Melanie
Welcome to the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast for all decision makers and action takers. Take it away, Esther.
Esther
And welcome back to another episode of the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast. Today, we're giving you some top software advice advice, and these are as voted for by myself and Melanie. So take that as you will, but these are things that we have used, we love, we recommend, and we just couldn't run your business without. So, Melanie, what's your first one? I'm not going to ask what your top one is, but what's the first one you're going to recommend?
Melanie
I think probably way up there is a tool that I use to help find other people's relevant content to share on my socials. Now, for those of you who are new to marketing, you're probably thinking, why would you want to share other people's content? And that's mainly down to the fact that it's not about me and my content, it's about the values that I can continually offer to my customers or my potential customers. And the more I can keep them engaged and interested and invested in what I have to say, even if it's talking about other people's products and services, I'm obviously not going to be recommending a direct competitor's product or services. But when you know your audience and your customer avatar better, you'll know that there are other things going on in their lives that matter to them. Finding a platform similar to Hootsuite or Buffer or Feedalpha, or the one I use is Post Planner is a really fabulous and very useful resource to have, although you obviously do have to pay for the platform.
Esther
Yeah. These will be a mixture of paid for and free platforms that we're talking about. There are free versions of things like Hootsuite and Buffer, but there's also the paid platform of it. There's other things that I've heard other people recommend. I haven't used it personally, but Metricool gets a good reputation out there at the minute. And like Melanie says, Post Planner is one that I haven't personally used, but sounds good. So that's for curating content and sharing to your social platforms. Can you on that schedule your own content as well?
Melanie
Yes, you can. The same with feed alpha, Hootsuite, and Buffer. Post Planner can also schedule your own content. But what draws me to post planner is the fact that you can, and the same with the others, it's no different for any of the other platforms, is that you can look up a search term or a search phrase. For me, it would be maybe content marketing or digital marketing or website information. It would find all the latest social media posts, blogs, images, videos, and I can share them to my social media platforms across the board using a scheduling tool.
Esther
Yes. Those are all very good. And if you don't want to pay for a scheduling tool and you're using Instagram and Facebook exclusively, then you can use the Meta Business Suite. Now, it doesn't give you this option that Melanie is talking about of sharing other people's content easily.
Melanie
You can share other people's content. It's just you can't find it in Meta Business Suite.
Esther
That's what I mean. That's what I mean. It doesn't give you the option to go searching for it inside the platform, but you can search for it externally on Google. You can grab their link from somewhere else and share it using Google.. Sorry, Meta Business Planner, Business Suite. That's the word.
Melanie
You can also use Planoly for free. And I think later has an element as well where you can share content as well. So there are places. It's just a case of knowing where to find them, isn't it?
Esther
Yeah. And a lot of these platforms that we're talking about can be a mixture of personal choice as to what works best for you in terms of the layout and things, or it may come down to finances. So I personally love Agorapulse, but a lot of people, it might be outside of their budget because it is for larger agencies. So So there's others that I've used, SocialPilot, there's Planable, and there's always new platforms coming out to help you make life easier when scheduling your social media content. So have a look. A lot of them do free trials and try some of them out, figure out which one you click best with and go from there. As I said, these are ones that we've used and loved. Don't just go by our recommendations, try them and figure out which one you prefer. So moving on then, that's our social media schedulers and content finders. How about then and images. So I'm all about the AI at the minute. So Midjourney and things like that. I'm trying to remember the other one that designs the images for you as long as you have the correct prompt for it. Thankfully, AI has moved along from giving people six fingers and four eyes and is now a lot better whenever you ask for different things. Still not 100%, so do check them and verify them before sending them out on social media. And I know which one Melanie uses.
Melanie
Well, I use a couple. Canva Pro has an element that you can direct and make it suggest images for you. It's not bad, actually, considering it's more mid-level, I suppose, cheap and mid-level for people. Although the pricing structure is changing in 2025. Those of you that haven't been paying attention to your emails from Canva, please note the pricing structure is going to be going up quite a bit over the next couple of years, just depending on how many people you have on your team. Another one I use, and I think is very good for image making and image creation, is Maji. It's actually suggested to me by Agorapulse, believe it or not, by the team at Agorapulse, and I'm very impressed with it, I've got to say. It is another paid platform, and it's got lots and lots of added extras. It's slightly pricier than the pro ChatGPT, but I got to say it does deliver.
Esther
That's another AI Form of designing images. It's not so much the drag and drop that Canva is known for, that you design your own and bring in elements that they provide for you, but it is more of an AI version.
Melanie
Definitely the AI element. But then obviously, Canva has its own templates and images, professional images that it has on there that you can use or update and create in different ways. I also, another firm favourite of mine is Pexels, P-E-X-E-L-S. Completely free. You don't have to credit, although I'm sure they'd be delighted if you did.
Esther
Yes. So that's for grabbing images that are royalty free, and you can use them in your social media and your website. And they are wonderful professional photographs and lots and lots of different options for all sectors on that, Pexels. I enjoy scrolling through the many, many options for different things. But again, when you go into these platforms, you need to know exactly what you're looking for, because sometimes what you call something might not be what the creator, what the photographer has included in the title or the meta tags that they have put there. So just have fun, go looking for stuff and enjoy the vast variety of stuff that is out there. Continuing on the theme of AI, ChatGPT, there's a free version of it that people use. Now, we would use that for help and tips and... Well, not so much tips, but-.
