Welcome to Relevance’s new monthly feature highlighting our pick of the best online marketing tools. Each month, our SEO experts will choose their favourite digital tools and explain why we love them. For anyone searching for ways to streamline their processes but lacking the time to research how, this monthly curation is for you.
January’s best online marketing tools
1. Storyboarder by Wonder Unit
Storyboarding is an essential part of the creative process for many marketers, designers, filmmakers and animators. However, it can be a very lengthy operation, especially for those just starting out. We highly recommend Wonder Unit’s Storyboarder for making this time-consuming process incredibly straightforward.
This free online tool allows you to import, move around and edit sketches. Better yet, you can also insert an image duration, dialogue, action and add extra notes to explain the shot. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and gives you the option of editing in Adobe Photoshop. Lastly your boards can be used to demo or preview your work in a slideshow, which makes it a great program for presenting all your brilliant ideas to clients.
2. The iland Cloud Platform
iland provides a good cloud to secure data for backup and disaster recovery. This award-winning global cloud service provider lets organisations virtualise and better manage their hardware, providing virtual infrastructures, storage and software products. Operating from data centres throughout the Americas, Europe, Australia and Asia, iland combines deep layered security, predictive analytics and compliance to deliver ease of management.
3. Loom
Video is a quicker and more personal way to send a message than email or texts. After all, words can’t capture the nuance of facial expressions and tone. It’s particularly useful for “showing” rather than telling, with many people identifying as visual learners. Loom is a great free online tool for video explanations to clients, and it can also be used for training new members of staff as it’s instantly shareable. A Chrome extension makes it really easy to use and and you can even upload the videos to Youtube, DropBox and Daily Motion.
4. TinyPNG
There are a lot of these gadgets out there, but – instantly recognisable by its panda logo – TinyPNG is one of the very best online marketing tools for compressing PNG images. PNG is the only widely supported format that can save transparent images, making TinyPNG ideal for apps and websites. It uses less bandwidth than other tools by selectively decreasing the number of colours in the image so fewer bytes are required to store the data. The compressed file’s quality is indistinguishable from the original and is displayed perfectly on all modern browsers including mobiles. Happy shrinking!
5. All Hashtag
Social media is all about hashtags, but it can be difficult to know where to begin. What’s trending? What’s shareable? What will expand your brand’s reach? Not to worry – we’ve found an excellent site for hashtag research.
All Hashtag is one of the best online marketing tools to help you quickly create and analyse relevant hashtags for your social media content and marketing. Enter a keyword and the hashtag generator will provide 30 hashtags, which are updated every day. Simply copy and paste into your social media posts.
6. Jing
TechSmith created Jing to help computer users – including students, teachers, marketers and clients – easily share what is on their screen without the need to be on a video call. The screen-casting computer program takes a picture or video of the user’s computer screen and uploads it to the Web, FTP, computer or clipboard. Jing is incredibly useful for technology demos, tutorials and sharing PowerPoint presentations.
7. Time Graphics
This digital timeline tool helps to visualise events during a project, highlighting progress, deadlines and completed and upcoming milestones in full colour. You can create a timeline for branding, website builds and other digital marketing projects. It’s a great way to convey important project information to stakeholders, clients and colleagues. Public timelines are free to use, but private timelines are part of the Premium package, reasonably priced at $95 for a year.
8. Plann
One for social media gurus and Insta influencers, Plann is one of the best free online marketing tools around for planning Instagram feeds. Billing itself as an all-inclusive Instagram management app, Plann allows you to brainstorm, schedule and analyse your posts all in one place. We love it for how easily it makes curating an Instagram grid, with a drag and drop function that allows you draft a perfect feed in seconds.
So there we have it – Relevance’s 8 best online marketing tools for January 2019. Stay tuned for next month’s edition!