Your team needs this digital marketing toolkit

Like a Michelin Star chef needs his pots and pans, digital marketers need their tools. You’re short on time, so we’ve put our heads together to round up our picks for digital marketing tools that help you do your job quicker and better.

We’re giving you the inside scoop into which digital tools we’re using, how we use them every day and how they help us keep being such superstars. Business development, planning, social media management, or video editing – read on to find your match.

Anna, Sales and Marketing Executive

My ultimate starting point for all sales activities is Capsule CRM. It helps me keep track of all leads and keeps their records clear and easy to skim through. The option to assign opportunities and tasks is particularly helpful to evaluate where we stand.

Capsule’s plug-in for Gmail also means I can store email conversations on the client’s record. This saves me any frantic email searches in my crammed inbox. We’ve been using Capsule for a while now and I can honestly say we’re getting everything we need from it. Oh, and we did a nice little marketing strategy for them too.

Another staple in my role is a social media management tool. Everyone’s heard of Buffer by this point, but I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t give it an honourable mention.

Managing social media at Sookio requires flexibility. Scheduling across different channels, moving posts around (we see you and we appreciate you, you sexy drag and drop feature) plus lots of editing - Buffer has that. Its user-friendly interface means both a social media novice and a time-stretched pro will find it helpful.

Buffer suggests optimal time slots to post, but it gives the freedom to override these and choose your own. Bonus: their First Comment feature means you can schedule all the relevant hashtags there and keep the text in the post clear and tight.

And speaking of social media… We’re a content agency and we like our visual content eye-catching. For bigger projects and client work we turn to the graphic design guru Jeremy, but our social media channels are powered by Canva.

From glowing client testimonials to punchy pull-out blog quotes, Canva is our go-to for all visual social media content. Thousands of backgrounds, templates and other elements will send you down a rabbit hole of curious browsing – the choices are endless. The upload tool and the option to save your brand colours makes it super user-friendly too.

Canva also saves your designs, so you don’t need to start from scratch every time. Just save it and use as a head start for creating a regular feature.

Canva home page

Matt, Head of Production

I’ve been working in commercial video for nearly 20 years and I’ve been using Final Cut Pro for at least 15 of them. Its Apple’s go-to non-linear editing software and probably my most used tool.

Every video I shoot will almost certainly be edited using FCP. It has a simple interface making my workflow better organised and much easier. I have always found the software intuitive and friendly so I have become a committed user and fan over the years.

It’s also extremely powerful, allowing for multi-channel video and audio editing. Excellent light and colour grading capabilities mean polishing up footage in an edit can be finished to a professional standard. There is also plenty of plugins available. This means you can find exciting new tools to work within FCP to better your edits.

I don’t use Photoshop as much as FCP, but I still find it an extremely useful and important tool in my possession. Creating graphics and manipulating images often comes as part of my job during post-production editing. Over the years I’ve used lots of alternatives, but I keep coming back to Adobe’s tried and tested photo editing software.

When it comes to still images this software can be truly transformational. It has a massive pallet of tools and comes with an integrated stock library. What’s also helpful is that it can work with multiple formats making my job easier when working with other designers and photographers.

I find both these post-production softwares wonderful. I’ve known about them for as long as I can remember and I’m grateful for all the benefits they have bought to my work. Capable, reliable and impressive. I’d be lost without them.

Sue, Director

One of my go-to tools is Trello, which I use for managing business and personal projects. What I like about it is the way it helps you visualise everything - like a series of Post-It notes with ticklists that you move from doing to done columns. Simple.

I used it when building my Business of Cambridge radio show, and it was so helpful when I was juggling ideas, pairing potential guests together, playing with the running order, and trying to pin people down on recording dates. If only Trello had been around when I used to work in radio production!

I also use it for business planning. A card each for my six objectives for the year, with tasks for each to tick off. Much more of a living, breathing and actionable plan than a Word document that sits there in the folder all dusty and difficult to update.

With Sookio School, we started out using Teachable, which is a great platform but we found we had lots of people signing up but not actually buying courses. It's great if online courses is all you focus on...but we don't, which makes it harder to build up that audience.

So we switched to Skillshare, which is much more suited to the courses we run. You have a readymade audience, and simply receive monthly payments. So it's bringing in much more revenue. I just have to find the time to record more courses! Follow this link for two months' free access.

Lastly, I'm getting a lot of use out of Zoom at the moment, which is proving the ideal tool to stay in regular contact with the team (including Friday happy hour), have client catchups and deliver training. Small bitesize chunks are what works best - no one wants to stare at a screen all day long!

Clark, Digital Strategist

We use Google Analytics to support our partners’ digital marketing efforts. As part of our support I produce reports that look at metrics like website sessions, blog page views and sources of traffic.

Google Analytics is part of a suite of tools we use at Sookio to make sure our partners are fully updated about their online marketing and what is and isn’t working. It allows me to see the bigger picture about our partners website and what is driving traffic to them.

It also allows me to dive down into the data, from age to location, so we can help our clients build a clearer understanding of both current and potential customers.

We provide support and consultancy to help our partners get the most out of the different social media channels. It’s important that I’m able to analyse the data across their social media channels to provide the best possible recommendations.

Iconosquare collates an array of social media metrics and displays them in an easy-to-read format. It allows me to focus more time on developing creative ways to improve reach rather than spending days collating data.

Naomi, Administrator

My main goal is to keep things running smoothly, working behind the scenes to support Sookio and the team. To keep on top of accounts I use Xero on a daily basis.

It cuts out the paperwork and automates the process. It’s super quick and easy to update, with everything in one place, giving me the ability to efficiently manage our cashflow. Having our bank account linked up to Xero means reconciling can be done with a click. This also enables real-time financial reporting which can be a huge benefit to small businesses.

I also keep track of annual leave, and Timetastic has been a great one to do that. It’s really simple to use and also integrates with Slack and Google calendars which means we’re all kept up to date.

Need a different kind of help?

Now you know what tools will help you achieve your goals, but none will create brilliant content for you – you need us for that.

So get in touch to chat content, strategy and whatever else your marketing heart desires.