I hate wishy washy articles. You know, the ones that you think are going to give you useful pointers and then babble on in the abstract. In today’s article, I’m going to tell you about 5 incredibly useful tools employed by social media experts but are extremely user friendly. Let’s call them, “Tools Even Your Mum Could Use”. (Before I get feedback re. discrimination, don’t read into it, I have children too.).

Social media has become a critical component of every legal and financial services business’s marketing portfolio. Not only does social media create opportunity through engagement and communication, but it can help you efficiently target specific individuals within a business’s corporate makeup. However, finding a way to bake productivity into your social media strategy can be difficult without the right toolset. Not only can tools provide additional efficiencies that help you streamline your social media content, they can help you create new strategies and reduce time spent on social awareness.

So, what are the best tools that can help financial services and legal professionals run their social media campaigns?

1. Canva

Over 80% of marketers use visual assets (e.g., video, images, etc.) in their social media marketing strategy. Not only are images great at capturing users attention, but they also help prospects remember your message. People only remember 10% of content that’s comprised of words. If you add an image to that same exact content, people will remember over 60% of the message. That’s impactful.

But creating custom images for each social media message or advertisement is expensive and time-consuming. Canva helps you create those images in seconds. Using drag-and-drop functions, Canva can help your brand create superb images rapidly without the high cost of custom content.

All you have to do is choose the image size and then drag visual elements onto a background. They have thousands of pre-made templates — which can help you brainstorm your end product.

2. Buffer

Financial services and legal brands typically have multiple social media accounts to control. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and all of the other social accounts that you may be using to push out creative content can be challenging to maintain. Tools like Buffer help alleviate some of the stress surrounding social timing. Buffer connects all of your social media accounts to one central hub so that you can publish and comment on a fixed (or flexible) schedule. Plus, it has analytic capabilities glued to each operation.

This means that you can get a top-down view of your social media strategy and back it up with rich metrics.

3. Calendly

When all of those social leads come through your pipeline, figuring out how to schedule all of these digital meetings can be difficult without the right software support. Calendly helps you manage all of those meetings — and it gives you the tools to connect to people digitally to have those meetings.

While Calendly doesn’t directly connect with social media platforms like LinkedIn in the same way that Buffer does, it can still help you manage the operations side of social media leads. If you’re feeling really brave, you’ll likely want to use a tool like Zapier to create more advanced relationships between the two systems.

4. https://www.linkedin.com/redir/general-malware-page?url=AnyImage%2eio

While Canva can help you create images, https://www.linkedin.com/redir/general-malware-page?url=AnyImage%2eio can glue those images to social cards that act as lead funnels. All you have to do is upload an image and AnyImage will create a clickable social card that will help redirect interested prospects back to your website. This will allow you to build more sophisticated and long-term relationships with these customers via your blog, website content, or mid-funnel content (i.e., white papers, eBooks, etc.)

Canva and https://www.linkedin.com/redir/general-malware-page?url=AnyImage%2eio are a great combination for creating budget-friendly social ads. Both services can be used for free. But, most businesses will want a tier upgrade to do full-scale ads.

5. Zapier

While Zapier can be viewed as an organizational tool that helps you connect your technology stack, it can also help you perform well on social media. Since Zapier automates interactions, it can be used to set up complex social media tasks that may otherwise require overburdening amounts of redundant activity. Also, Zapier will make it simple to automate other aspects of your business once you understand its automation logic.

Connect tools together in unique and powerful ways.

Final Thoughts

Social media marketing is a gateway to success in the current digital ecosystem. Linkedin has over 20m users in the UK alone and 79% of U.S. citizens have a social media profile: Social platforms give you the data and connectivity to reach these people rapidly and on-scale. Doubtless, these campaigns can be time-consuming and complicated without a proper tool stack. These are the tools that can be easily incorporated into almost any business’s unique social campaigns.

Of course, there are other tools that may be directly valuable for your business. If you’re interested in learning about these tools or you would like some help generating high-quality social media leads, do book a call. (see Calendly in play!)