Tools You Should be Using as a Brand Manager
By: Pragati Mehra
Tags: Brands, Marketing Strategies, Branding, Brand Strategy

Like the world in which they live, brand managers have to be in constant motion. They’re staying consistent across all channels and deliverables, keeping up on social media, nurturing relationships with customers, collaborating with business partners and agencies, keeping a close eye on the competition and market trends to managing brand reputation, it is a complex journey.

If you’re a brand manager, then you’ll know that consumers, politics, economics, competitors and technology affect everything you do — it’s an exciting yet complicated playing field!

It’s crucial, therefore, to have an arsenal of resources to stay on top of what’s going on in the world, what’s being done by other brands, and how ideas are being presented. We’ve put together a list of the best sites you can use to stay on top of your game.

When it comes to brand consistency, brand visuals say a lot. It concerns questions like, what images are being shared about and related to your brand? Is your logo consistent across all channels and affiliates? Image Raider goes beyond the realm of Google Image Search, by tracking the use of your brand visuals across the web. You can just upload an image and see where — and where not — it’s currently used.

2. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing service providers in the world primarily because they offer a forever free email marketing service plan which allows you to send 12,000 emails for up to 2,000 subscribers. This plan is fairly limited because you don’t get features like send-time optimization, advanced segmentation, multi-variate testing, etc. You are also required to display their branding in your email. It comes with an easy drag-and-drop email builder, autoresponders, segmenting contacts into groups, and simple tracking for analytics. It also allows you to setup delivery times based on user’s timezones, and you can setup segmenting based on geolocation.

3. The Writer

A language consultancy obsessed with how you write what you write, The Writer makes you think about your voice. Their blog posts will give you handy tips on how best to speak in order to resonate with your audience. There are style guides, grammar tips, and even a Readability Checker to see how readable your content is.

4. Brand24

Brand24 is a great tool for monitoring all your brand’s online mentions — across industries, sites, social media, and more. Regardless of your business size or content distribution, you have access to your brand’s reputation: news sites, blogs, big-name review sites, and more. Not only does the tool alert you to new mentions, but it also helps you analyze who is talking about your brand, where they’re discussing it, and whether they’re an influencer.

5. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is an great reputation management tool. Even if your brand is ranking well for all your targeted searches, you still need to know what else about your brand lives online. Once you set up an alert, you can choose your frequency: real-time alerts, daily alerts, weekly alerts — whatever works for a particular search.

6. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a cloud-hosted social media management tool that allows you to manage your marketing routines and audience interactions. The main features include social media analytics, social content management, conversation tracking, and automated publishing.

The software’s social media publishing feature helps you automate the job of scheduling content on social channels and approve the content prior to publishing. You can also use the platform’s analytics and reporting functionalities to track the performance of your brand across popular social media channels.

7. Unbounce

Unbounce is an amazing tool for quickly building, tweaking and publishing new landing pages to test. One of the most fantastic features of Unbounce is how easy it is to use the platform to create brand new pages. Even if you’re not much of a designer, you can use some of the templates available as a jumping off point, then tweak them to fit your style.

8. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the gold standard for most websites these days. Google has advanced analytics that shed light on a variety of your website information, including who your visitors are, how they make their way through your sales funnel and what they do on your website in real-time.