6 digital tools that will make you a better marketer.

One of my favorite movies is Ferris Bueller's Day Off. We all remember when Ferris said, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." It's in this spirit that I reflect and think about some of my favorite digital tools which make me a better marketer.

So here we go. In no particular order...

1) Foresee - Customer Experience Measurement

I've been using this tool for 8 years. The challenge with the standard web tracking platforms is they only focus on activities. For example, how many page visits did I get? Or, how long did a user stay on a page? While things like this are good to monitor, they shouldn't determine success.

What I like about Foresee is they capture actionable information, via user surveys, that determine if your website has actually helped your customers. Scott Cook of Intuit said it best when he asks the following question- "what problem are you trying to solve for?" Foresee helps you answer that question. They monitor things like customer satisfaction and task completion. These are the real indicators of success. After all, if your customers can find what they want and are happy, that leads to other good things like sales, loyalty, etc.

I've worked with some great people over at Foresee over the years. Many of whom Larry Freed (founder) put in place. Here are some of the people I've learned from over the years - Khalida Jarbou, Steve Kennedy, Krystie Lee, and Jason Veekner.

Every year Foresee puts on an annual conference, which I highly recommend. If you haven't already seen my previous article about my key takeaways, make sure to read it - What I Learned at the Foresee by Answers Summit Last Week.

Benefits of using Foresee -

• Aligns everyone to customer centric metrics
• Captures how users think/feel/act
• Provides real time feedback for continuous improvement
• Benchmarks your website against other sites
• Provides ad hoc market research opportunities

Here's some more information on Foresee...

2) Simply Measured - Integrated Measurement Dashboard

Complexity of information has always been an issue in the digital space. And it's gotten worse over the past 5-7 years. I'm sure you've seen the annual list of vendors Chiefmartec publishes. In 2011, it started with 150 vendors. It's now up to 5,000. Every time I see an updated chart I cringe. It's basically impossible to keep up with everything.

Having access to so much technology is good and bad. We need all these different platforms/tools to ,monitor data and generate insights. But it's a pain in the butt to tie everything together. Simply Measured solves this problem. They help integrate a lot of your existing data into one place. And they present it in a way that's simple and easy to digest.

Most of this happens by connecting their platform with the various APIs from companies like LinkedIn, Twitter, Bitly, Google Analytics and Instagram. A big thanks to Jamie Dukalis for introducing me to Simply Measured, and helping me get everything up and running a couple years back.

Benefits of using Simply Measured -

• Puts data from different sources into one place
• Provides extra data that isn't always available on the native measurement platforms
• Allows you to export data into Excel or PPT to help you easily share your story
• Feeds data/insights in real time so the marketing/content team can learn faster

Demo of how Simply Measured works...

3) LinkedIn Elevate - Social Media Advocacy

One of the important ingredients for social media is authenticity. You need to make sure what you're saying feels like it's coming from a real person. And when your employees tell your story for you, it's more believable. Elevate is software that allows your company to feed content through your employees personal social media accounts. The employee gets to determine what posts they agree to share. After all, it's their account.

Beyond helping making the content distribution process easy, Elevate provides some great analytics. Beyond the basic engagement data, LinkedIn also provides the company name and job title of who likes, shares or comments on the post.

Another thing I did with Elevate is develop a media equivalency model. In simple terms, this shows how much money it would cost you to reach the same audience via a paid campaign. While the model is never a perfect science, it's effective at demonstrating value. This is especially effective with non-marketers since they can quickly understand "It would have cost us $125K to reach the same audience through a paid campaign."

Even though there's plenty more data LinkedIn could provide, they do hold some of it back due to their members first privacy policy. So even though you want more data, you have to settle for what they provide. I have a lot of respect for Jeff Weiner at LinkedIn for providing the vision to create this policy.

A quick shout out to the many people at LinkedIn who helped launch the global program at Aon - Ashley Helfrich, Chris Carollo, and Chris Kelleher. And a bonus shout out to Matt McGivern, Penny Gilhaus, Courtney Hyde and Jeff Cogan for being cheerleaders for the platform. And of course, Katie Barmantje who leads social media for Aon. She did all the heavy lifting and made it happen. Make sure to read more information on the Aon program via this blog post from Katie - How Employee Advocacy Helps Aon Reach New Audiences.

