11 Apps Every Marketer Should Download

Apps are everywhere these days, and not just on your iPhone. Apps are all over Android, mobile devices, desktops ... even in your marketing software! And the functionality of these apps is ever-expanding, which is good news for marketers, because it means you can now download an app that does more than just fling angry birds at little green pigs. That's right -- now there are apps out there that make a marketer's life easier, and even make them better at their jobs.

As a marketer and fan of exploring new apps (although my colleagues might have a more emphatic name for me than "fan"), I wanted to share with you the apps that make marketers more successful at, well, marketing. Here are what I consider to be 11 must-have apps for marketers so you can really make a dent in your career!

1) Evernote

As a marketer, you are bound to think of your next campaign idea at an unexpected time: right before you go to bed, as you are about to step on the subway, or even when you're out with friends. So how do you make sure you don't forget your next lead generation idea? With Evernote, of course!

Evernote is a way to capture your notes while you're on the go. Not only is there a desktop application, but there is also a mobile application. As soon as you open either device, it will sync and update your notes so that you always have access to your latest information. The ability to constantly have a virtual notepad like this is so important for marketers who have to keep up-to-date on the changing landscape of marketing, and best of all, Evernote can be used on any device!

2) Dropbox

Dropbox is a fantastic tool for collaboration and file sharing; it's so simple! It becomes a folder on your hard drive where you can upload files and share them with others on your team. You can also download Dropbox apps on your smartphone and iPad so you can have those files on the go -- even when you aren't by your computer. But the best part about Dropbox is that you can keep files that are too large to send via email, and immediately give access to other members of your team. This app can also be used on any device.

3) GoDocs

Have you ever been on the go but needed to access your Google Documents to update something you simply forgot to change before you left the office? GoDocs is not an official Google app, but it still works really well to access your Google Docs. It sorts your documents by the last one that was edited and allows you to see the entire document. You can even upload documents right from your phone. If you're working on a spreadsheet with multiple tabs, it includes all of the tabs as well. GoDocs also allows for multiple accounts. This is available for iPhone and Android devices.

4) Trello

Trello is a collaboration tool for to-do lists. Each team member has a "board" where they list tasks they have to do, tasks they are working on, and tasks they have completed. Take a look:

Trello also gives users the ability to assign other team members to tasks on their list, and give deadlines and priority labels to tasks on your list. You can also have checklists within individual tasks and track your progress on completing those tasks.

Trello is both a website app and a mobile app. So when you are leaving work and want to know what you still need to complete, you can just grab your phone, open the app, and look at what your night or next day has to offer! This app is available on iPhone and Android devices.

5) HootSuite

HootSuite provides a social media dashboard that helps marketers post, monitor, and measure their social media tools. It allows you to schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ throughout the day, and even manage multiple accounts. Additionally, it provides analytics that are essential for marketers to be able to report and figure out how to increase their followers, traffic, and clicks. Similar to other apps, HootSuite can be accessed from your smartphone so you can continue to monitor and engage with your followers at any time. This app is available on all desktops.

6) GoToMeeting

Have you ever been on the train with terrible wireless but needed to call into a meeting or webinar? There is now a GoToMeeting/GoToWebinar mobile app that lets you do just that! It allows you to not only hear the presentation, but also see the presenter's screen. Instead of simply calling into meetings when you are not in the office, you can now see them right from your mobile device! This app is available on iPhone and Android devices.

7) Eventbrite

Many events now use Eventbrite to keep track of their registrations. You can buy tickets on Eventbrite, create backend reports, and track where your attendees are coming from. Eventbrite also has a mobile app that keeps track of the events you have registered for on Eventbrite, so you can easily access any of the information on their Eventbrite page. This will come in handy for people who don't remember when and where the event is and are already on their way!

Because HubSpot has seen the value in this app, we have created an app for our App Marketplace. It will keep track of who has registered for your event, your ticket sale progress, and import your registrants as leads into your portal so you can continue to have a relationship with them after your event. This is a great way to share some of the content from the event after it's over and keep in touch with your attendees. This app is available on iPhone and Android devices.

