New clients, stretched staff and looming deadlines are all part and parcel of digital marketing. Of course, you want your business to grow quickly – who doesn’t? – but, if you’re not careful things can get on top of you rather rapidly.

Start-ups often fail to grasp the full value of online marketing because of many factors, such as not fully understanding the relevance of content, visual media, social media, and paid search. But start-ups are also stretched for time and resource, an issue that can be equally damaging.

So in the name of increasing efficiency and doing more with less. Here are some useful tools digital marketers can use to give their business a boost.

1.     Google Drive

An obvious choice, but a relevant one: Google Drive allows the digital marketer to share, store, and back-up any file safely and securely. If fact, Google Drive practically epitomises the word 'organisation'. Its features include:

Storage Plan

Working in conjunction with Google and Gmail, the basic storage plan comes completely free (15GB). So, any important emails or documents you receive, can be stored in easy-access folders and can be shared with the relevant people in your company. For example, if you are pitching for a new client, you can share a doc with anyone you want in your team – allowing them to contribute, at any time, whilst the doc is safely stored in one place.

Apps

Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and Drawings all come with Google Drive free of charge. These will allow you to easily create whatever piece of content you need for a particular client, or any housekeeping you might need to do. For example, you can create a monthly spreadsheet for your company’s budget.

Through sharing it, the different teams in your company will be able to see how much they can work with in terms of, for example, buying photos, freelancing articles to writers, or how much budget to put behind a campaign.

Having all this information safely stored in one place will create a sense of cohesion and organisation within the company, allowing for optimum efficiency for multiple aspects of your company: documents on clients, spreadsheets on outreach links, and pitches are just a few examples.

2.     Slack

Slack refers to itself as ‘team communication for the 21st century’. It’s a real-time messaging service that lets you and your team organise your communication channels in relation to particular topics or clients, direct messages to colleagues, and private groups for sensitive information – no one else can see these.

However, it’s not just a messaging service, you can sync this up to your Google Drive account and automatically share those all-important documents easily and quickly. It provides a more organised method of communication than email does, as each shared file can be shared into the relevant channel – not just into your email inbox.

It’s not just Google Drive you can link up to, all your social media accounts can be linked to as well – effectively all your communication channels that you use internally and externally will be all in a single, sharable place, in one easy-to-use service: that is efficiency.

Free clod software can help your marketing plans come together

3.     Trello

Trello is a visual tool that is, essentially, a project management service. Whereas Slack is used for direct communication, Trello helps you with all the ‘nitty-gritty’ information that you’re most likely to forget.

You create what’s called a ‘Trello Board’, from which you breakdown projects for different clients to include: deadlines, attachments, pictures, a ‘what needs to be done’, or whatever it is you need reminding of.

It organises exactly when and what you need to do for individual projects. This allows the manager to see what their team are doing as well, helping them to keep a close eye on things without having to directly ask the staff.

4.     YesWare/Sidekick

YesWare and Sidekick do the same thing: email-tracking. This is such an incredibly valuable tool that once you get it, you’ll wonder why you didn’t get it sooner. Let’s say, for example, you are doing an outreach campaign for a client – an important aspect of digital marketing – you can place trackers on all the emails you send which notify you when the recipient of the email opens it, how many times they open it, and whether or not they have read it.

Not only will this inform you of when to send a follow-up email, should they fail to respond after opening your initial email, but it can also inform you if they are interested at a later date: opening, for example, an email that contains a pitch a few months after you sent it could highlight a renewed interest in your company.

By following this up with a timely email may prompt them to respond, as you may be now what they’re after. You would not have known this if you didn’t have an email tracking service and, as a result, maybe lose out on potential new business – email is all about timing.

5.     Harvest

Harvest is a time-tracking software that simplifies employee timesheets and billing. From a managers perspective, this information in incredibly valuable to have all in one, easy-to-read, place.

It informs them of how many hours their staff are working on a certain client – this is important should you be on a monthly retainer that includes a number of billable hours you work– and can also create reports on project budgets, incomes, invoices, and enterprise-level analytics. These can all be customised and exported into an Excel spreadsheet, and emailed to a client extremely quickly.

It essentially logs all the information you need in regards to your companies budget, in every aspect: salaries, retainers, expenses, invoices – everything you need in one place.