Melanie
Inspiration.
Esther
When you're stuck. Inspiration, that's exactly what it is. Inspiration. When you're stuck on what you want to say, what you want to tell your audience, you tell them what your audience is like, you write the prompt and it will give you information on what's best, maybe topics or titles for future blog posts, etc.
I wouldn't rely on it for writing the blog post itself unless you're willing to go through and rewrite the whole thing. But for inspiration, it is very good. And there are lots of different AI things out there similar to ChatGPT, including Maji, Claude. We use one that's called you.com, Y-O-U.com. And if you do want to know more about using AI for SEO, then perplexity is a very good one as well. So again, all of the ones that I've mentioned, they're perplexityyou.com, ChatGPT 4.0, those are paid for. But there is the free ChatGPT version available to everyone.
Melanie
There is another one called, I never know how to pronounce it, but it was mentioned to me by one of my clients, actually. I think it's meant to be the word author, but it's A-I-T-H-O-R. I have no idea how to say it. So A-I-T-H-O-R, and it creates, just like ChatGPT paid for version does and free version does, and Magi, actually, can create the blog for you. But as Esther said, it's much better if you can edit that so that it speaks like you. Sometimes, especially with the stuff I've seen from Aithor, it seems to repeat the same thing again and again and in slightly different ways. I've seen the content on the website and it's fine. If you're not a writer, it's perfect. You've got to do something to improve your SEO, so I completely get it. But it does generally seem to repeat the same thing in a different way, even in the next paragraph.
Esther
Well, I mean, AI is constantly changing and constantly adapting and modifying and getting better. All of the social media platforms now have AI built in. If you go to write a post on LinkedIn, it will ask if you want AI to help you write it. If you write it on Facebook, Instagram, again, there's the option to click the button and AI will make it better.
Melanie
Yeah. Feetalpha, Post Planner, they all offer that.
Esther
They do. So, I mean, It's time to embrace AI, is what I'm saying here. We really need to keep going on it. And like I said, it will keep getting better and giving better results the more you use it, because it will get used to who you are. And that sounds scary now. Not trying to scare you. But okay, moving on. What other business software do we recommend? Obviously, sorry, StreamYard, because we're using it right now to record this. That's where you're watching us. Hi.
Melanie
Then we've also got OpusClips, which is something else we used to help us with our YouTube series that we did earlier in 2024. That's something else that we've used and I would definitely recommend, and I'm still recommending it to clients who are getting amazing results from it. But there's more things that we need to look at as well, which is the social media analytics and monitoring as well. Our good friend Amanda Webb would be absolutely hitting us over the head right now with something sharp. If we didn't mention Google Analytics, especially if you can add in UTM parameters through your social media platform so that you can really, really understand what social media platforms, what social posts, what calls to action are actually driving your audience, and you can really get a true understanding of it through Google Analytics. Then there's other tools like Social Mention, which I'm afraid I don't know very well personally, but it's been mentioned to me a few times by colleagues. The other one that I use personally is Google Alerts. Completely free, but it really does work. It's very effective.
Esther
Yeah, I find, though, that it can, depending on what you've alerted it to, it can really fill up your inbox. But it is good to know if people are talking about you as a person or you as a business or what the top things in your industry are right now. You can set up alerts for anything. So That's a lot. We've gone through a lot of top tools that we use, that we don't use, that we've heard of. But these are all things that we would recommend that you try out and see for yourself what it is that works for you, because not everything's going to work for you. Okay, so Google Analytics has to work for you because there's no other option, really, to be perfectly honest with you. I mean, there's different analytics on different places that aren't Google, but let's be honest, the majority of the world searches for you on Google rather than on Bing or DuckDuckGo or any of the others. So stick with your Google Analytics for now and see what's working that way. Use all the different tools that are available. Like I said, try the free trials on different things. There's also the email marketing platforms. We haven't talked about those.
Melanie
Haven't touched those.
Esther
No. I used to be a big fan of Mailchimp. Not so much anymore. I've now converted over to MailerLite, which I find is really good, really helpful, and has a lot of great things in there for free, including automations. So you can set up a welcome pack in there and people get a list of a a section of your emails that you set up once and it will continue to go to all your new subscribers each time that they sign up. And it has lots and lots of things in there that you can do it and help you with. There's so many things. Maybe We should do a part two of things that we recommend because we haven't touched on half the stuff that we use. I'm looking at my tabs going, I should have mentioned that. I really should have mentioned that. But that is what we're here for, again, on another day, we can talk about them.
Melanie
Yeah, definitely. Well, thanks so much for your time and attention. Thank you all so much for your support and listening to our award-winning podcast. Don't forget, you can find us on lots of different social platforms, so pick your favourite one, and you can listen to us on pretty much any listening mobile use of the podcast system at all. I don't know where I was going with that sentence, but I'm sure it made some sense to somebody out there. We're going to finish now before I babble and waffle on even further, and we'll be back next week with another podcast. Bye for now.
Esther
Bye-bye.
