Inbound Marketing is an ever growing and changing space where the promise of attracting customers in an organic and strategic manner must be met in a well thought, planned and executed manner. Get it wrong and you will lose leads and customers. To that end, the Inbound Marketer is blessed with a multitude of apps, tools and solutions to help them attract, convert, close & delight their customers.
Here we look at our 20 Essential Apps for Inbound Marketing (in no particular order) and why they are worth considering in your inbound marketing arsenal:
Step one of the Inbound Marketing journey – attract people! We human beings are a visual bunch, it only takes us 1/10th of a second to form an opinion on someone merely by looking at them.
Inbound marketing is no different – your aim as an inbound marketer should be to create meaningful, interesting and BEAUTIFUL content at all times and in Canva you have the perfect aid to help.
Launched as a website only offering in 2012, today they boast over 4 million users and an incredibly easy to use iPad app. Canva's simple templates allow for just about anyone to create beautiful visual online content that is attractive to everyone.In the world of marketing it’s easy to become snowed in under a mass of the day to day noise that detracts from the creative side of the role.
When it comes to Inbound Marketing this problem is amplified – think about it: to create good content you need to come up with creative ideas and get them down for your customers to see.
Evernote, while not created with the Inbound Marketer in mind, has become one of the most practical and widely used productivity tools going. Why? It’s simple to use and allows people to think on the go, take notes and firm those ideas up later.
Evernote’s cross-platform mobile app offering is first rate and integrates wonderfully with its desktop app. The free version ticks most of the boxes you’ll need day to day so stop reading and get downloading!
An Inbound Marketing plan isn’t that different from any regular marketing plan in terms of keeping many balls up in the air and making sure they drop at the right time, in the right places, in front of the right people.
Trello is a freemium based online project management tool based on the Japanese ‘Kanban’ just in time approach to production. It’s easy to use card system layout allows for all project components to be allocated out across team members through a variety of ways such as task lists, deadlines, scheduling etc.
The Trello mobile apps (across iOS, Android & Windows) are beautifully crafted and easy to use making working on the go very easy.
Is it worth downloading? Well 1) its free, 2) it’s pretty to look at 3) it’s simple to use & 4) over 5 million users seem to think it’s pretty good!
Inbound Marketing campaigns are nothing without the analytics in the background giving insight into what is working and what isn’t and may need tweaking.
For the inbound marketer it is crucial to have real-time access to this information to allow for monitoring of new campaigns & immediate changes if required.
Google now offers its analytics profiles and reports on a handy mobile application that gives the user 24/7 access to their own customisable reports. The cost? Free!
I’m of the opinion that email is a dying animal, it stifles productivity under an avalanche of messages where important files, requests and information get lost in the noise.
Business owners may acknowledge how unproductive it is as a communication tool but don’t necessarily have an alternative view.
The inBASE team swears by Slack when it comes to internal communications & file sharing. The ‘stream’ function allows for messages & conversations to be matched under specific topics so everyone in the group knows what the focus is and the file sharing capability is ‘blink-and-you’ll-miss-it’ quick.
However, Slack’s real party piece is it's integration function with a multitude of different tools such as Dropbox, Trello, Google Drive & Intercom to name but a few.
Sometimes the easiest ways are the best ways.
Remember when you’d come into the office every morning and write down your to-do lists for that day?
Well Wunderlist is built on the same simple premise of task management where the user compiles their to-do lists under a variety of topics (work, private, shopping etc.) and sets tasks and sub-tasks within each as well as a variety of other functions such as completion times, file sharing and assigning of tasks.
The wonder of Wunderlist is the functionality available, even at the free entry level it’s more or less exactly what the inbound marketing professional needs to stay on top of their day to day tasks.
The mobile application offering is first class also with clean, easy to use screens making it a must have.
The Hemingway app is a standalone proofreading tool available for both Windows and Mac computers at the reasonable price of $9.99.
Its main focus is to ensure that the content you write is clear and concise for your target reader and it does this through monitoring complex words or phrases, long sentences, repeated adverbs or frequent use of passive voice.
It will then colour code and highlight these issues to you so you can make revisions.
Where content creation is such a vital part of the inbound marketing process, it’s imperative to place quality over quantity and Hemingway is one of the best ways of doing so.
A key factor for many inbound marketing professionals is time – it’s the one thing they aren’t making more of!
