With Thanksgiving right around the corner, myself and the rest of the KoMarketing team recently took some time during a team training session to share some online tools that we are thankful for as B2B marketers. As we were going around the room, rattling off all kinds of great time-savers and organizational sidekicks, I thought to myself, “It’d be pretty selfish of me to keep such great information to myself.”

So, here I am, offering anybody who’s interested an inside look at 20 online tools that we are thankful for here at KoMarketing. Enjoy!

Evernote

What Is It?: Evernote serves as a digital work space that has the ability to live across multiple devices, keeping valuable information readily available with the click of a button. Users can write free from distraction, collect important information, find what they need, and even share their ideas with the world.

Why We Are Thankful: Evernote has allowed (some) of us to ditch our old-school yellow notepads. With features like daily checklists, virtual notebooks (for individual clients/projects), and the ability to save and tag articles we find across the web, it provides a sleek digital alternative to pen and paper.

Google Docs

What Is It?: Living within Google Drive, Google Docs, Sheets and Slides allow users to collaboratively create, edit, and access documents online.

Why We Are Thankful: Oftentimes, a number of team members are working together to build out a document (blog posts, keyword lists, page tagging recommendations, etc.), Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides provide our team members with an opportunity to collaborate on projects at their leisure, in real-time. We subscribe to email alerts that notify us when a change has been made to the document to stay up to date.

Gmail Labels

What Is It?: The “Labels” feature in Gmail possesses the same functionality that folders do in standard email services, but include the ability to add more than one label to a single message.

Why We Are Thankful: Many of our team members are “visually minded,” making the Labels feature a welcomed addition to the marketing toolbox. As seen in the example above, the user has labeled specific messages in their inbox with color-coded tags as an easy way to stay organized. Working at an agency, this can be a very helpful way to quickly identify urgency or the client a specific message has come from.

Google Keep

What Is It?: Much like Google Docs, Google Keep is automatically synchronized with the user’s Google Drive interface, allowing them to create, access and organize notes, lists and photos.

Why We Are Thankful: While some of us still love to use sticky notes, Google Keep provides a nice digital alternative. This virtual bulletin board allows us to access across devices, keep important notes, and check off items when used as a “to do” list.

Basecamp

What Is It?: Basecamp is a place to share files, have discussions, collaborate on documents, assign tasks, and more. Much like some of the other tools we have covered, Basecamp can also be accessed from multiple devices.

Why We Are Thankful: Basecamp is an incredibly valuable tool to KoMarketing. It not only allows us to collaborate on projects internally, but also allows us to set up projects to be shared with clients as well. By doing so, we can work with our clients (setting milestones, editing documents, etc.) to stay on the same page and work together in real time.

Toodledo

What Is It?: Toodledo is a digital productivity and organizational tool that allows users to store notes, lists, and outlines in one spot.

Why We Are Thankful: One of the primary reasons we enjoy using this tool is due to its scheduling capabilities, that allow us to create repeating tasks, get reminders based on our location, and view tasks on an interactive calendar.

RescueTime

What Is It?: Running securely in the background on your computer or mobile device, RescueTime lets users track time spent on applications and websites, painting a clear picture of daily productivity and time usage.

Why We Are Thankful: The reports that RescueTime generates can be valuable to our team when determining where we could better optimize our time and gives a clear understanding of where the majority of time (and with what projects) is being spent.

Toggl

What Is It?: Toggl is a time tracking software and free timesheet alternative.

Why We Are Thankful: Similar to RescueTime, Toggl gives us a real-time look at productivity and time being spent on various activities throughout the day.

YesWare

What Is It?: YesWare is a sales toolkit that tracks emails and presentations, allowing users to create templates, log calls into CRM, and more, right from their email inbox.

Why We Are Thankful: YesWare is one of my personal favorites. It allows me to create and save easy-to-access email templates and it’s helpful when trying to reach out for 3rd party opportunities (to know if I’m being blatantly ignored or maybe have a wrong email address). YesWare also makes it very simple to create and schedule emails for a designated time in the future.

Swayy

What Is It?: Swayy is a personalized content discovery platform designed to help users uncover the most engaging content to share with their social audience across a number of networks.

Why We Are Thankful: Much like a RSS feed, Swayy allows us to hook up our social networks and choose topics around content that we want to be served. Swayy shows us the most popular pieces of content in that category, identifies our most popular content, and offers suggestions on what our audience is looking to consume.

Quozio

What Is It?: Quozio is a simple, user-friendly tool that turns meaningful words into clean, sharp images. Once the image has been created, users can then easily share across social media platforms.