Benefits of using Elevate -

• Drive consistency in messaging by providing employees with approved messaging
• Better understand who engages with your content
• Generate earned media for essentially no cost
• Let your employees build their professional credibility by sharing industry articles/information
• Take the fear/anxiety out of social sharing, especially for those who aren't tech savvy

Here's some more information on Elevate...

Here's a demo of how the Elevate app works...

4) Salesforce.com - Lead Management

Peter Drucker famously said, "you can't manage what you can't measure". Before platforms like Salesforce existed, the connectivity between marketing and sales were limited. Now, you can understand exactly what happens from the beginning to the end of the sales cycle.

Beyond tracking sales, you can also become more savvy at how you buy media. Most marketers fall into the trap that a cheaper lead is better. So they optimize on metrics like CPM or CPC. The problem with this approach is it doesn't factor in how much revenue comes from each lead.

For example, would you rather pay $1.50 for leads that converts at 10% or $3.00 for a lead that converts at 35%? Or to equal the playing field, would you rather pay $3 for a lead that brings in an average of $1,500 or $3 for a lead that brings in $4,500? Without Salesforce, you'd never know.

Benefits of using Salesforce -

• Ability to track leads/sales from the beginning to the end of the sales process
• Helps you make better marketing investments since you know how well your leads convert
• Makes your salespersons life easier by streamlining a variety of tasks

5) Google Analytics - Measurement

Google Analytics, or GA as most people call it, is a basic analytics platform which a lot of people use. It's a free tool. But don't be fooled, it's very powerful! You can do some complex things like e-commerce, goal setting, campaigns, adwords integration, and a lot more.

Google always impresses me when it comes to their technolgy. A number of my former colleagues work at Google, so I feel pretty well connected to what's going on. I visited Google as part of a digital roadshow I organized in Silcon Valley last year. If you haven't read that article, have a look here - Journey to the Center of Digital: The 9 things you should know about my trip to Silicon Valley

Benefits of using Google Analytics -

• Understand the activities of users on your website
• Understand how people are getting to your website
• Ability to connect paid campaigns into on site conversion
• Ability to assign $ amounts to completed task on the website
• A lot of people know it so you can easily find someone to help you
• It's free!

Here's an overview of what GA can do -

6) Evernote - Work/Life Management

Alright... Evernote is a little different than all the other ones. But I had to put it on the list. While it doesn't do anything to help build or measure marketing programs, it definitely has made me a better marketer.

Evernote is basically your place to store anything that's important. You can put content in folders, tag them with your own taxonomy, or do both. And content is supported in many shapes and sizes - documents, pictures, recordings, videos or zipped files. With a premium membership you never run out of room to upload and store information. Plus, you can access your content anywhere - desktop, phone or tablet.

There are some great features like being able to take a picture of a business card and have LinkedIn data automatically appended (takes about 2-3 seconds). Or, it can read text from most documents. So if you remember a presentation from a conference three years ago, and one of the slides said zebra, Evernote will find it if you search for zebra.

Here's another example of how I use it. Anytime I see a great piece of work, I put it into Evernote and tag it. I probably have 350+ tags right now. Some examples include - social media, CMS, strategy, measurement, B2B, or RFP. Anytime I start a new project, I can quickly bring up old documents and see if I want to use anything. This has saved me a ton of time!

Benefits of using Evernote -

• Store all of your important documents in one place
• Create your own folder or tagging structure to find information fast
• Store business cards all in one place
• Record in person conferences and reference them later

Here's a quick overview of what Evernote does:

Thanks to Phil Lieban who is the co-founder and former CEO of Evernote for creating this tool. I'd also like to thank the people who've put up with me for pushing Evernote on them over the years. I'm talking to you Eric Sawitoski, Venetta Linas Paris, Jenny Uyeda, Chris Lawson, Keith Reehl, Andrew Miller and Carolyn Goldhaber.

So there you have it... those are my 6 favorite digital tools!

I'll end this post like I do my other ones, and ask you to share your favorite digital tool in the comments section. It could be something big and powerful, or something simple.

Now it's your turn. What tools help you be a better digital marketer? Leave a comment below.