As marketing operations and demand generation consultants, we pride ourselves on “melting” into our client teams, which can be challenging as a fully remote team. We attribute our success to our unique expertise combined with our digital tools, which help us efficiently plan, manage, and execute tasks. We are often asked, “What are the Sponge.io team’s go-to digital tools?” we’ve put together our favorites below:
Screencastify
“I love Screencastify” often floats across our team Slack channel. There are a lot of ways to capture your screen on video, but there’s something just dead simple about Screencastify’s Chrome extension. Even our Apple users prefer it to Quicktime. Anytime a client needs quick instructions or if our team internally learns something beneficial to share – it’s insanely easy to capture and provide. Their video editor is easy to use, so you can quickly record, edit, store, and share with teams. The integration with Google Business Drive is seamless, providing users with quick access to your team’s videos in one place. Lastly, the functionality of making a video private or public is easy and effective.
Zapier
A way to seamlessly connect all your apps is so simple that technical and non-technical users can use it! Sign me up. Zapier doesn’t require coding, integrates with many apps (7000+ and counting), and has an intuitive interface.
Unbounce
We’ve built landing pages on many different platforms, and none compare to Unbounce. It’s the most flexible and customizable option (WYSIWYG editor), encourages A/B testing, and has valuable banner/pop-up “convertibles.” Its only genuine fault is its native Marketo integration.
>>Related: 6 Favorite Salesforce Admin Tools and Extensions<<
Rev
Transcribing interviews and webinars is one of the fastest ways to write and repackage content and helps reluctant authors overcome their writing block. We’ve tried the hacks, but Rev is consistently worth the (small) cost—especially considering how fast their turnaround time is compared to others. Ask anyone who had to spend 90 minutes transcribing a twelve-minute clip—it’s worth the $15!
GoFullPage
Need to quickly take a screenshot of an entire page? You can easily add this to Chrome as an extension, download it, and save it to whatever format you need—and there’s nothing else additional to install. It’s a shortcut we marketers love!
Zoom
Ubiquitous and accessible – which is why most teams prefer it, especially us. We particularly like its Gmail, Google Calendar, and Slack integration. There are quite a few features in Zoom, so it is worth sifting through the account settings to ensure the configuration has the permissions that work for you. For scrappier demand generation campaigns where the timeline is critical, we’ve also recorded podcast and webinar content via Zoom, quickly edited it, and placed it on an Unbounce landing page. Voila! Gated content for a quick campaign :)
Slack
Much like Zoom, everyone seems to be using Slack for internal communications. We love it for its seamless ability to integrate with thousands of other apps like Google Suite, Asana, etc., along with other customizations like “Question of the Day” (a simple bot that triggers mindless questions for our team to answer and engage with daily). Simple UI and real-time communication internally and with external client teams make collaboration efficient.
Figma
Continuing on the theme of real-time collaboration, Figma is a great browser-based design tool for graphics, email page templates, etc. All team members can provide feedback on the same file, and the UX is ripe for brainstorming and iterating. Best of all you can quickly download images, and reference design elements allowing you to quickly build a new email in your marketing automation system.
BriteVerify
Briteverify is our all-time favorite email verification and cleanup service. It significantly improves your marketing and data quality and protects your sender reputation by reducing your bounce rate. Its technology is updated consistently for new and existing MBPs or mailbox providers. We’ve always recommended this service whenever we feel our clients can benefit from it.
Asana
We successfully manage our day-to-day tasks and client projects using a solid project management tool as a team. While most of the ones available work (ClickUp, Monday, Wrike, etc.), we prefer the simplicity of Asana. There aren’t limits to the number of tasks, projects, files, or messages created. Each team member can create personal views to get work accomplished in a way that fits their composing process. Compared to other project management tools, the notifications and messages between users are simplified, which helps them refer back to completed tasks & comments when necessary. One of our favorite features is the ability to seamlessly switch between our Asana environment and other client’s Asana instances. Toggling between instances is helpful because not all clients want to be in ours, so we can quickly toggle back and forth, making it easy to keep track of all tasks.
CodePen
Our most technical projects require us to develop unique front-end code for websites, forms, asset design, automation, etc. Many projects require a unique solution, and CodePen helps our team develop, design, test, and store our favorite scripts in a secure library. We learn, find inspiration, and build better solutions for clients using this amazing tool.
