Primary Times - the definitive what’s on and where to go family guide of activities and events for children of primary school age. Things to do with your kids during the school holidays including arts and craft activities, music and theatre for children, parties, competitions, days out, and family attractions along with term time drama schools, dance classes, after school clubs and sports activities. Things to do at a place near you!
Marketing Tips | September
Tip 9 - Use the awesome marketing tools out there
There are some fantastic (and many are free) tools that will help you to ace your marketing – Mailchimp for email campaigns, Grammarly to ensure your communications are error-free and Hootsuite to manage social media activity.
Our favourite marketing tools
The modern marketer’s job isn’t easy – you need to be part creative whizz, part data scientist and part copywriter-extraordinaire. But, there are some amazing tools out there to make your life easier.
These are some of our favourites. It’s worth noting that some of these require a paid subscription and some have free versions. Our advice is to take advantage of the trial period and see how you get on.
Grammarly
This is a brilliant tool to help you with your written content. It’s an online spelling and grammar checker, but it goes beyond the basic spell and grammar checker that Word gives you. It goes into the finer points of grammar, and let’s face it, if you’re anything like me, those school grammar lessons were a long time ago!
So if you don’t know a split infinitive from a compound sentence, then Grammarly is brilliant.
You also get a weekly email with insights into the common mistakes you are making to help you improve your writing style. You get stats as to how much more productive you were than other Grammarly users, or how many more unique words you used each week. It’s a dash of useful insight along with a spoonful of joy as you realise you’ve been 80% more accurate than other users!
Another useful aspect of Grammarly is that it has a plagiarism checker. This is very useful if people are submitting content to you, as Google can penalise websites that use duplicate content so you really want to avoid that at all costs.
Canva
Moving from words to images, Canva is a brilliant and affordable tool to help you create graphics. It’s ideal if you don’t have strong design skills or the budget to hire a designer.
It has a simple and intuitive user interface. You can select the type of graphic you need (for example a poster, a Twitter card, an infographic or a presentation) and it will automatically give you a template with the correct sizes. You can then use the simple drag and drop to build your design. You don’t need to have strong design skills to create a nice looking graphic.
You can then save your designs and export them in the format you need. It’s brilliant if you want to run a campaign across print and social, you can take your print design and apply the same theme to create graphics for each social media platform. It really does take the headache out of design! And I know this is a bit of a plug, but if you don’t feel comfortable with design, our in-house design team can design your advert for you at no cost.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite enables you to manage all your social media accounts in one place. It makes it easy to see all your social media activity in one place.
There are some elements of Hootsuite that we find particularly useful. That may be surprising as we’re predominantly a print brand, but we use Hootsuite to track social mentions of Primary Times and to follow popular hashtags from our core audience (parents of primary children and primary teachers). This helps us to identify key topics for articles in the magazine, online and across our social profiles.
There are social media management other platforms, but we find Hootsuite easy to use and affordable.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a very well used tool, and for good reason. If email marketing is part of your armoury, Mailchimp isan easy to use and effective tool. Plus, it helps you remain GDPR compliant by managing unsubscribes within your email database.
You can do a lot with Mailchimp, from creating landing pages for email campaigns to integrating it into your website to manage email subscription lists. We love the ability to test emails and subject lines for effectiveness. This can be a very useful test to inform your print campaigns. It’s a little harder to test the effectiveness of print creative, but you can test it initially on a sample of your email database to gauge the effectiveness of your messaging.
You will need to pay for the subscription version of Mailchimp if you want to run more sophisticated testing, but the free version offers some very good testing functionality.
Surveymonkey
If you’ve ever responded to a satisfaction survey, it’s probably through Surveymonkey. It’s the most popular platform for surveys. It’s ever so easy to build a survey on SurveyMonkey and issue it to your audience. You can use all sorts of question types, from open ended questions to questions using scales. The resulting report is attractive and easy to understand.
We love SurveyMonkey as it’s a great way to quickly gain client opinions and levels of satisfaction. There’s a paid version if you need to produce more complex surveys or want the option to brand your surveys, but the free version works well for most people’s needs.
There are hundreds of tools out there, but these are some that we use regularly. What are your favourite tools? We’d love to know!