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Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com.

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Okay, so in this episode we're going to go through and do one of our ever popular tips and tools. So we're going to try and give you a number of tools that we've been using recently that we thought were really useful. But before we do that, I just want to make a quick announcement. You may remember in a recent episode we said that if you went through and left us a review, itunes or Stitcher radio or anywhere else like that, good or bad review, we would put you into a basic prize draw for my new book, which was that Building Digital Culture book. We had lots and lots and lots of you go through and very kindly leave us reviews. But actually we got a lot more than we expected. So we were going to go through and do a prize draw. But actually we thought, you know what, these people have gone out and made the effort to go through and do this for us. So actually all of you who went through and left us a review, you will be getting a copy of the book. So you will receive an email from us shortly just requesting a few details and we will then mail out the book to you. So congratulations everyone for getting a copy of the book. But also it just goes to show when we do competitions and things like that, it's well worth entering them. So make sure you do that in the future. So let's get straight on and get into the tools. First of all, is a tool I've been using for the last couple of weeks and it's phenomenal and it's all the more phenomenal because it's free and this kind of tool really normally isn't. And it's a beta, so it's being tested. It may not be free for very long because it is surprisingly good value. But essentially what I've got here is something called Leadberry L E A D Berry B E R R Y and it basically does reverse IP lookups on the people visiting your website. So just to explain what on earth I'm talking about, essentially when you go to analytics, you can see how many visits you've had and so on, but you don't know who's visited the website. What this does is look up where that person's coming from and it tries to work out based on their IP address, what company they're at. So this is really useful for those of you that have got business to business websites and you're trying to do lead generation more than anything else. And what I'm then able to see is which companies have been visiting my website. Now I can't work out exactly who visited my website and for example, it might have been someone at Microsoft. Well, I can't find who that individual was at Microsoft. I can't phone up the switchboard and say, yeah, I know someone's been on my website. Can you put me through, please? It's not really going to work, but essentially what I can do is if I see a number of people from my website visiting, I can actually go through and maybe do a bit of research. Very often the approach that I'll take is I'll see which companies are visiting our website and I'll try and identify a number of people in that organization that I think might be relevant and I'll try and connect to them via LinkedIn potentially. So I'm at least working out the kind of people that are visiting the site so I can get some insights into who might be interested in my products and services. It's not perfect because this whole process of trying to work out who is it that's been on your website, you could do some really spammy stuff. Upside on the other side of this if you weren't careful just emailing all those kind of people. And it will give you email addresses, but you shouldn't necessarily email those people because they weren't necessarily the people that actually visited your site. It was just someone at that company. But it is great. It is free, it's worth playing around with. It's very interesting actually to see different bits of your content, which companies are looking at it. So it's Leadbery and as ever, all of the links to these tools are going to be in the show notes as well. So that's Leadbery, it's in beta, it's free at the moment. It might not be for much longer, but worth taking a look at. So on to the next one. If you're anything like me, I quite like an animated gif. You see them in Twitter and Facebook and lots of other places, those little kind of looping animations that you get in different social media places. Now very often I'd quite like to create an animated gif, but they're a bit of a problem to create because I've got to go through and kind of create them like a flip book, so doing cell by cell animations. But actually I came across a great little tool. It's on makeagif.com and it's their YouTube to GIF converter. So what it allows you to do is Just point it at a YouTube video and it will make a GIF animation of that video. Now the whole point of GIFs is they're supposed to be fairly short, so you don't want to do something that's incredibly long. But actually it does a really nice job of converting them. So it's make a gif.com and then it's YouTube 2 gif. But again, we'll put everything in the show notes on targetinternet.com so go through to targetinternet.com, go forward/ podcast and you'll find all of the podcast and all of the show notes. But it's one of the few tools that I found, actually does a good job of this. Now if you want to convert a video that is longer than about 10 seconds, you are going to need to register for an account. But it's well worth doing, is a free account and it will make nice little animations for you. So let's keep up the pace, let's keep working through these tools. The next one is and I can't believe we haven't featured this before, and I was saying to Kieran that I'm sure we must have spoken about this before. It's been around for a while and I absolutely love it, but apparently we haven't. So answer the public.com so if you're not familiar with this, and I apologize if you are, but if you're not familiar with this one, you go through and you put a keyword in and it will go off and find you related words and phrases. But how it does this is by using the autocomplete data from Google and from Bing. So autocomplete is that bit when you go in to do a search and what happens is that it suggests other things that people have been searching for and it completes your search for you and gives you some options. So what it's basically saying is this is the stuff that people have been searching for that's relatively popular. So I might put in digital marketing and it might suggest digital marketing courses, digital marketing tools, etc. Etc. So it