10 Surprising Marketing Tools That Are Life-Changing Productivity Hacks

Marketers need to bring results, oftentimes with limited resources. Whether you’re lacking the budget, manpower, or hours in your day, here are 10 life-changing marketing tools that will help you reclaim your time. Seriously, these digital marketing tools are diamonds in the rough that you have to know about — especially if you want to take your career to the next level.

1.  Canva: Create Beautiful and Professional-looking Designs

Maybe your designer is on vacation, or your company doesn’t even have a design budget…

Canva has changed the game for marketers everywhere, letting you create quick, professional looking designs for free. (Canva has both free and paid options.)

Whatever your needs are, Canva is a life-saving drag-and-drop design builder which lets you create beautiful presentation slides, thumbnail images, social share designs and more. 

2. Rev: Never Type Up Your Interview Notes Again

You’ve just conducted a long interview, and you don’t want to write up all of your notes…

We’ve all been there, right? So, why not let Rev do the hard work for you?

Rev is a game changing marketing tool that allows you to outsource your transcription needs to their network of professional transcriptionists. Get a 99% accurate transcript in a matter of hours. 

Or, if your needs are more time-sensitive, you can get a “rough draft” transcript in minutes with their automated transcription option.

Just upload your video or audio file, and Rev will send you a “rough draft” transcript powered by their industry-leading AI. (Seriously, their voice recognition engine is the most accurate in the game. In fact, their automatic transcription actually beat Google, Amazon, and Microsoft for the lowest Word Error Rate.)

It’s fast, extremely cheap and it sure beats hours of manual transcription.

3. Google Docs Voice Typing: Don’t Want to Type? Now, You Don’t Have to!

You’re tired and it’s been a long day. But you still need to write up a long blog post.

Here’s a cool marketing tool you can use when you just don’t feel like typing.

Did you know that Google Docs has a Voice Typing option? (It’s not as accurate as Rev’s automatic speech recognition, but it’ll get the job done!)

Just speak into the microphone, and let Google Docs Voice Typing do the writing for you. 

It’s really simple to use. 

1. Click Tools

2. Select Voice Typing

3. Click the microphone and just start speaking.

Simple, right?

4. Lusha Contacts: Get In Touch with Impossible-to-Reach Bloggers

You’re trying to reach out to bloggers, influencers or a few of the internet’s whose who.

But, you’re getting nowhere…

Your Linkedin InMails aren’t being opened and you’re not even sure they’re getting your emails.

Enter Lusha, your new favorite digital marketing tool…

It’s a fast, free web-browser extension which lets you find your B2B contact’s personal phone number or email address. (Both free and paid options are available.)

Just install Lusha, find the person on Linkedin, click show – and you’re ready to reach out.

5. Rev Captions: Easily Add Captions or Subtitles to Videos

You’re going live with a video and you’d love to reach new markets. 

So, why not add captions or even foreign subtitles to your video?

Yup, Rev’s so good that we just *had* to include it again as one of our favorite marketing tools online.

It’s true, many people watch videos when they’re not supposed to, or when they’re not able to listen in. (Hey, we’ve all watched a video in the bathroom, whether we want to admit it or not.)

Adding subtitles allows you to reach people who prefer to read, rather than listen.

You can also add foreign subtitles if you’re interested in reaching new markets (they have 17 languages to select from). 

This allows you to expand your video’s reach to non-English speakers without the headache of shooting versions in different languages.

Rev has also recently added another pretty amazing feature to help your content reach a wider audience — open captions (or burned-in captions).

With burned-in captions or subtitles, you can get your captions hard-coded directly into your video file. This is super helpful for those who intend to share videos on social media (i.e. every marketer ever), because some social media platforms don’t accept videos with separate caption files.

Finally, there’s Rev’s Live Captions for Zoom Meetings and Webinars, a real-time, AI-powered feature that makes it easier to follow along in your Zoom calls. Whether it’s a team meeting or a virtual event, Zoom live captions will make the call more inclusive and accessible for everyone.

6. Quora: Answer Customer Questions and Get More Traffic To Your Site 

Quora is a great way for marketers to conduct research, see what their prospects and customers are saying online, and crowdsource content ideas.

Search for keywords in your target market, or even your product’s name, to see what people are saying.

You can also use Quora as an awesome way to boost your brand’s online presence and get traffic to your site by answering relevant questions in your industry and linking to your site.

7. Medium: Make Your Blog Content Go Twice As Far

Need to expand your brand’s reach and get more traffic to your site?

Enter Medium.

Sure, Medium’s a great place to level up at work and read thought provoking pieces.

But, you can also share your existing blog posts (with no SEO penalty for duplicate content) and get more traffic to your site. 

Pretty cool, huh?

1. Just click on your icon

2. From the dropdown, click Stories

3. Click Import a story

4. Add the URL to your blog post, then click import

5. Click See Your Story

6. Then click Publish

7. And that’s it! Your story is live on Medium.

8. Lusha Forms: Get Up to 50% More Conversions From Your Lead Forms

Conversions. That’s always the name of the game in marketing, right? 

Lusha Forms is a simple and free online marketing tool that increases your lead form conversions by up to 50%. (There are both free and paid plans available.)

Prospects get short, one-field forms that makes it easy to convert.

Marketers get loads of data that makes it easy to qualify leads, thanks to Lusha’s data-enrichment.

9. ChromeVox: Listen to Articles Instead of Reading Them

Some people prefer to listen to a long website, rather than read it all.

And that’s where ChromeVox comes in.

ChromeVox is an awesome Chrome extension that lets you simply tap on something, and turn text into voice. 

It’s also awesome if you have something long to read but want to multitask while consuming it.

Just enable the browser extension, highlight the text you’d like it to read, and let ChromeVox go to work.

10. Zest: Send More Traffic to Your Content in Just One Click

Need a way to quickly drive traffic to your blog content?

Then you have to meet Zest, the ultimate free, online marketing tool.

Zest is a free web-browser extension that’s a dream for content marketing distribution.

Just download the Zest plugin, open your blog post, click on the Zest icon and then “submit content.”

Zest vets every article before publication onto its distribution network, which usually takes 1-2 days. 

After that, your content is Zested, and can be reached by over 20,000 hungry marketing professionals, all there to learn and level up their knowledge base.

About the Author: Lihi Lotker is Lusha‘s unstoppable Head of Growth. A growth hacker and growth expert, Lihi leads the charge on all things A/B testing and growth at Lusha. In her spare time she loves attending festivals and watching Ru Paul’s Drag Race.