY mobile app to add GIFs to your texts.
Including a funny GIF in your correspondence can make your reader chuckle and add a little brightness to their day (and who doesn’t love that??).
Speaking of brightening someone’s day, SendOutCards allows you to send cards and gifts to your contacts at basically the click of a button! You can even set up reminders or automate your sending to make sure you never forget a birthday or anniversary again. We use SendOutCards to send birthday, anniversary, and thank-you cards and gifts to our clients, colleagues, and more.
There are so many great techy tools out there — this just scratches the surface! We’d love to hear from you: What are your must-have tech resources?