gives you the idea of what's popular around that topic. But when you go through, the really nice thing is you go in and the first thing it will do is give you all the questions. So for example, it might tell me, what is digital marketing? Where can I study digital marketing? And it will group them together into the where's, who's, what's and whens, etc. It will also then go through give me an alphabetical list. It gives me lots of prepositions, but it does this visually. So you get kind of big circle telling you all these different things that people have been searching for. So it's a really nice starting place when you're thinking about researching ideas for content or how you should title any particular thing. Now the way that I use it is I take things from answerthepublic and I pick out the phrases and the questions and I particularly like the questions. And then I'm gonna take those and I'm gonna put them into the Google Keyword Planner. And the Keyword Planner is the one that tells me the actual numbers of searches. So I can see, okay, well it looks like it's popular, but also how many people actually then searching for it. Now, bearing in mind it gets its data from both Google and from Bing. And what I found about that is most of the keyword research tools we use like the Keyword Planner and Google Trends are very Google specific. And actually having a little bit of Bing data in the mix there as well is quite useful. So try out answerthepublic, see how you get on with it as well. But I think it's absolutely great tool, does really nice visuals. And when you go through to the page, you'll see first of all there's a guy standing there waiting for you to do a search and he gets increasingly bored and picks his teeth and does various other disgusting things. So actually it's great. Quite good fun, really nicely visually laid out, but have a play with that. The next one is a really quick bite sized one that Kieran came across and it kind of does what it says on the tin. So this is upsidedowntext.com you can probably guess what it does. So you put your text into it and it will create that text upside down in a font that you can then copy and paste somewhere else. And one of the things we've been playing around with, I mean, Kieran sent me an email with a title in upside down text and I was a bit intrigued to work out how on earth he'd done it and basically just kind of cheated and gone off to this website. But you could potentially use this in an email subject line. Now one thing I would say is if everyone starts doing this in email subject lines, it will very quickly stop being amusing or clever. But I've seen hardly anyone do it, so you could try it out. I think even by telling everyone this, we're probably ruining it immediately anyway. But key thing is put your text in, write it upside Down, Put it into an email subject line. Put it in an email through to somebody and it just kind of grabs your attention. Because when I'm getting subject lines coming through, there is a real art to writing them effectively. But actually something like this is a bit of a gimmick and it might actually grab my attention. Now bear in mind, we have seen this happen before. For a period of time, people would put your name into a subject line. Daniel, special offers just for you. And that would make me think, oh, this looks quite interesting. But actually now when I see that, I just think marketing, I know this is going to be some sort of E commerce or special travel offers or something else like that as well. So again, it might work for a while. I don't normally like these kind of gimmicky things, but actually this one did grab my attention. It worked for me. We've also seen it with emojis being used in subject lines. That was quite quirky for a while and then soon everyone realized that was just being used in marketing messages as well. So again, use it sparingly if you are going to use it at all. But worth a look at it, I think it's just worth looking at how they've done it because it's quite clever. When you see the text written upside down, you understand it's not actually a kind of normal font. So go through and take a look at that as well. So that's just upside down. Text.com another tool to show you. And this one has been phenomenally useful for us. And this is full story. And again, all the links are in the show notes on the website. Fullstory.com records what people are doing on your website and allows you to play them back as videos. So essentially you sign up for an account, there is a free trial and then it is paid after that. But it's not expensive at all, especially compared to some of the other tools in this area. And you get a bit of code when you sign up. You put that code onto every page of your website, just as you would with analytics code. Or if you're using Tag Manager, Google Tag Manager, you can just drop the code in there. And what it essentially does is make these little recordings of where people are clicking on your website and so on, and allows you to play those back. When you look at a particular page of people using it, you very, very quickly learn where things are going wrong for you. So how far down the page they're actually scrolling, where are they clicking within the page, where's their mouse going? So you can kind of get an idea of where their attention is as well. So I think this is really, really important because we use this and we had a particular sales page on our website, so it's trying to sell our digital marketing elearning, our online training stuff. And essentially we knew lots of people getting to the page, we knew lots of people were dropping out. We'd done lots of analytics analysis, we'd looked at the path through the website and we'd learned quite a lot from the analytics. But I think literally within 10 minutes of sitting down and watching these videos, I realized there was a particular bit of the page that people just didn't like and they weren't scrolling past it. And we cut it out, we just chopped a bit of the page and actually the conversion rate of that page has gone up phenomenally. So it's one of those things. When you're looking at analytics data, it's very often hard to work out the wood for the trees to try and understand what. What's the real story behind this data, what's going on, how are people interacting with your website? Whereas actually watching videos of people using it was really effective. And it's what you'd kind of do in a usability study, where you would get people to do something on your website in particular, and you would try and work out how they went through that