I Wish I had A Tool That…

You know, there are just so many times when Jacob and I are working on marketing campaigns when we wish there was an automated tool to help us do this or that.

Thankfully, Jacob and I have been able to find a tool or make one that does what we need. Here a couple of the top tools we use. Some are free and some are not but regardless of price, these tools will save you tons of time. Time... you know, that one resource you can't buy more of (oh wait, resveratrol?)...

• SpeedPPC - This is one tool Jacob and I used a lot. In fact, MOST of the campaigns we have made this year have been built using this. It just saves so much time and take your campaign quality scores to another level.
• Workspace Macro Pro - This is a great tool where you can create macros and have them repeated over and over automatically. For this, you essentially record yourself doing a set of actions and can play it back whenever. Can save a ton of time for repetitive tasks.
• Adwords Editor - If you're not using Adwords editor to edit your campaigns, you can be wasting a lot of time. This and other desktop tools are really useful at increasing efficiency.
• Xobni - Xobni is a tool I use every single day of the week, 365 days a year. It's an outlook plugin that I seriously can't live without. It indexes emails for extremely quick searching, links email to linked in profiles, facebook, etc. This way you can see a face with each email if they have a profile. It shows the persons telephone number if they have ever sent it to you via email, etc. If you have a lot of emails, this is a great tool to have.
• iPhone... Nuff said.

Really, there are probably hundreds of tools out there that could probably replicate or do something similar to the tools above. Those are just the ones I have found to work best for me.

In a small business environment, it's easy for us to do the long repetitive tasks over and over and feel good about us having worked for 8 hours straight on getting that campaign up. If there is a way to automate it and it costs $500 bucks, we shy away from it because we want to save money. In all honesty, you can make a lot more by being more efficient and working on multiple things.

There are also some tools I did not mention simply due to their nature. I put them in my "do not share" folder. You can find them around if you search for a need you have when creating campaigns.

There is also Elance. Elance is a great place to find programmers who are willing to code projects for you cheaply and efficiently. If you find a tool that might help you out, think about having it created.

After all, we only have so much time!