How often have you set aside time to work on an element of a client’s online campaign only for you to find that with various tweaks and requests, you’ve gone way beyond the initial time allocation?
If you bill by the hour, tracking time spent on client activity is vital and Toggl is one of the best tools out there for tracking this. Ideal for freelancers, consultants or small agencies, Toggl operates via an incredibly easy system where you literally click start and finish as you go. Tasks can be tagged, scheduled, allocated to individuals and monitored to give a complete overview of activity as it happens.
Desktop apps as well as mobile functionality mean Toggl is an incredibly simple but versatile tool that tracks where all that precious time is being spent.
So you’re focused on driving traffic from a number of areas via a multitude of different social media routes but are having a hard time keeping track of each account? That’ll be a job for Hootsuite then.
Hootsuite is the most popular online social media management tool and allows for people to collaboratively execute campaigns across a variety of social media channels, all from the comfort of one dashboard.
For the Inbound Marketer it’s an essential piece of kit where managing social media, scheduling messages, tracking conversations & measuring campaign results can be done with ease.
The cross-platform mobile application offering also affords real-time insight into social interactions, so important in ensuring your brand is protected at all times.
Hootsuite offers free, pro & enterprise solutions ensuring that all companies, from start-ups to Fortune 500’s, can have access to all their social media avenues at the same time.
VMO is an A/B testing tool that allows online marketing professionals to create different versions of their websites, web pages and landing pages that can then be used to track visitor behaviour and click rates.
It also features additional tools such as behavioural targeting, heat maps & usability testing which means you can get in-depth insight into your visitor behaviour and can make informed decisions based on these.
What’s more, the system does not need any expertise in web design or HTML knowledge, rather you simply copy and paste an element of code into your website and track the outcome.
If you thought Wunderlist was simple, Pocket will make it look like a quantum physics equation!
Pocket, formally known as Read It Later, is a reading list management application available across all platforms, be they mobile or desktop where you simply save the article URL in your browser via the Pocket web browser extension for reading later.
Articles can be categorised under various topic headings and while the keen amateur chef might find it of real benefit to save various recipes under different headings, the same rings true for the inbound marketer.
Content creation demands thought and ideas be put into the content you create yet these ideas can pop up at any time in any online article you may skim past.
Pocket’s strength is its simplicity – save those articles until you’ve time to properly kick back and digest them properly.
17 million users and over 1 billion saved articles proves that the simple things are the best.
Content creation relies heavily on access to information that is relative to the service offering the company specialises in, which can mean the inbound marketer has to spend a long time researching online through search engines for information relating to topics they wish to attract customers or potential customers with.
What Feedly, a news aggregator application, does so well is it compiles its news feed from a variety of online sources based on the user’s own preferences and customisation settings.
Over time, it learns from what articles are ignored, read or shared via social media channels and will offer content that is pertinent to that user.
A boon for the inbound marketer, this allows for content that is wholly relatable to your target customer personas to be identified and shared through the right channels to reach them, all with relative ease.
Mobile application offering across every platform you can think of and integration with other tools such as Evernote, Trello & Slack make Feedly an incredibly strong offering for the online marketing professional.
Visually is a marketplace that specialises in creating stunning visual content in the form of infographics, eBooks, videos, social media micro content and data visualizations.
Their team of design experts, writers & developers (they’ve over 1,000) allow you to specify exactly the type of content you are looking for, manage the process by working closely with the design team and above all ensure the piece is delivered on time and in budget.
Their infographics in particular are excellent as they provide a cost-effective means of generating quality, beautiful content that has a high share factor that will ultimately benefit your brand.
Why not explore some of their 40,000+ infographics already created for inspiration for your own content marketing?
Excusing the questionable choice of name, Gimp is an open source & free alternative to the Photoshop’s of this world.
It’s an ideal option to have in your stable when looking to create high-quality images, adding text or text overlays to existing images or generally just tweaking pictures.
Where the key to gaining attention is high-quality visuals on social media, Gimp won’t let you down.
Mindjet is a virtual whiteboard, collaboration & project management suite that has features for every member of a team.
It’s ideal for visually brainstorming & mapping ideas, co-editing & storing documents, creating plans and keeping everyone within the team appraised on where the project is currently standing and in what direction it’s heading.