process. Now, it also gives you some great other functionality and allows you to do things like look at people that converted that did end up doing the thing you wanted them to do, or people that came in from a particular channel or came at a particular time of the day or day of the week. So it's well worth looking at from that point of view because it's just going to give you insights that you wouldn't get. And it's a lot of stuff that you would just miss otherwise, basically. So we'll move on from fullstory. And this is kind of related to digital marketing, but kind of not. But I thought a lot of you might be interested in this. And as you may or may not know, Target Internet is what we call a distributed company, which means we don't all work in a central office. Everyone works from home or from a shared office space or where they're traveling, whatever it may be. And then we get together on a regular basis for what we call meetups. So it's great, because what it means is that we don't have the cost of an office. Everyone gets to work flexibly, so they get to work kind of from where they want. But you do miss something from that. There's a little bit of serendipity that gets missed in the fact that, you know, you're not together all the time and we need to work out ways of working around that. So we will use tools like Skype very simply or we might use Slack or whatever. There's lots of other tools for helping you work as groups that are distributed and actually lots of people have done this before us as well. Automatic, very famously, the company that build WordPress are a fully distributed company, have developers all around the world and they do meetups as well as I understand. And basically the meetup might be we might fly off to Edinburgh or we'll all go to London or we'll go off to Barcelona or somewhere else. Probably not too long a flight away for us because we're based in the UK and we'll all get together for a day or two, do some brainstorming, come up with some ideas. And it's a really nice way of really getting people together and building up that social element that's missing when you're working in a distributed way. So we're always looking for interesting places to go. Now there is this whole culture in digital because of things like the four hour work week. So Tim Ferriss book that kind of took the world by storm a little bit and said look, what if you could create a lifestyle where you travel the whole time and you run a business remotely, which he calls his museum. And the idea is that it's making you money when you're away and there's lots of people that are looking at can they do their job from somewhere else. Now there's all sorts of practicalities that might get in the way of that. So if you've got kids or anything else, they're schools, they can't really be traveling the whole time necessarily. I'm not saying it's not possible, but there is this whole idea of traveling somewhere and working remotely, whether that's for a short period of time or a long period. And I found this amazing website called Nomad list. So it's nomadlist.com and you go in and you select what you want. So I start by selecting a month of the year, might be the whole year, might be just a particular month. I going to look at how much money that I've got to spend on a kind of monthly basis. What kind of weather do I want? Cold, mild or warm? Do I need fast Internet? Is that essential? Is it near where I am? Is it near A beach. Other people scored it well, is it safe? Is it safe for lone women traveling? Is it good for co working? Is it friendly? Is the air clean? Is the nightlife good? Is it near a mountain? You get the idea. And you can also look at kind of visa requirements and so on as well for your particular nationality. So I'm going to go in here and say, right, okay, I want to travel in June, somewhere with very fast Internet that's very warm in June. I want it to be somewhere that's very safe and it must have clean air. Be near a beach and it goes off and it finds me a load of places. So for example, I haven't selected the near you option, I should say this. And it comes up with, first of all, Valencia in Spain. So it says Valencia in Spain and it tells me how much it costs and it reckons I need about $2,180 a month to survive there as a digital nomad. But then it goes Miami in the US, well that's a bit more expensive, $3200. But actually Kangu in Bali, in Indonesia reckons $900. And you get the idea. So it's suggesting places. And when I go through to one of those places, it tells me the overall score that other people have given tells me average cost of living, the weather, all those sorts of things. So if you are looking at travelling as a group or you're looking at golf and changing your life and doing something a little bit interesting, it's just a fun website. And it's one of those things if you quite like coming up with ideas that you're never actually going to use as well, it's quite good for doing those things, seeing other people's insights on as well. And it's one of those things. Kind of half the pleasure in traveling and in even purchasing sometimes is the anticipation. It's the kind of planning that goes into it. So I think Nomad list is quite nice for that as well. So that's the tools and tips and websites that I wanted to go through for today. Just a couple of shameless plug kind of things at the end. And we try not to do too many of these. But if you haven't seen another tool that you might find useful on the Target Internet website, we have got our digital skills benchmark now. So go through to the website, you go to benchmark on the menu and you register your details and it will ask you a whole series of questions about digital marketing and it will try and work out where your skills lie. But also where the gaps are based on your current role and your kind of career aspirations and your level of seniority as well. From that it will then output a load of free content. So there is some premium content, there is our paid for elearning, but it will also give you all the blog posts, podcasts, videos, all those sorts of things that we do for free as well and that will helpfully on your learning path as well. So we have got that digital skills benchmark. So go off take a look at the tools. As ever, we would love to hear about the tools that you're using. So just go through targetinternet.com and you've got the contact page. All of the links through to the tools are targetinternet.com podcast and hopefully you can try those out. Let us know what you think and we'll see you again on the Digital Marketing Podcast.