8 digital tools that will change your life
Hello lovely readers. It’s Prue here again. In this edition of the Digital Dunk, we asked the Digital team to round up some of the best free/cheap tools we use across our work. Enjoy!
Crazy Egg (yes, the world record egg is pretty crazy but that’s not what we’re talking about)
Crazy egg is a heat-mapping tool we use for understanding how your users are interacting with a webpage and to test out new page layouts. You can see how far users are scrolling down the page, where they’ve clicked (including a breakdown of the numbers) through its heat map, scroll map confetti features. The data is presented in a really clear and visual way that’s easy to understand and share.
Chloe Darke, Content Producer
We use Trello in two different ways for production planning and workflows in digital engagement
Trello is, at its core, an online corkboard. We use it in production for our product roadmaps. We organise “cards” into lists and on average our boards have 10 lists. These cover development times, bugs, blockers and the wish list (if money was no object). It gives each team member full visibility over all aspects of a project and flexibility to rearrange cards as priorities change. We also use it to manage workflows with third party agencies.
In Digital Engagement, we use Trello as an activity planner for our digital comms. This means we have one central planner, that everybody in the team can see, anywhere, anytime. We use the lists as our workflow view, so we can see where each piece of activity is at. We use the calendar view to see what we’ll be launching and when. We comment on cards to keep everyone up-to-date on each piece of activity and use labels to filter by activity type and view all activity in a multi-channel campaign.
Kimberly McGrath, Digital Producer and Lauren Bernard, Senior Digital Planning Officer
Scheduling social media posts, sign off on assets and copy within minutes, responding to your adoring fans (or not), checking analytics on the hour every hour are part of any social media team’s day. So we use Sprout Social to help us manage these processes and workflows. It pulls through analytics from your profiles across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. You can monitor and respond to people who are messaging you or about you and your campaigns, you can schedule content, and create nifty workflows for sign off. You can even develop chat bots to respond to private Facebook messages.
Prue Watson, Social Media Manager
Treejacking
Treejacking is a method used to test a website’s navigation — or Information Architecture (IA) — with real users to see how easily they can find content. It’s usually completed online using a simplified text version of the site’s structure and gives users specific tasks to complete. We’ve recently been working on a new IA for the NSPCC website and used treejacking platform Optimal Workshop to test it with our key audiences. Being able to see our users’ movements gave us some great insight and we made some valuable changes based on the results.
Katy Rouse, Content Manager
Google Analytics (you’ll probably hear people call this GA):
Google Analytics is a tool which helps to track and report website traffic. We currently use this for understanding how our website is performing, how people are converting and also identifying our user behaviour.
Zarqa Mukadam, Analyst
Answer the Public
Answer the Public is a free keyword research tool, which visualises data pulled from Google and Bing. Type in any keyword or phrase and it’ll break it down into clear and easy to digest categories, including questions, comparisons and related terms. It’s best to just have a play around with it — it’s easy, free and almost makes keywords exciting. Share screenshots with management and they’ll think you’re a genius .
Declan Henesy, Content Producer
Business manager
Facebook Business Manager is a tool which allows you to manage your paid social ads on Facebook and Instagram. In the ‘Creative hub’ you can manage all of your campaigns, and create your individual ads. Once your ad is imported, you can preview it on your Facebook/Instagram page before it’s set live, and monitor how it performs as your campaign progresses.
Jo Savage, Delivery Partner
Google Search Console:
Google Search Console is part of Googles Webmaster Tools toolkit, allowing site owners to manage and optimise their site in the Google search rankings. It’s important to note that there are other tools provided for the other major web browsers, however as the vast majority of our traffic comes through Google we focus our time optimising for Google to get the greatest return on our effort.
We use Search Console to track where our pages rank in Google search and what keywords they rank for, allowing us to optimise our online content to what users are looking for at any given time, and to ensure we are ranking for terms relating to organisational priorities.
Chris Benyon, Analyst
Have you used any of these, and what has your experience been? What other tools do you use, and would recommend or not? Let us know in the comments below.