Why We Are Thankful: Whether we are sharing wisdom within our own office setting or collecting knowledge from other industry professionals, our social media team loves using this tool to add a little bit of jazz to powerful quotes. Next time you see a quote on one of our social media profiles, chances are Quozio is responsible!

Boomerang

What Is It?: Boomerang is a Gmail widget that makes it simple to schedule and set reminders in an effort to not let any messages slip through the cracks.

Why We Are Thankful: One of our favorite features of Boomerang is its ability to set follow-ups to specific messages in our inboxes. Messages can be tagged with a variety of follow-up options (see above) to make sure any single (or all) message(s) get the attention and response they deserve.

TweetDeck

What Is It?: TweetDeck is a social media dashboard tool that makes it possible to manage multiple Twitter profiles from one interface.

Why We Are Thankful: Our social media team is very thankful for TweetDeck. Rather than having multiple windows open with multiple Twitter accounts, TweetDeck allows them to monitor social activity from a single window. Our team also enjoys the feature TweetDeck offers to create private lists in an effort to stay on top of what’s buzzing in a specific industry.

Jing

What Is It?: Jing is a free tool that allows users to easily capture and add basic visual elements to images and short videos of their computer screen to  share with others.

Why We Are Thankful: Here at KoMarketing, we rely on screenshots heavily to show the effects of the work we are doing. Whether it’s a screenshot of Google search results showing a client’s position in the rankings or just some other tidbit of info to be shared internally, Jing allows us to quickly add custom graphics to our screenshots so we can share with clarity.

Pocket

What Is It?: Available for major devices and platforms including iPad, iPhone, Android, Mac, and more, Pocket provides online information consumers with an easy way to save articles, videos and more for enjoyment at a later time.

Why We Are Thankful: All of us here at KoMarketing are always keeping our eyes open for valuable pieces of content on the web to share internally or save for reading at a later time. We’ve all had experiences where we say, “I read this article from somewhere…,” Pocket allows us to have less of those moments.

Snip

What Is It?: Snip is another screen capturing tool, but with a unique twist. With the push of a button, Snip allows users to capture the entire scrolling area of window at once.

Why We Are Thankful: Oftentimes, we want to share what an entire page of a site looks like (not just the visible portion). Snip allows us to do just that and also easily lets us share it with those that may be interested.

IFTTT

What Is It?: Short for “If This Then That,” IFTTT is a web-based service that allows users to create simple conditional statements (known on the service as “recipes”) to trigger an action between other services (Gmail, Twitter, Instagram, Craigslist, and much more).

Why We Are Thankful: Who doesn’t love a tool with automation capabilities like these?! IFTTT is used by many KoMarketers for both work and personal purposes. Want a text message when a certain hasthtag is tweeted? IFTTT can do that for you.

Focus@Will

What Is It?: Partnering with leading neuroscientists Dr. Evian Gordon and Dr. Stephen Sideroff (UCLA Professor of Psychology), Focus@Will delivers “attention amplifying” music channels that are scientifically designed to increase attention span and focus.

Why We Are Thankful: When our team members get tired of jamming out to “Iggy Azalea Radio” on Pandora, Focus@Will is a common destination. With channels ranging from “Classical” to “Uptempo,” Focus@Will has several productivity-optimized options.

Coffitivity

What Is It?: According to a peer-reviewed study out of the University of Chicago, “A moderate level of ambient noise is conducive to creative cognition.” This is where Coffitivity got its idea of creating a tool that streams the sounds of a coffee shop to those working in office settings.

Why We Are Thankful: It happens to all of us, sometimes we just need a change of scenery to refocus and finish the day or week strong. However, sometimes it isn’t ideal on our schedules to relocate to the nearest coffee shop in order to do so. Coffitivity lets us plug our headphones in and get all the noises and background commotion (which is oddly soothing) from the comfort of our desks.

Sidekick

What Is It?: Along with offering email tracking and email scheduling, Sidekick also loads the users’ email service with valuable contact insights.

Why We Are Thankful: From within our email inbox, Sidekick allows us to view a person’s title, company, social media accounts, and recent social media activity (offers an abundance of information about associates’ companies as well). This can be a serious time-saver when trying to locate additional information about a contact or the company they work for.

Final Thoughts 

This is by no means a be-all and end-all list of online marketing tools that could be valuable to B2B professionals, but we hope some of these will assist your day-to-day activities. What are some tools that you’re thankful for as Thanksgiving approaches? Let us know in the comments section!