For online marketers it offers a visually appealing and intuitive way of devising topics, storylines & strategies for projects (both client and company’s own) where ideas can be dragged and dropped wherever is required to best map out buyer persona’s own stories to others.
MindJet has cross-platform functionality working on Mac & Windows desktops, mobile devices and also integrates with a range of enterprise applications.
- Google AdWords – Keyword Planner
Anyone operating in the online marketing will be familiar with, and understand the importance of, Google Keywords Planner.
However it also has a lot of benefits to the Inbound Marketer, not least as an ideation generation tool for content creation.
By using the tool to identify relevant and popular keywords that tie into your brand, you can create content around these keywords which in turn will drive targeted volume to your website.
The Keyword Planner tool allows you to identify the topics that your target audience are interested in exploring and the keywords they are actively entering into search engines.
All combined, it allows for a much more targeted and effective content strategy.
SlideShare is a slide hosting site where individuals or businesses come to interact with others around content generated on slide decks (think YouTube but with slides instead of videos!)
What is incredibly impressive about SlideShare is its sheer scale - over 70m visitors a month of which over 80% come through targeted searches.
It has many benefits for the inbound marketer where you can get access to concise, well-presented content from top experts and literally immerse yourself in a range of content from experts in every imaginable field.
Conversely, you can place slides relevant to your business into an environment where they are likely to be seen by people who will have an interest in what you are saying.
The analytics the site offers is excellent also, detailed explanations on where people are spending their time on your presentation and what's caught their interest.
You will find that the more decks you publish, the more attractive your content looks to your target audience.
SlideShare is an underutilised outlet for many content marketers who instead tend to focus on the more mainstream channels such as Facebook, Twitter etc.
The thing is it’s an avenue you absolutely should be focusing on given the type of individuals who use it and that fact that it’s owned and operated by LinkedIn, thus appealing to a much wider scope of professional.
Fast becoming the daddy of online research and monitoring tools, Buzzsumo is a phenomenal tool that allows the online marketer full visibility of content that is shared through social media channels.
Users can gain access to their own content performance, identify key influencers on specific topics, track competitor activity & carry out back-end analysis on their content and can also set alerts on keywords, brand names amongst many others.
Buzzsumo is ideal when looking to create content that is relevant to your target audience as it allows you total oversight over what has & hasn’t worked for others on the same topics and is also great when looking for content ideas.
A secret for many online marketers for quite some time, it’s now a must-have for anyone who is serious about targeted content that is guaranteed to attract your target audience.
There are a multitude of project management tools and software available today that all do very good jobs (indeed Trello even made our list!)
They all seem to do various elements very well yet none seem to deliver a complete solution, particularly for the Inbound Marketer.
Wouldn’t it be great to have a system that allows you to create campaign templates, content calendars, inbound game plans and monitor key deliverables across clients to name but a few?
Step forward DoInbound.
inBASE quite simply LOVES DoInbound!
Their easy to use templates, well thought out structures and the fact you can quite literally plan, create and execute entire inbound marketing campaigns for yourself and for your clients using DoInbound means they are fast becoming a vital piece of inbound agencies toolkits the world over.
They also happen to be experts in their field who understand the requirements of inbound marketing agencies which means the product is something special indeed.
Inbound Marketing has many different facets that when come together offer the complete online solution to attracting, converting, closing and delighting customers.
The journey the customer goes through is an incredibly organic one when compared to traditional forms of marketing and yet on the back end the inbound marketer must work just as hard to ensure that seamless transition through each stage.
HubSpot is an all in one inbound marketing platform to help companies attract visitors to their website, convert them into qualified leads, nurture them through to closed customers and delight them as long-standing customers and brand promoters.
HubSpot is THE complete inbound marketing management platform that allows all inbound marketing elements to be monitored, analysed and managed at all times.
The HubSpot dashboard offers complete line of sight on web analytics, website grading, social monitoring, email analytics and campaign management.
Essentially your brand’s entire digital presence can be effectively monitored and managed directly through the dashboard making Hubspot one of the most powerful tools available to the Inbound Marketer.
So there you have it, inBASE’s 20 Essential Apps for Inbound Marketing that we use regularly and think that today’s Inbound Marketing professional should not be without.
What makes the cut in your business?
What are the tools you cannot be without in your day to day activities?
