Great apps and tools for businesses are hard to come by.

Sian and I have tried out more than our fair share in an eternal quest to increase productivity, or save a bit of time or money; we are fast becoming ‘app experts’ – ‘appsperts’?

When you find a good one, you know it’s a good one because you want to use it ALL the time. Life becomes a tiny little bit easier and you may even feel a tiny flutter of excitement every time you go to use it (just me?).

Today I’m writing about three tools that we use to manage our business, share information with clients or build marketing campaigns.

1. Loom

This tool isn’t one we use every day, but at least once a week, we’ll find that we want to share some knowledge about how to do something, with each other, or with a client. When this happens, typing instructions seems too labour intensive so we ‘send a Loom’.

What is a Loom?

Well, Loom is a fantastic, free app that you can use to record your desktop and/or your face and voice, at the same time. So you can work through an online process, record it and talk over it to describe what you are doing while you are doing it. Genius! If need one of our clients to complete a task that only they can do, but they don’t know how to do it, we record a step-by-step process and talk them through it. Loom then sends the video to whoever you’d like to see it and lets you know when they’ve viewed it. It’s brilliant.

2. Typeform

We like to ask our clients what they think of our service on a regular basis, so that we can share their feedback and use it to improve what we are offering. We’ve found that asking specific questions creates a more meaningful testimonial, and makes it easier for our clients to get the thing done, rather than starting from a blank piece of paper.

Typeform is a free survey tool that we use to do this. You can design your form, match it to your business branding, use your own logo and images to personalise it, and ask up to 10 questions, then send it out as many times as you like, all for free. It’ll even track responses and export them to an excel spreadsheet so that you can import the data elsewhere. Easy.

3. Pocket

If you are running a business social media page, it’s a good idea to share content from other sources besides just your own stuff. Having a curated content platform will round out your brand, but finding all the content and keeping  track of it can be hard to do. We use Pocket for this.

Pocket is a super simple content bookmarking site. Install the little widget to your web browser and then easily bookmark web pages whenever you find something useful. Set up your own tags to categorise your bookmarks so you can find them easily later. Super simple, free, and quick to use.

It’s your turn! Which tools are you using? Any suggestions for me? Please comment below if you have something that you’d like to recommend.

We like to keep a track of the free and cheap tools that we use to manage our business and recommend to clients on a Pinterest board, that we keep just for clients – if you are a Pinterest user and would like to see it, just drop me a line (pip@marketingarchitect.co.uk) to let me have your Pinterest handle (username) and I’ll invite you to join us on the board!