ONLINE TOOLS BUSINESSES CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT

BY HEIDI MCIVOR ALLEN

To stand out from competitors and show consumers your business is professional, up to date, and on top of daily tasks, these recommended tools help maintain and grow your business and manage your team successfully. The team of McIvor Marketing professionals is here to consult and partner with you to implement the tools that will bring immediate value.

“When you change one thing, you have the ability to change EVERYTHING.”

ELEMENTOR IN WORDPRESS

If you are looking to create a simple, yet professional website, WordPress is the website building platform for you. This site allows users to create landing pages, blogs, services pages, resource pages, contact us pages, eCommerce and more. There are also thousands of available plugins you can upload – Elementor is the McIvor Marketing team’s favorite plugin. Elementor is the ultimate page builder tool with thousands of premade pages, templates, and blocks. It includes tons of fancy features, styles, and functions to help your website look professional and stand out from competitors.

CANVA

Canva is the ultimate creation tool. If you don’t have experience or funding to create your own graphics for social media banners, marketing flyers, blog graphics, or social media images, then Canva is your one-stop shop destination. Canva provides users with pre-formatted graphics, templates, stock photos, fonts, and more – features that give your business the appearance that you have a professional graphic designer on your team. Canva offers a free version and a pro version for a small monthly fee.

BUFFER

Buffer allows users to plan, schedule, and publish social media content for any platform: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Pinterest. Users can access all accounts from one Dashboard; connecting them to Buffer is super simple. Posts can be scheduled as far in advance as you would like. Buffer not only helps users draft posts, but you can also coordinate with your team and orchestrate your social media marketing campaigns.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Google Analytics is one of the most used and preferred web analytics tools in the market. This feature-packed tool guides businesses to do faster and smarter marketing for free. It helps businesses understand visitors, identify the reason behind their visits, see the pages they view, how much time they spend on your website, and track whether they are converting or not.

SEMRUSH

SEMrush is a SEO tool you don’t want to live without to collect valuable information about your online presence. Users can use SEMrush to analyze traffic and keywords, statistics backlinks, and display advertising performance. One of the most popular features of SEMrush is the Domain vs Domain analysis that allows you to easily compare your website and keywords you are ranking for with your competitors.

CONSTANT CONTACT

Believe it or not, email marketing is still one of the most effective marketing channels, and Constant Contact is the tool McIvor Marketing recommends. With Constant Contact, businesses control when emails are sent, with the ability to schedule them in advance and a single landing page to view all campaigns in one place. Users can also discover more information about audience dynamics and send our newsletters, press releases, and more.

DROPBOX

Dropbox is a secure tool for backing up files onto the cloud and can be easily shared with everyone on your team – even those outside your team anywhere in the world who may need access to certain files.

SLACK

Slack is a highly effective and relatively new communication tool. Slack can make communication within your business a lot easier by providing a chat feature for everyone on your team. Discussions can be organized by topic, project, or team member, and includes the ability to send direct messages, group messages, and share files. Slack also integrates with several tools you’re already using so you can receive real time notifications from Twitter, Dropbox, Google Drive, or Zendesk.

TEAMWORK

Teamwork is the organizational project manager application for your team and the tasks that you must work on. Users can add clients, track employee’s hours, add to-do lists, check off what tasks have been completed, and more. Teamwork allows all team members to have insight on where other team members are in the task process and tracks what still needs to be done. In short, it’s the tool that helps in-house and remote teams improve collaboration, visibility, accountability, and ultimately results.

GOOGLE APPS

Google offers a large collection of tools that are essential for each and every business no matter how big or how small. Google Apps for work includes Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Meeting, and Hangouts. With these tools you can stay organized, schedule events, collaborate with team members, and communicate with anyone in the world.

ZOOM

If your team isn’t using Google Meets for video conferencing, the most universally known video conferencing tool is Zoom. Zoom allows users to connect with everyone on the team, even if they are in separate locations. It is great for networking, team or client meetings, and more. Users have the ability to share their screen to demonstrate a task they’re working on or show a meeting agenda for all to see.

GRAMMARLY

Grammarly is a simple and useful tool that helps to ensure your writing quality is the highest possible. The online grammar checker scans your writing document or website text for all types of mistakes – from typos to sentence structure problems and beyond. Grammarly can be used when creating landing pages, blog posts, emails, and also scales collateral to enhance your writing, keeping your brand voice consistent through all channels.

HUBSPOT

HubSpot is one of the most popular marketing tools that provides an all-in-one marketing software. This tool covers everything from social media, email marketing, marketing automation, content management, and reports. The HubSpot blog is also a fantastic tool full of advice and tips on improving inbound marketing campaigns.

FLIPPINGBOOK

If you want to create mobile-friendly digital content easily and quickly, then Flipping Book is exactly what you need. It helps users make interactive brochures, eBooks, catalogs, and magazines with a nice page-flip effect and a professional look. You can also upload videos, GIFs, pop-up images, and outbound links, creating even more engaging content for your customers. There is a privacy settings feature for documents – a shareable link only available to recipients to a protected embed that only works within your website. Users can also customize digital documents with business logos, custom backgrounds, and colors to stay brand consistent.

ADOBE INDESIGN

Adobe InDesign CC is professional-level design software to create high quality content, and is the most widely used tool for creating an assortment of documents. Adobe InDesign is the first choice for many marketers, designers, and publishers. Providing professional layout and typesetting tools, create multi column pages that feature stylish typography and graphics, images, and tables. Documents can be shared and printed with just a few clicks.

TRADEMARKIA

Instead of searching for hours trying to find out which domains, logos, or patents have already been claimed, you can use Trademarkia to find information accurately and quickly all in one location. Trademarkia saves you time and potential legal problems.

The marketing professionals at McIvor Marketing are extensively trained and experienced on how to utilize these tools to up level your business, increasing ROI, customer engagement, sales, and more. Reach out to us today for a consultation on how we can partner with you!

What Business Services Does McIvor Marketing Offer?

We are so glad you asked! From setups to start-ups, to businesses in growth and transformation, McIvor Marketing specializes in a variety of services to meet your needs. Our Phoenix based digital marketing agency can help with website design & development, logo design, branding, off-line marketing design and strategy, paid search management, social media management, email marketing, display advertising and more!

Not ready to dive into hiring a full-time marketing director? Maybe you’re just curious about how your marketing is performing. We can help you set up trackable ways to measure your marketing ROI with a project-based digital audit to gauge current performance. We can also help you get your social media advertising portals set up. We also offer training on Google Analytics, Facebook Business Manager, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Canva, as well as how to plan content and brainstorm ideas to help you grow through research.

Check out our full list of services and reach out with any questions.

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