It’s been a whirlwind of a year for Team Impulse. As always, the constantly-evolving world of digital marketing has kept us busy adapting, growing and rocking our goals.
As the awaited long Thanksgiving weekend approaches, the Impulse Creative team took some time to reflect on the tools, tricks, changes and technology we’re most thankful for this year.
So get stuffed on Tofurky, unbutton your pants, kick back on the couch and digest the list of magical marketing tools and tech we just can’t live without this holiday season.
Audrey DeMartinis, Project Manager:
Forecast by Harvest saves my time, my sanity and when I start my happy hour. I used to make Gantt charts by hand to schedule out projects for every employee. This kind of process becomes a puzzle when there are so many balls in the court. Forecast not only lets me make Gantt charts, it has separate screens to divide it by team and projects. So I can tell how many hours an employee has open and I can tell when a project is going to go over scope before it does. This helps me bring on more projects and as an agency, become more profitable.
Jeffrey Lewis, Graphic Designer:
Adobe XD is lightweight, easy to use, makes designing websites and app interfaces a breeze and allows for better efficiency in my workflow. It’s completely transformed my process and has saved a bunch of time, mostly due to its specificity. The program is built for "rapid prototyping", and its features are limited because it’s focused on designing for screens. I used to do all the same work in Photoshop which wasn't created for designing websites. Photoshop is bloated with features that can make creating and saving files really time-consuming. Plus, Adobe XD features a fairly intuitive workspace that makes duplicating and reusing elements (nav items, buttons, text blocks) across various layouts a cinch.
Danielle Rhodes, Content Marketer:
As a writer, I am thankful for anything that keeps written content a relevant and lucrative part of the marketing world. Once in awhile, something like pillar pages comes along and becomes a total game changer for us. With so much content focus being poured into video and graphics, it was sort of mind-blowing to see these 2,000 – 10,000 word web pages being hailed as the latest, greatest SEO hack. As far as writing these massive feats of web literature, I’m incredibly thankful for answerthepublic, a free tool that generates all of the search terms related to your main query. It’s an easy way to outline your pillar page with the most relevant information.
Katelyn Rhoades, Inbound Marketer:
I am thankful for HubSpot, honestly. It makes my job so much easier as an Inbound Marketer because it has every resource I need to rock at my job. The social media scheduling tool that saves me so much time each week, the blogging tool that seamlessly integrates your google doc into the publishing tool, the analytics dashboard, the sources tab, I could go on and on. Everything is so valuable in the HubSpot CRM. Oh and I also want to mention Feedly. It’s like the best website ever for coming up with great content to post for our agency and our clients.
Ryan VanDenabeele, Inbound Marketer:
I'm a big fan of SEMrush for SEO research and keyword research for PPC campaigns. The Adwords Keyword Planner tool also does a great job and works in almost the same way. Best part is it’s free!
Rachel Begg, Chief Operations Officer:
I am thankful for QuickBooks, as the person in charge of billing and operations it makes my life a lot easier in regards to invoicing and reconciling the expenses from the bank accounts. It's very effective in helping me remember who still needs to pay and even has recurring invoices so I don't worry about forgetting to invoice every month. The most important tool in QB is the profit and loss feature, I can see how profitable we are any time. I also love Wi-Fi!
Remington Begg, Chief Remarkable Officer:
I’m thankful for smart lists in HubSpot. They allow for us to segment contacts based on demographic and intent. Knowing who’s in your list, and who’s engaged, can lead to much higher conversion rates. Sales templates are amazing because in the world of modern sales, you want to spend your time helping people, not drafting up the same old email time after time, after time. What really matters in the sales process is what allows you to focus on what really matters, building authentic relationships.
Russell Benzing, Web Developer:
I’m thankful for Soundboard.chooseimpulse.com. It started with culture and a dream, a tool to influence our humor and expand our righteousness. The soundboard was a project spun from hilarity and puns. It takes real sounds and makes them available for perfectly timed blasts during conversation.
Deven Davies, Web Developer:
I love the ability as a dev in this age to just fall headfirst into code land within the walls of Spotify music to keep the brain going at 105% and brush away distractions! As a dev with elbows deep in code on the daily, sometimes you just need to slow it down and get methodical with some smooth acoustic tunes. Other times, I need that energy spike and with a click or two on Spotify, the electronic waves and harmonious synths help elucidate my mind.
Noel Beltrand, Video Marketer:
In the Adobe family, whenever we animators wanted to animate we would rely on either After Effects or Flash. Both are great for animating but weren’t really built for it. Then Adobe finally introduced a Adobe Character Animator which focuses JUST on getting your 2D animation into the world via a very user friendly program.
What are you thankful for this year? Let us know!