5 Tools Every Marketer Needs to Survive These 5 Daily Struggles

I'd argue that an "unmarketer's" perception of the life of a marketer is fairly imprecise.

You see, to the untrained eye, a marketer's day-to-day appears to be filled with creative brainstorms, juicy analytics, and happy clients. 

The truth is, some days do pan out this way (and it's awesome.) However, most days, we're thrown our fair share of obstacles. 

But rather than let a wrench in your plans derail your entire day's work, check out these resources that will help you fight back. 

1. There's not enough hours in the day

Handle

Gone are the days when you have to bounce between your email and a post-it note to document what needs to get done. 

Handle is a mobile app for iPhone and iPad that is designed to help you "get a handle" on your day-to-day by seemlessly merging email, calendars, reminders, and to-dos. 

Feeling like your sanity is burried somewhere in your inbox?

Simply swipe right to delete a message, mark it to read later, or archive it, or swipe left to create a to-do task, set a reminder, or add it to your calander. 

This user-friendly approach makes it easy to turn an email from your boss into a to-do list task, or an email from your BFF about brunch into a calendar appointment. 

One of the most innovative features is the Handle Timeline. Using smart technology, the timeline will only turn up taks that you can take action on now based on the time, location, and your events and priorities. 

(Don't have an iPhone? Handle is also available as a Chrome extension for your desktop, where it can be easily connected to your Dropbox to keep everything in sync.)

2. You don't know what to blog about

BlogAbout

Let's brainstorm here. What are five things that are worse than writer's block?

1. Burning your toast (twice)
2. Hitting your funny bone
3. Getting snowed-in with your in-laws
4. When the wine runs out???
5. ............

We give up.

The point is, writer's block is the worst. 

Having spent far too much time staring at the blinking cursor, we decided to take matters into our own hands, and as a result, BlogAbout was born. 

BlogAbout is an interactive, plug-and-play style blog title generator that helps you brainstorm awesome ideas for your next blog post. 

Rather than serve up a handful of static titles like most generators, BlogAbout invites participation, giving you more control over the process. 

After all, these ideas are your own, we're just here to help organize them. 

3. There's too much distracting you from writing

ZenPen

You sit down to write some email copy and suddenly the storm hits. 

Your emails are multipying by the minute, tweets come pouring in, your co-worker is frantically messaging you about her latest breakup, and suddenly your screen is a tangled mess of notifications and blinking tabs. 

So much for that email copy... 

Rather than let distractions get in the way of what really matters, open ZenPen. 

ZenPen is a "minimalist writing zone" that is designed to block out eveything on your screen so you can let the words flow from your finertips in total peace.

While ZenPen is pretty stripped down, you can still use basic features like bold and italics, and easily insert urls and quotes. 

4. Your designer's plate is full

Canva

"Can you adjust this photo?"

"Can you layout this ebook?"

"Can you redesign our entire website?"

Over the course of a day, we throw a lot at our designers. 

So when the need for something small like a Twitter sharable image comes up, I turn to Canva. 

Rather than intterupt them in the middle of their creative process, I (a non-designer) can use Canva to create high quality visuals for a number of different marketing needs. 

This tool has a template for everything from Facebook cover photos to SlideShares to Instagrams to email headers to Twitter posts to...you get the point.

Between the templates and the easily customizable images and fonts, Canva takes the complexity out of the design process, making it easy for marketers like you and I to produce work our designers would be proud of. 

5. It's time to schedule social media

BuzzSumo

Struggling to uncover shareable content that your following will actually enage with?

Look for furth than BuzzSumo. 

Quite simply, Buzzsumo allows users to identify content that has performed well on social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, & Pinterest. This content can then be filtered by type to help users narrow their search (articles, infographics, guest posts, giveaways, interviews, & videos.)

If need be, you can also share the content directly to any of your networks by simply clicking the share option next to the title or selecting on of the colored share counters. 

Aware that strong social media strategies incorporate both original content and outside resources, this tool will help reduce the ammount of time you spend searching for content worth sharing.