We’re quickly approaching Thanksgiving (I know, where did 2012 go?), and I’ve been spending some time reflecting on what I’m thankful for this year. As I thought back, I remembered that in January, Besa wrote a post about our Marketing New Year’s Resolutions. Uh oh, I thought to myself as I clicked back several pages on our blog… did we actually make any headway on those?
Thankfully, yes, we made progress on all of them! And I realized that we were able to tackle our biggest marketing challenges because we enlisted the help of some awesome, free tools this year. (Software for the win!) Here’s a look at the five free marketing applications I am most grateful for in 2012:
- Google Analytics: One of our goals was to be able to better analyze and track our marketing campaigns. We wanted to be able to prove that what we work on each day actually makes an impact. Even though we’ve used analytics for quite some time, this year, we were really able to dig deeper into which campaigns drove the most traffic to Capterra’s site, how engaged people were with our various marketing efforts, and whether we actually generated any leads from our campaigns. Thanks to Google Analytics, we are now able to make informed decisions about what projects to prioritize in the weeks and months ahead.
- Hootsuite: As we took a deeper dive and explored newer social channels like Pinterest and Google+ in 2012, I didn’t want our old Facebook and Twitter accounts to fall silent. Thankfully, with the help of Hootsuite, we were able to schedule posts ahead of time and manage multiple social platforms all under one roof. Also (going back to our goal to better analyze our data), we were able to track in Hootsuite which posts got the most clicks, retweets, and likes to guide our progress in social media.
- Trello: While we knew content marketing would be a big focus for Capterra this year, we were a little intimidated at the prospect of having to create content for 350 different categories of software. And, admittedly, we’re still a little daunted by this task, but we’ve definitely made progress. When we piloted our content program this summer, we used Trello to keep track of outlines, drafts, edits, and final copies of blog posts and articles for 12 different software categories. If all that had been sent over email, there’s no doubt that a lot would’ve gotten lost in the shuffle! Thanks to Trello for keeping us organized and on track.
- WordPress: One of our big plans for 2012 was to better nurture our prospects, and to do so, we went on a quest to find marketing automation software (which is not free, but also awesome and something I’m really thankful that we found). As we started our search, we realized that sharing our experience buying software could really benefit other marketers; after all, we are supposed to be the experts at this! We’d been using WordPress for a while to write this blog, but we didn’t want to flood this existing software marketing blog with antics about our search for marketing automation. Instead, we decided to start a new WordPress blog – Desperately Seeking Marketing Automation. It was free and simple to use, and most importantly, didn’t require our Tech team to constantly make tweaks and updates every time we wanted to add something to the site.
- LinkedIn Q&A: As we attempted to learn and grow our overall marketing expertise in 2012, we had a lot of questions come up along the way. We’d ask around the office for guidance, and most of the time, we were met with, “Well, you’re in marketing… what do you think would be best?” And sometimes (very rarely because Besa and I are pretty smart) we didn’t know the answer. That’s when we turned to LinkedIn. They have a free Q&A section where you can ask your peers for suggestions and recommendations! I’m very thankful for all of the helpful marketers who answered our questions throughout the year, but I’m even more thankful for LinkedIn giving us an awesome platform to help guide critical business decisions.
If only they’d had all these free marketing tools available in Plymouth in 1621, I bet the first Thanksgiving would’ve been spectacularly marketed and pretty highly-attended, don’t you agree? At least their concept of giving thanks every year stuck around long enough to help us marketing pilgrims of today! What free marketing apps are you thankful for this year?