One of the perks of our job is that no two days are ever the same. We might be spending much of our day at a desk, visiting clients for regular check in meetings, supervising a video shoot, or coordinating press at an event.
Over the years, we’ve developed a toolkit to keep things running smoothly. These tools shift from time to time, as technology changes and our needs expand, but here are some of the tools that are currently in our belt:
Asana: Communication & task tracking
As we’ve all become intimately familiar with while working remotely, it’s important to keep teams organized and on task, even if they’re not in the same space. We’re longtime users of Asana, a program that allows team members to collaborate on projects, assign tasks to each other, and house all information in one place. Simply put, if the project and tasks aren’t in Asana, they may as well not exist. We also use Google Drive and Dropbox for client file sharing and document storage.
Meltwater: Media outreach
We know that as the media landscape continues to evolve, journalists move around or change beats. As a PR firm, we spend time researching the best journalists by reading, listening and watching media coverage. When it’s time to build a wide reaching list of journalists or outlets that cover your industry, media databases like Cision and Meltwater can be crucial in widening your reach. In addition to building media lists, they also offer distribution services that allow you to track who has opened your press release.
Adobe & Canva: Graphic design
For big creative projects, we have relationships with some amazing designers that we like to collaborate with. For the smaller tasks, we flex our own creative skills with programs like Canva or Adobe Creative Suite. Canva is our go-to for simple email headers, social media images, and many other in house projects and it’s a bonus that it’s a user-friendly tool for clients to make their own simple or time-sensitive edits.
Swydo & Google Analytics: Digital analytics
We can put all the effort we want into marketing and PR, but without a way to measure our efforts, our work doesn’t seem very meaningful. In today’s world, certain analytics are more trackable than ever as we shift to more digital platforms. It’s never been easier to see just how many people viewed your social media post, clicked your online ad, or tuned into your podcast.
To track online marketing, we use Swydo, which allows us to create comprehensive reports that include exactly the information our clients are interested in on their online campaigns.
Google Analytics can’t be beat when it comes to tracking all things pertaining to your website.
PR has always been a tricky thing to measure. There are various programs like Cision, Meltwater, and CoverageBook that can search for media mentions and give feedback on data points including audience size and AVE (ad value equivalent) in each article that mentions your keyword (or, likely, client name).
Freshbooks & Bench: Accounting
If you’re a business that needs to bill your clients, you’re going to need a way to create invoices and accept payments. In our case, we use FreshBooks for this task. It also doubles as a time tracker (to keep us on task and update our clients on where we’ve been focusing). We recently made the move to Bench for bookkeeping, which is a huge time saver.
Fluent IMC is a Maine marketing agency specializing in integrated marketing communications. Our expertise ranges from brand strategy and marketing planning to digital marketing and online advertising to public relations and communications.
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