By Katrina Olson
Last week we looked at four fairly sophisticated apps to help you monitor, measure and track your social and digital media efforts. This week’s apps are more focused on making your job easier by streamlining some of your daily (or weekly) activities.
The apps we’ll be reviewing today can help you in the following areas:
- Saving time by creating quick profiles or personas to represent your target markets
- Consolidating all of your contacts in one place
- And helping you create and distribute media-rich stories, news releases, articles, white papers, and distribute them to the right audience
Here’s a rundown of each.
Personapp (personapp.io)
Creating a persona (or many personas) to represent your target audiences offers marketers a number of benefits:
- You can make assumptions about the user, then validate or invalidate them through research.
- They move your thinking away from business models and goals and toward what matters—customers.
- They help your team envision whom you’re making the product for.
- Decisions become less abstract and more human.
Personapp is a great starting point if you’ve never used personas before and want to introduce the concept to your clients or managers. Start with their easy-to-use template for filling in behaviors, facts and demographics, and needs and goals. If you want to expand on this “lightweight informal persona,” click the app’s “persona guide” for tips on building more detailed personas.
Share them with your marketing team members, branch managers, brand managers and anyone who needs to understand who you’re marketing to. (I opened an account and created the persona below in 10 minutes.)
Profile created using Personapp
You really don’t need a demo or tutorial to try Persona. It’s very self-explanatory and easy to use…and it’s free (for now)!
FullContact (fullcontact.com)
Chances are, there are some people you contact by Facebook message, some who are in your phone, some for whom you only have an email address, and others you only reach through LinkedIn. It’s a lot to keep track of.
The Full Contact app consolidates all of your contacts in one place— media contacts, vendors, customers, etc. You can import them from your Google contacts, iCloud, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and more. With the free version, the app syncs daily between Google and iCloud; and once a month it searches the public web and updates your contacts’ photos, titles, companies and locations.
For a monthly fee, Full Contact will transcribe (using live people) contact info from business cards, capture contact information from Gmail signatures, sync in real time with Google (Gmail) and iCloud, and more.
To check out FullContact, visit their website here.
PitchEngine (pitchengine.com)
Don’t have the money or resources to create multimedia news releases or use an expensive service? PitchEngine helps you create media-rich stories including images, video and logos using existing templates.
Story created using PitchEngine
You simply upload your files. The app then optimizes it for desktop and mobile devices then pushes it out to Google and other search engines. A new feature called “Tiny Pitch” (which is still in beta testing) designs and optimizes your story and sends it back to you formatted and ready to distribute however you please. (I created the pitch above by repurposing content from one of my LinkedIn posts.)
For more information, see PitchEngine’s website.
PressPage (presspage.com)
PressPage bills itself as a technology provider for social media newsrooms, digital pressrooms and online media hubs. The company provides the process, structure and system for digital storytelling and brand journalism. Use the technology to create and distribute media-rich news releases and stories in real time with analytics to evaluate effectiveness. Stories are easily shareable across multiple platforms including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And, you can create these digital stories yourself without involving web designers and IT staff, and without coding experience.
PressPage’s newsroom
Your news releases, feature stories, white papers or other stories are archived in an interactive social newsroom which integrates seamlessly into your existing website. And PressPage’s robust search engine optimization brings readers to your newsroom.
To learn more, watch this video or visit PressPage’s website. To see what your digital newsroom might look like, visit PressPage’s newsroom.
What apps make your job easier?
What marketing-related apps do you use to save time and effort? Share them below in the comments section!
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Olson is a marketing and public relations consultant, and principal of Katrina Olson Strategic Communications. She has written for tED magazine’s print edition since 2005, judged tED magazine’s Best of the Best Competition since 2006, and emceed the Best of the Best Awards ceremony for a total of seven years. She can be reached at katrina@katrinaolson.comor via her website at katrinaolson.com.
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