Top 10 apps Social Media Marketing Agency Owners use to Grow their Digital Marketing Business.

If you're a business owner, a digital marketer, a social media marketing agency owner or even an entrepreneur that has an online business, you've probably used a myriad of different apps to help with content creation, schedule content and create Facebook ads, for your personal business and your clients. At Blue Media Online, we also use multiple different tools which help us as digital marketers, deliver high quality results for our clients. Here we want to share with you the name of each tool, the benefits of using it and how to use it. *These tools are not listed in order of importance or priority*.

Canva: Is a great application to let your imagination go free. It allows you to create some of the best creative, colorful content for any platform. You can search for templates for social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin. You also can create content for offline purposes such as creating your own business card, billboard and posters. For content marketers, it's a dream platform.

The fun part is choosing templates, changing the images, the colors, adding your own watermark, adding effects, to create your ads or social media content. Make sure you are using every feature to the best of its ability by upgrading to the Pro version (which is only $10 per month), to unlock more images, designs and great templates. I've seen professional marketing campaigns built in Canva as well as professional web designs. If you have a marketing team, you can create different folders for all your different projects. It's a full service social media platform for content creation.

Buffer: Is a scheduling and analytics platforms. You can sync all your social media platforms for direct posting (including Instagram) and track how well your content is performing. Personally, I recommend creating a batch of content (creating 2 weeks to a month worth of content in one sitting), and then uploading it all so you can just set it and forget it. You can then come back to analyze which posts performed better and what type of content you should be focusing on at different times and days. It's great for building your content marketing strategy, especially if you're short in time. Also, before launching a post, it allows you to target by geolocations, meaning if you have a picture you took in Alaska, you can tag the place you visited.

Don't forget you can include your hashtags in the copy itself and it has a great preview mode where you can view your content before posting it. They have a free plan, but the next one up is $15 per month and you can connect up to 8 social media profiles. It really is a great tool to have in your toolbox.

Semrush: This is one of my personal favorites for market research. Next to Majestic, if you're looking to improve your SEO for your website, funnel or landing page, you should try Semrush. The software divides the content into different tabs, such as organic research, paid research, keyword optimization, backlinks, competitor research, etc. This gives you a huge advantage when searching for key keywords that you want to rank for.

Allowing you to create your digital marketing strategy around keywords that will bring your SEO up and become discovered by the Google algorithm.

If you have products or services you're looking to promote or sell, this tool allows you to take a deep dive into what are some of the keywords, phrases, and content you need to include in your funnel. By checking your organic SEO dashboard, you'll be able to see what your competitors are doing that's working and not working. Imagine you could research all the keywords that will bring you lots of traffic if you included them in your website? Image the difference it would make if you included YouTube videos in your funnel that would hit your target audience? Your online presence would skyrocket! With the right strategy in place, you can rank your page in the first page of Google.

Clickfunnels: One of the best, if not the best platform, to create your online page is Clickfunnels. The owner, Russell Brunson, is the CEO and marketing genius behind such great website. Social media marketing companies and digital marketers all together, love to use his software because of its ease of use, capabilities, and delivers much better results compared to a traditional website.

When you think of a traditional website, you have a site full of a lot of useless information that just takes a lot of space and confuses your visitor. You want people to go to your site and take an action, and most website don't do that. With Clickfunnels you are walking people through a customer experience like no other. Conversion rates are close to non-existent in websites, but by creating a clear message with a funnel, your prospect is much better informed and can take the appropriate action to do business with you.

Plus, with your subscription, you get a free domain. As one of the best emerging platforms to build landing pages, websites, or funnels, I would highly recommend clickfunnels.

Facebook ads manager: The Facebook ads manager is the backend of Facebook where you get to create and run your Facebook ads, use analytics, performs market research and brand your business. The business manager has various purposes. One, you can perform some market research and check who your competitors are, their social media presence, the age, gender, demographic, and interest of your ideal customer, and tailor your ads with the information you obtained. This is the Audience Insights tab.

