20 Need-to-Know Life Hacks for Marketers – TrackMaven

20 Need-to-Know Life Hacks for Marketers

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Marketers lead busy lives. We are always on the lookout for opportunities for our brand, running to and from conferences, and striving to stay ahead of new technologies, tools, and platforms. Luckily, there are some key life hacks for marketers that can help make our challenging jobs a little bit easier.

Organize your inbox. Staying on top of the latest marketing news and developments is part of a marketer’s job. While email newsletters, alerts, and listservs are a great way to have information delivered to you, the sheer number of emails can be overwhelming, making for a chaotic inbox which may cause you to miss crucial notes from your team. Feedly is one tool that lets you organize your subscriptions into collections, so all of the incoming information you receive is in one place.

Find a social media management tool that works for you. I like management tools that provide shortcuts to make repetitive tasks easier. The more little steps you can skip, the more time you save! For example, Sprout Social lets you schedule one tweet for as many days as you would like over the space of several months. This also comes in handy when you need to make a change to a tweet you have scheduled at several different times. Instead of going back and changing each instance, you can can make all of the necessary changes in one place and they will automatically populate over all of the scheduled instances of that tweet.

Marketing Life Hacks: Sprout Social

Auto-schedule your social media posts. Many social media management tools offer queue features to automatically schedule posts for optimal times, according to your audience’s activity. Buffer, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social are just a few tools that offer this time-saving service.

Automate your social media responses, when appropriate. For new follows, direct shares of your blog content, and anything else you find yourself typing the same reply to over and over again on Twitter, try to automate responses. For example, Product Hunt automatically sends a tweet to brands when they receive 100 upvotes on the Product Hunt website.

Organize the login information for your apps. Remembering the login information for every marketing tool and platform your team uses can be a hassle. Use a tool like LastPass to organize all of the passwords to your apps, and share changes with your team.

Encourage communication and collaboration. Use an interoffice messaging tool to keep your team in sync, and to motivate them toward their goals. Our team uses Slack to update each other on projects, ask questions, and share marketing news.

Easily confirm contact information. When doing outreach, finding contact information can take a lot of time and effort. Rapportive is an app that plugs into your Gmail, and displays the LinkedIn profile information for any email that’s connected to a LinkedIn account. It allows you to easily test most emails, so you can make sure you’re contacting the right person.

Marketing Life Hacks: Rapportive

Buy a portable charger. Choose one that’s small and light, with a USB plugin. You’ll never have to worry about your phone running out of juice in the middle of a call or live-tweeting session.

Keep your team outcome oriented by displaying goals. Post your marketing metrics on a large board or screen for your team to follow. Something like Gecko Board can make your metrics attractive and informative.

Use a note taking app that syncs between your phone and desktop. You’ll never be without important information. Workflowy or Evernote are great choices, but there are many tools to pick from, so try a couple out to find out which one fits your personal preferences.

Keep device cords organized. Have extra rubber bands or twisty ties on hand to organize the cords connecting your devices. Nothing is more frustrating in the middle of a stressful day than reaching into a drawer and pulling out a mess of wires, along with everything else.

Duct tape is always handy. I use an old gift or membership card (something stiff) and wrap some duct tape around it a few times, then stick it in my wallet. This hack has saved me and my colleagues on more than one occasion.

Use a stylus for Snapchat. If your brand uses Snapchat, buy a few extra styluses so you don’t have to worry about losing them, or make your own. Writing and drawing is a lot easier using a stylus than using your finger.

Marketing Life Hacks: Stylus

Always keep an extra couple of bandaids in your wallet. Even if you don’t need them, paper cuts are inevitable, and being able to offer one at the opportune time can give you an instant best friend.

Emergency wardrobe fiascos are no joke. Save the sowing kit from your last hotel stay and keep it in your purse or laptop bag. It’s saved me a couple of times, as well as a speaker I worked with, whose skirt split shortly before she needed to go on stage.

Keep a multi-tool handy for events. For events, buy a small multi-tool (I have a Leatherman) and keep it in your bag. You’ll use it for a dozen different setup tasks before the day is through. Just be careful about where you bring it if the tools includes a knife — you might end up losing it if you have to go through a security check.

Marketing Life Hacks: Multi-tool

Always have a couple of pens and a small notebook in your bag. You never know when your devices will give you trouble. You could even go the extra mile and buy yourself a Fisher Space Pen so you’re even covered in zero gravity!

Use the Yoast plugin for a quick SEO check, if you use WordPress for your website. It uses a simple color code system to tell you how to improve SEO for a web page. Red is a strong recommendation, yellow is a suggestion, and green means you’re good to go!

Customize reports in Google Analytics. Create customizable reports in Google Analytics to access the information you need quickly, and share them with your team.

Save time spent on digging through data. And, of course, let TrackMaven take care of digging through all the content and analytics for you and your competitors. It’ll free up your team to make smarter (and more creative) marketing decisions, without drowning in data!

Want to learn more about TrackMaven? Request a demo today!

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