22 November 2021

What our Social and Digital Marketing Agency is Thankful for This Year…

To quote that Coca-Cola ad, ‘Holidays are Coming’ – and while those of us here in the UK have to wait all the way until December now, America is currently gearing up for the feast of food and football that is Thanksgiving. At first glance it may seem odd for the Seek Social team to recognise this, but Manchester’s top social and digital marketing agency does actually have fairly close ties to the U.S.. We have clients in America of course, but there’s also our office in Boston (Massachusetts, not Lincolnshire), and in addition to their colleagues currently based across the pond, a couple of our UK team have also lived and worked in America for extended periods of time.

Of course, Thanksgiving has developed a number of extra traditions over the years, but it’s never lost it’s true ‘raison d’etre’, and indeed, gathering around a table and stating what you’re thankful for in your life is a tradition still observed today. That got our social and digital marketing professionals thinking about what we’re thankful for in our professional lives – those little tools that make life easier, and help us to do what we do to the high standards that we expect of ourselves.

In the spirit of the holidays then, in today’s blog we’re going to share some of those social and digital marketing tools with you, so that you can better understand just what help is out there, and avoid missing out on something that could really help your business take a step forward. Are you ready? Then let’s get started!

Analytics Tools

Here at Manchester’s best social and digital marketing agency we’re big believers in data. All of our work is data driven, since dealing with data is the only way to know for sure that you’re dealing with the reality of a situation. In order to take that approach however, you obviously need to have a resource that you get your data from. Seek Social have several different sources of data at our disposal – the ones we’ve identified below are simply those that we make use of most often, and they should be useful to most social and digital marketing projects.

Each of these sources will be more or less important depending on the nature of the project we’re taking on and it’s goals – but you can rest assured that our team know which sources and metrics will be important to a given project, and will listen to the data accordingly in order to bring you social and digital marketing success!

Google Analytics

When it comes to data acquisition for social and digital marketing (or anything web-related for that matter), Google Analytics should be your go-to tool. Home to a wealth of different metrics and reports that will tell you almost everything you could ever want to know about how visitors use and navigate around your website, of all of the tools mentioned in todays blog this is probably the most invaluable for our team. Read our Google Analytics guide to set up a GA account for your website.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console really comes into it’s own for SEO and online sales-based projects. At first glance it could be difficult to tell what the difference is between this and Google Analytics, but as our social and digital marketing professionals can tell you, the difference (in a nutshell) is as follows: Where Google Analytics shows you what people do on your site, Google Search Console shows you why you rank where you do on their results pages, and (if you know how to read the data) what you can do to improve that ranking.

SEO Client Report

Here at Seek Social, we love SEOClientReport. While it doesn’t actually provide any data of its own, it does collect data from a range of different places across the internet (including Google Analytics and Google Search Console) and displays it in one central location. This makes it easier for our team to see all of the data points they need to see without having to navigate across several different places on the internet (meaning we can work quicker), while also letting us put together comprehensive, professional-looking reports for our clients… Reports that show them all the key points that they need to be aware of, and do it in an easy to understand way.

Content Creation & Scheduling Tools

Content Curation Tools

One of the first things that we stress to clients when they come to us for social and digital marketing services, is the importance of content. As you may have heard us say before in previous blogs, ‘content is king’ in this industry, so the more quality content you can make use of, the better. Content curation tools like PRLog, Feedly and Medium are a great way to find quality content that’s relevant to your digital marketing niche – and while we’d never defend plagiarism, the content that these tools bring to your attention is great to link out to in a social media post, or to read for inspiration before you start writing on a similar topic.

Scheduling Tools

The best social media content in the world can’t help you if you forget to post it – but scheduling tools can take that worry away for you! Many social media platforms have their own native scheduling facility these days, but as our social and digital marketing professionals can tell you, if you look around online you’ll find tools that go one step beyond this – allowing you to schedule multiple platforms via the same interface, schedule posts to go out on multiple platforms, and plenty more besides. These tools really do save our social media team a lot of time, and help us ensure that our social media platforms are never without a fresh post!

Graphic Design Tools & Resources

Canva

Here at Seek Social our graphic designers make great use of Photoshop – it’s an awesome tool offering seemingly endless possibilities. However, over the course of the past couple of years this social and digital marketing agency has also learned the real value of online design platforms like Canva – which let our designers put together a great looking design with a faster turnaround than is usually possible using Photoshop. Just as having access to restaurant-quality ingredients doesn’t make anyone a chef, be warned that these platforms can’t turn anyone into a designer overnight – but in the right hands, Canva is a great tool to turn to when you need top-quality visuals without the wait!

Stock Photo Resources

Text without images is proven to be less effective as a marketing tool than text and pictures working together, so any social and digital marketing professional worth their salt should be telling you that you do need to add images to your website, your content and your marketing materials. However, images are intellectual property, and that means you can’t just use whatever images you feel look best – unless you have permission to use that intellectual property, you need to stick to free ‘stock’ images. Google image searches do return copyrighted images, so how can you ensure that the images you’re using aren’t affected by this? Simple – you turn to the many dedicated ‘stock photo’ sites on the internet – without which our top-quality content wouldn’t look nearly as good as it does!

Online Image Resizing Tools

The issue with things like stock images however, is that they aren’t created to meet the specific needs of your project – and one of the more common issues that this raises is images being the wrong size to fit the space allocated to them. Again, you could use Photoshop to fix this, but resizing an image is quite a simple process that doesn’t require all of Photoshop’s resources to complete successfully. For that reason, our social and digital marketing professionals prefer to turn to one of the various online image resizing tools that you can find with a quick Google search, to get the job done quickly and easily!

Want to Learn More About These Tools, and how They can Help you Succeed?

No problem – here at the home of top-quality social and digital marketing in the North West of England, we’re always happy to share our knowledge and spread the word about good digital marketing practice – so get in touch via LinkedIn or via our contact us page to find out more, and in the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving!