As a small business, Curve deeply understands the importance of keeping costs down. There are hundreds of different paid marketing platforms out there, from social media feeds to brand analytics platforms. How do you know which ones are worth the money?
Here are three paid marketing tools that we highly recommend to any marketers, social media managers, or entrepreneurs looking to build their online profile.
Note that Curve Communications is not affiliated with any of these companies. We just love them!
If you’re using an email newsletter to connect with your fans, how confident are you that your emails are showing up properly? This is a huge problem especially if your email newsletters are designed from scratch in HTML, but even pre-made templates might not be perfect on every single platform.
Litmus takes the guesswork out of it for you. You can send a preview email from your email-marketing platform like Constant Contact or Mailchimp to a special email address provided by Litmus. Litmus will then display your email on several dozen different browsers and devices, from iPhones to Outlook to Gmail.
Why is it worth your money?
The time and labour cost it would take to manually send these emails to different devices would be tremendous, especially if you’re managing several emails a week. Litmus cuts this process down to a single streamlined task, and provides a lot of other value-added services like HTML assistance, live editors, and useful webinars.
While the price is still steep, Litmus is invaluable if email marketing is a major part of your marketing plan.
Price: Plans start at $79/month, free 7-day trial available
Edgar is a brand new social media automation platform. So new, in fact, that you have to request an invitation to be a part of it, but it’s definitely worth the extra effort. Edgar is all about helping you share evergreen content: articles and blog posts that can be posted year-round and aren’t time sensitive.
Let’s say you have a sale you want to promote twice a week. Normally, you would have to copy and paste the text of the tweet and manually schedule it every week.
However, if you used Edgar, you can schedule any promotional tweets to go out on Monday and Wednesday at noon. Next, you just write a couple of tweets (let’s say five) about your sale and label them as promotional. Edgar will then automatically rotate through the five promotional tweets without your input. If you want to add more tweets to the queue, change the times, or remove older tweets, this can be easily done through the dashboard.
Why is it worth your money?
First and foremost, Edgar helps you save an incredible amount of time. Manually scheduling hundreds (or if you’re like us, thousands) of tweets a month for different clients and accounts eats up a tremendous amount of time. We still look for great articles to share on our Twitter feed every day, but the process has been greatly simplified due to Edgar.
Price: $49/month
When it comes to having full control over all your different social media accounts, Hootsuite is the undisputed champion. While Edgar is fantastic for helping you schedule your posts, Hootsuite does all that (although it requires more manual tweaking), and it helps you monitor and track hashtags, mentions, DMs, and anything else you need to be a social media superstar.
In Hootsuite, each account has its own page, and each page has a customizable feed so you can focus on what’s important. Have an account that’s used primarily for tweeting out marketing content? You can prioritize your scheduled tweets and anyone using #Marketing (or any other hashtag) on your feed.
What about a tech support account that focuses on responding to customer questions? You can prioritize Direct Messages and Mentions to make sure you can easily monitor anyone trying to contact you.
Why is it worth your money?
Hootsuite is invaluable for any company that has to manage (and track) social media accounts across different departments and product lines.
Hootsuite isn’t limited to just Twitter. Hootsuite is also compatible with LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, Foursquare, WordPress and Mixi. If you’re looking for one social media tool for your business, we strongly recommend using Hootsuite Pro.
Price: From $8.99/month for a Pro plan. A free user has limited functionality, with only two social media networks and very basic post scheduling.
Have any other paid platforms you love using? Continue the conversation below.
Three Paid Marketing Tools That Are Worth Every Penny
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