My Digital Toolkit

Throughout my working week, I use a variety of useful digital tools to help with organisation, feedback, imaging, content production and content management. These clever tools make it easier to do my job as a marketing assistant and art worker for Moray Sports Centre. I have noted down a few of my favourites and why I find these so useful.

Hootsuite

I use this as part of my weekly communications strategy on a Monday. It’s great for lining up social media posts throughout the week to give you an oversight of what stories will be shared, what images and videos to include and how to pitch a mix of information and interaction with an audience.

MailChimp

I release a monthly newsletter with updates and information. MailChimp is really easy to use and with a quick click of the ‘replicate’ button, previous layouts can be tweaked to save time. Adding links to the images and news articles helps direct people back to website blogs and the events calendar. The report page lets you gauge how successful a newsletter is with the amount of opens it gets, how many clicks your links get and who is reading it. At the Digital Scot, we use MailChimp to send our updates newsletter, don’t miss our next one, sign up here.

Bitly

Bitly is great for those really long URL’s when sharing links to social media. Until Twitter doubled up, it was a character saving dream. It is also great for using your own campaign name to make it more personal and easier for people to see what it links to.

Pixabay and Pexels

The Sports Centre has not yet started construction, so we do not have any of our own stock images to use on marketing material or social media of people using the facility. To connect with our audience, I use Pixabay and Pexels, to find royalty-free photos (Moray Sports Centre is a charity, so any cost saving is a must!)

Survey Monkey

Getting feedback from the community is vital for funding applications and finding out what people actually want to see at the Centre. I use Survey Monkey as a digital way to collect this feedback. It is easy to create a design in our brand colours and download the information once the survey is closed. Google Forms is an alternative which can also be used, it’s just a matter of preference.

Branded3 – Annual Event Calendar

To help build our social media audience and monthly content overviews, I use an Annual Event Calendar to link with National Days and Sporting Events throughout the year. I have found the Branded3 Calendar to be the handiest to reference for this.

Doodle

This tool is brilliant when trying to organise meetings and events. I use Doodle to create polls to see which days and times better suit people. Using this saves lots of emails and phone calls and allows me to see what attendance a meeting would have on a certain day.

As I continue my career and learning, I find more and more useful digital tools. However, not all of them work in every job role and some I have used previously in other companies I no longer use now. Using a digital toolkit is about making life easier and working smarter. You don’t need to use everything that you have ever heard of as a digital marketer, just the tools that are right for you.