8) Statigram

There are some social media tools, such as Instagram, that do not natively offer reporting. But as a marketer, it's crucial to have analytics in place to measure your social media marketing performance. Enter Statigram!

Statigram provides analytics for Instagram, a mobile app that was recently acquired by Facebook and more and more frequently being used by brands in marketing campaigns. In addition to fun metrics to see what your most popular photos were and what filters were used the most, it also gives reports on the best time to post new photos, the average lifespan of a photo, which filters are triggering the biggest amounts of likes and traffic, and which followers are the most engaged. This app is available on all desktops.

9) Pinerly

Similar to Statigram, Pinerly measures activity on Pinterest. It helps find people who pin pictures that match your interests, helps identify people who have unfollowed you or you may want to unfollow, identifies popular pins that you may want to repin, allows you to schedule pins throughout the day, and provides statistics to show you what you are doing right and wrong. As a marketer, it's important to be able to schedule pins throughout the day to constantly engage your audience, and then measure the activity around your pins to determine whether or not you are pinning images of interest to your followers. This app is available on all desktops, and if you're new to Pinterest.

10) iReach

PR Newswire has always been the go-to tool for public relations professionals to send out press releases. However, putting a press release on the wire can be very expensive, and not always realistic for small marketing budgets. But HubSpot has an app in its App Marketplace that addresses that problem! For only $179, you can put a press release on the wire to a smaller segment of publications, but still over 1,000 websites including PR Newswire. We have used it in the past for big announcements with great results.

11) Zerys

Blogging and content creation is one of the most important components of inbound marketing, but all too often, it gets pushed to the back burner. The Zerys app provides a solution to this problem! Zerys allows you to post topic and title suggestions that you would like to have written for your blog, and then gets in touch with writers who want to help you write blog posts. You can then accept, request edits, or reject the content. It even helps you think of titles based on the topics you want to write about! This app is also available to HubSpot customers in your HubSpot portal.

What other apps do you use to make your marketing life easier?


























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10 Must Have WordPress Plugins Of 2012 Every Blogger Should Know About

How can you wow your readers when they visit your blog, so that they never want to leave again?
With over 900,000 new blogposts that are freshly published every day, the competition is fierce for each and every author.

Yet, making your articles the ones that readers want to come back to check out isn’t so hard. On each and every occasion I would argue that providing amazing content is absolutely key.
For this post though, I want to focus on how you can greatly improve the number of shares and awesomeness of your blog, with some of the latest WordPress Plugins.

Here are my top 10 picks for you, to increase Social Media sharing of your articles and blog performance:

#1 Digg Digg – Powerful and simple social sharing buttons:

The first plugin I want to introduce is the well known Digg Digg sharing bar, which recently received a major face lift. Social Proof of sharing is one of the most important things for blogpost I found. From BrightEdge’s research, it has proven to increase Social sharing by up to 7 times if included.

Digg Digg makes it super easy to add a floating share bar to your blogpost, just like Mashable for example. You can also choose to add buttons either before or after your posts with the plugin.

Best part: Digg Digg also features the latest sharing button options such as Pinterest and Buffer.



#2 Hello Bar – Convert more readers with a powerful call to action:

Another very powerful plugin every blogger should know about is called Hello Bar. It adds a simple line above your articles that you can fill with any message you wish. Personally, I have been using Hello Bar to promote products, events or simply evergreen blogposts.

The plugin is used and trusted by some of the biggest bloggers out there, including Tim Ferris or Eric Ries. It also offers some great customization options, to be either displayed at the top of your page or at the bottom.
Best part: What is most impressive about Hello Bar is the analytics options, allowing you to track exactly how many clicks you are getting on your promotions.



#3 WP Touch – Make your blog mobile friendly:
As we are going forward in 2012, not having your blog optimized for the millions of iPhone, Android and other smartphone users is definitely not an option I found. One of the best solutions out there is definitely WP Touch.

Within a split second of installing this plugin, anyone arriving at your blog from a mobile phone will have a wonderfully formatted site in front of them. It gives you some great customization options so you can truncate titles, hide excerpts and other things that are a pain to get working on your mobile normally.
Best part: What I like best with WP Touch is that it has advertising options built in right into the plugin, so you can capitalize more on mobile traffic.