Second, you can install the Facebook Pixel directly into your website and all marketing channels. This allows you to gather data and analyze the type of audience that's visiting your website or landing page. With the pixel in place, you can also create retargeting campaigns throughout digital channels, such as Instagram and Facebook. It's a great tool to have for digital marketing planning.

Third, you can go into the analytics section and study your ads performance so you can see what works and what isn't, swap the ads, make a new creative and keep testing until you find an ad that resonates with your audience.

The Facebook business manager is free to use. All you need is a Facebook account to get started.

Aweber: Is one of the very best email marketing automation tools. If you have an online business, you need an email software to build your own email list and send out recurrent email campaigns. Aweber is one of the many tools that allows you to collect information from your customers or prospects, once they decide to opt-in to your list and become a member of your community. Either you collect emails because you want to share your weekly blog posts, news in your industry or because someone wants a service or product you have to offer.

This serves as a direct communication channel where you can send your prospects future promotions, offers and build good quality relationships with them. You can create different email lists and different sequences to divide your list based on the products and services you're offering. If you don't have an email marketing tool, definitely check out Aweber.

Typorama: A mobile tool and personal favorite I use almost every day. If you have an iPhone, you can find this handy tool in the app store. Typorama is an app where you add text to an image. This is perfect for Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. They have lots of different text styles and editing capabilities, as well as a free image stock. When offering our different social media marketing services, we use this tool as well to create beautiful, captivating posts. You can create posts for all the other social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter, etc). And the best part is you can use it on the go since it's for mobile.

Buzzsumo: Allows you to search for the best marketing content in any niche. Either you want to know what posts are performing best, what your competitors are doing, what's trending in certain industries, or build on your own content, Buzzsumo is the tool to use. Some of the biggest brands in the world use it and so should you. With this tool you can create posts or write articles around what's what's popular and hot right now in your industry. Stop the guess work and get behind the data and create content that will push you forward to reach your marketing goals.

Slack: Is a collaborative work hub where you can stay in touch with your team while working in any project. It was created for content creators, messaging, collaborating, decision making and team related actions. As a digital marketer, I recommend you use it to keep in touch with your group or social media marketing agency. Specifically, to keep each other accountable and check progress in their tasks. You can share images, videos, or any type of content through the platform. Top social media agencies use it and if you have a team that shares content consistently, you should give it a try.

Animoto: Awesome unique tool to create creative videos. It's a cool way to stand out in social media with video marketing. I've also seen lots of different social media marketers use it in their own business or in their clients. You can start creating your own videos with low monthly payments of $9 per month. I hope you like it.

Lumen5: Lumen5 is a social media marketing tool used to create video content out of articles, news, website URL's and more. Just upload the domain name and Lumen5 takes care of everything else. This tool is especially useful for video news creators that want to put a message out that's different from the competition. It has a wide variety of content to choose from as well as a library to use all Getty images and content for your personal use.

I find it particularly useful for Physicians, Plastic Surgeons, Real Estate, Law Firms, Restaurants, etc that want to get the word out about particular news or services they're offering.

It's also compatible for mobile. Mobile marketing is another audience great to target using these tools since the digital marketing space seems to be moving from desktop to smartphones. It's much easier to consume content on the go than having to sit down and go into your desktop to watch what's going in the world. Make sure you're advertising through all the marketing channels, and that includes mobile.

This concludes our list of the top 10 apps social media marketing agency owners use to grow their clients digital marketing business or their own business. From editing, to content creation, you can try them all and choose the one's you like the most. There are much more tools out there, but I believe these are some of the best ones and the one's I've seen people use the most.

If you enjoy any of them, I'd love to hear your feedback.

Feel free to email me at josh@bluemediaonline or just visit my website for more info.

If you're interested in working with our team, feel free to send me an email to further discuss your marketing goals.

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