Marketers constantly tell us that while they understand the value of marketing apps, there are just too many of them. And besides, even if they do run a handful of apps, marketers find themselves bewildered when hundreds of new ones are released a few weeks later. Our opinion on the matter? It's simple: "less is more." Your team can benefit from marketing apps, but don't over-do it. Specifically, we'd like to pass along five — just five, not 25 — apps that marketers should be using.
1. Dashboard for Google Analytics — Think of Dashboards as your command center for all things Google-related. Dashboards gives you an overview of how your properties are performing by displaying summaries of different reports as widgets on a single page. With Dashboard, you can monitor many metrics at once, so you can quickly check the health of your accounts or see correlations between different reports.
2. Mention for iPhone — Want to know what people are saying about your brand? Then this app is a must-have. Mention for iPhone helps users manage their online presence by creating alerts on company name, brand, and competitors in real-time. It enables users to react accordingly, get relevant statistics, and help generate even more social media chatter. This app is a slightly different — and, to the extent it helps you manage your brand's reputation, a more preferable — alternative to something like Google Alerts. That's because Mention for iPhone has advanced filtering technology (they call it "anti-noise management") that ensures you only read the most relevant mentions.
3. Workflowly — According to their site, Workflowly is an "organizational tool that makes life easier." Haven't we heard that before? But believe it not, Workflowly is a very useful marketing app to help you make sense of your litany of lists (or, if you're like us, lists of lists.) Workflowly is simply an intuitive note-taking app that, among other things, automatically syncs between your phone, tablet, and computer, and allows you to tag and filter list items. This can be a very valuable app for your marketers who, as we all know, are constantly juggling dozens of work-related tasks on various devices.
4. iLeads — Let's say one of your salespeople is at a trade show. He meets hundreds of would-be prospects, hands out business cards and receives an equally substantial amount of business cards in return. Then what? He goes back to his hotel and tries to make sense of it all — and very rarely is it pretty. iLeads helps to solve this problem by providing a secure, cloud backup of leads that can sync to an unlimited amount of devices. Now marketers can capture leads anytime, anywhere (even without an internet connection) so none fall through the cracks.
5. Wifi Finder — Your road-weary salesperson has left his trade show with a ton of promising leads and is now driving his rental car through the outskirts of Lawrence, Kansas. Beautiful country, but just one problem: he needs to send a file ASAP and aside from the nearby Subway, there aren't many promising options for free Wifi. Enter Wifi Finder, an app that using the GPS function on your iPhone, tells users exactly where the closest Wifi hotspot is located and better yet, how to get there.
One last thing. You'll note that each of these apps serves a specific purpose or element of your inbound marketing strategy. That's intentional. After all, there's no need to run two or three apps to track your online brand and reputation; one will suffice, and if you ask us, that's Mention for iPhone. Again, less is more, and by mastering these five apps, you'll see your sales team's productivity — and dare we say it, morale — improve.
What marketing apps work well for your team? Which apps haven't worked out? Has your team responded positively to running marketing apps or did you need to "make the case," and if so, how?