#4 Sexy Bookmarks – Easy sharing of all social bookmarking sites:

An awesome plugin solution to add a ton of different social bookmarking buttons to your blog is Sexy Bookmarks by Shareaholic. Especially if you are looking for a plugin that covers some not so well known buttons, this one will be providing them for you.

The plugin also comes with the option to be installed for a great number of other blogging platforms such as tumblr or as a standalone for any website. It is overall a most solid solution for your blog.
Best part: What I like best is the customization option to add a small line of text, that adds that extra amount of personalization to your blog.



#5 W3 Total Cache – Make your site 10 times faster than before:

To be quite honest, I have always forgotten about the importance of performance plugins for my own blog. Yet, some great research from KISSmetrics, showing how loading times can affect visiting times of your readers. In fact, half a second of longer loading time would lead to 20% traffic decrease for Google.com.
With W3 Total Cache, you have one of the most powerful caching plugins out there, that will increase the loading time of your blog up to 10 times. It will cache each and every element of your site and readers will be able to read your posts in a split second.

Best part: What I like best is that you are able to individual turn on or off Object Caching, Database caching and other options so performance is absolutely optimized.



#6 The Slide – Suggest related posts to your readers:

There have been many attempts of products that aim to keep readers on your site after they have read one of your articles. The Slide is a simple plugin that slides into your page, halfway through an article, just like the New York Times has for example.

What I like about this plugin is that the article suggested is not just any article. The Slide uses a sophisticated algorithm to pick the most relevant and related content for your readers. You can also check out a related plugin called upPrev, as The Slide is currently in private beta.

Best part: An amazing part is that the Slide also allows you to place sharing buttons right on the widget and get more social traffic for your blog.



#7 Twitter Follow Button and Facebook subscribe buttons

Of course, strictly no wordpress plugins, the Twitter follow button and Facebook subscribe button are two of the most indispensable things for bloggers still though I believe.

Although mentioning the two buttons is quite an obvious tip for many, as they are quite well known, there are still a lot of blogs, who don’t make use of them. Both can easily be implemented by copy and pasting the code snippet into a sidebar text widget on your blog.

Best part: What I like best about the two buttons is that the process of following or subscribing is so seamless and doesn’t cause the reader to leave the page.



#8 All in one SEO Pack – The only SEO plugin you will need:

Although there exist a ton of great SEO solution out there, one of the most reliable and well maintained plugins is the “All in one SEO Pack”. Especially if you aren’t too familiar with any SEO tactics, this plugin makes it dead simple to understand the most important ones.

The plugin automatically generates Meta tags, optimizes your post titles for search engines and helps you to detect and avoid duplicate content. Even if you have very little SEO knowledge, this plugin will be of great help for you.

Best part: A goodie to mention from this plugin is that it enables you to manually include META tags (title, description and keywords) for each page and post on your site.



#9 Social Metrics – Track how well your posts perform on Social Networks

Another handy solution every blogger should know about is a plugin called Social Metrics. It gives you a slick dashboard inside your WordPress interface, and allows you to track and compare how well each of your posts perform on Social Media.

By being able to track each of your posts in comparision to each other, I found that I could focus a lot better on improving my content. It is also interesting to see, that some posts perform better on different social networks.

Best part: What I like best about Social Metrics is that there is no setup involved for you and you can start tracking seconds after you install the plugin.



#10 Social Media Widget – Display all your Social profiles in one place:

A lot of the times, you might want to display larger amount of your different Social Media profiles, especially as Pinterest and others are being added to the mix and official buttons aren’t available yet.

With the super easy to handle Social Media widget, you will be able to do exactly that and display any Social Networking profile you can think of.

Best part: What is super handy with this plugin, is that you are even able to create your own icons of Social Media accounts and personalize the look and feel much more.

Those are the 10 most indispensable WordPress plugins for 2012 I believe. Each of them has definitely given my blog a huge boost. I hope some of them are helpful for you too. Which plugin is your favorite of the above?



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