Paul Vesey-Brown, MarTech Consultant at BluprintX ANZ, shares his experience of five assets which can be used in combination with your Marketing Automation platform to save time and money by improving the efficiency and reportability of marketing campaigns. At BluprintX we internally use Adobe Marketo and this is one of our specialties – we’ve worked with over 350 clients who have implemented Marketo for their business.
If you’re already using a MarTech platform, you’ll know what it has to offer with regards to lead capture, identification and segmentation – prerequisites to progressing your prospects through the funnel. Beyond these early stages, MarTech facilitates personalised content delivery to help develop leads towards crucial milestones and sales handover.
But, there are additional tools you can use to streamline your marketing automation processes. It might sound like marginal gains, but the cumulative effect of these processes can be massive.
In this blog, we’ll take a look at five free tools you can use to maximise efficiency in tandem with your marketing activity. Let’s jump in!
1. Google UTM Builder
Link: https://ga-dev-tools.web.app/campaign-url-builder/
If you’re not using UTMs for all your inbound website traffic generated by your marketing activity, it’s time to start! This is the go-to method for assessing how your audience is finding you digitally. UTMs also provide data to inform ROI from marketing campaigns and wider activity. Ultimately, it’s a free insight and attribution resource that’s only a few clicks away.
Google offers a UTM-builder tool which is intuitive and easy to pick up. Simply input your destination URL and fill in the relevant fields with tags you’ll recognise (remember, these will be visible to end users) and Google will generate the UTM in real time.
It’s simple on face value, and any form of UTM creation is a great start. If you’d like some further best practice, reach out to us and we’ll be more than happy to share some tips to make sure your UTMs feed perfectly into MarTech activity.
TIP: Don’t use UTM links internally on your own website – it will skew your Google Analytics with inflated session times, bounce rates and conversion figures.
2. WordTune
Link: https://www.wordtune.com/
While not directly linked to automation, WordTune can be a huge asset when you’re creating content for your campaigns. After all, even the most prolific copywriters experience the odd spot of writer’s block!
WordTune can offer you alternatives on a sentence or paragraph if it’s not quite hitting the right tone. There’s options for formal or informal copy, making it a handy resource for quickly reformatting ideas.
TIP: There is also a Google Chrome extension which allows you to use WordTune within other cloud tools.
3. HTML Cleaner
Link: https://html-cleaner.com/
If you’ve ever pasted pre-drafted copy into email editors, pressed preview and been taken aback by the formatting, this one’s for you.
Whether it’s font sizing or line spacing, tidying up these inaccuracies can be time-consuming. They’re usually hidden, coded elements used by the original editor – Microsoft Word is a common culprit.
This tool will help clean out all the extra HTML/CSS code that Word likes to use for its formatting, which is what causes most of those issues when you paste content into email editors.
This tool will help you clean out HTML or CSS modifiers and make your experience much smoother. Paste your content into HTML Cleaner, define your cleaning options and click through for the results. From this point, it’s best to copy the new HTML code directly into the editor.
TIP: This can also be helpful if you’re parsing Microsoft Word content through your WordPress website editor.
4. Calendar Link Generator
Link: https://parcel.io/tools/calendar
Calendar ‘.ics’ files are a helpful resource for encouraging your audience to save the date of an upcoming event, but in the new era of personalised marketing, there are more user-friendly options available.
Recipients need to download and manually import the .ics file, which isn’t necessarily optimised for their preferred calendar software. So, why not provide them with a native solution for their chosen calendar?
This tool provides software-specific calendar invites compatible with Google, Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo and more. You can pre-fill all the information your audience requires, and even set a custom time zone. This will streamline the experience for your audience, and encourage more uptake through your prebuilt invites!
TIP: If you are using tokens, experiment with including your token codes inside the description to auto-generate the calendar link content. Just remember, you can’t nest tokens inside other tokens, so you will need to use the link directly in your content.
5. Program Name Generator
Link: https://www.bluprintx.com.au/tools/name-generator/ Note: This can be used for all MarTech platforms.
If you’ve taken a BluprintX Marketo Training course or implementation, you’ll be aware of the importance of consistent naming conventions. Having conventions in place will ensure you can easily find your programs, streamline housekeeping of assets, and save time on administrative processes. This is especially helpful if you know you’ll need to regularly refer to legacy projects – from a single point of record, you’ll know exactly what to look for.
We’ve created a simple tool, designed for Marketo (but able to use on alternative platforms), which quickly generates unique program codes. Choose your asset type, date and a ‘friendly name’ (a shorter, memorable code) to receive a program name you can apply to your asset.
TIP: If using Marketo – Include the Marketo asset code, found in the URL of the asset, in the asset name so you can quickly identify and search for it later.
By using some or all of these tools, you’ll be able to streamline key aspects of your MarTech activity. They might even be helpful for other steps in your workflow – and if that’s the case, we’d love to hear about it! There is always room for additional innovation, efficiency and progression when it comes to how your Marketing automation platform is utilised.
Ultimately, this is all about building effective processes that put time back in your day so you can dedicate more resources to the things that really make a difference – content, strategy and collaboration.
About the author
Paul Vesey-Brown – MarTech Consultant, BluprintX (ANZ)
A full-stack, ROI and automation obsessed marketer with over 20 years of experience in brand and marketing roles, including 5 years of Marketo experience. His comprehensive marketing experience spanning campaign strategy to branding, automated lead processing and front-end HTML development, has given him a 360º perspective on the value Marketo can bring to sales and marketing teams.
