Tech Tools I Love
Finding the right tech stack for your business can be a time consuming and difficult journey. Get it wrong and it could cost you a fortune and soak up hours of your valuable time (been there!).
We have a great tech set up now with a range of excellent tools that all work together to streamline our business.
Over the years, we have explored and used a variety of tech tools to bring our business to life. Some good, some not so good and some downright terrible (Dubsado I’m looking at you!)
Listed below are the ones we have tried and tested and which we can wholeheartedly recommend right now.
Please note that this page contains affiliate links. When you buy through these I may earn affiliate commission but this does not cost you anything extra.
Design Platform
Having an easy to use design platform is an absolute must for your business if you want to save countless hours of time and create stunning professional images which convert.
Business Level : All
The last decade has seen an incredible revolution in design putting the power of design into the business owners hands. We have used Adobe Express for more than a year now and use it to create all of the visual assets for our business, from social media posts right through to presentation decks. One of my very favourite features is Adobe Scheduler, a brilliant scheduling tool that integrates with Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn and X so you can create and schedule content all in one place.
Including both paid and free membership levels, Adobe Express is packed with templates, stock photos and allows you to resize content, convert files, and easily add animation and effects allowing you to quickly create visually stunning images and video content, before sending them out via your social media channels in just a few clicks. Content creation has never been easier.
Check out Adobe Express HERE
Email Platforms
Email is quite literally the most important way to stay in contact with your customers / clients. Unlike social media it is a channel where your customer data is owned by you. I have listed the only two platforms we recommend, one for early to medium stage businesses and one for growing and larger businesses. We have used both in our business over the years and regularly recommend these to clients.
Business Level : Early to Medium
MailerLite is quite possibly the easiest email platform out there to set up and manage. MailerLite none-the-less offers a suite of essential tools to make sending emails simple. Combining a simple drag and drop email editor with an easy automation builder, landing pages, sign-ups forms and pop-ups it has everything you need to collect emails, host lead magnets and send automated emails.
Even better, it’s currently free for up to 1,000 contacts allowing you to send up to 12,000 emails per month.
Check out MailerLite HERE
Business Level : Medium to Large
More than just an email platform Active Campaign is also a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system with a multitude of different options to choose from. Starting with Marketing (i.e. email) you can also add on Sales where you can set up pipelines to talk to and organise your customers wherever they are in their journey in relation to your business. Whilst it’s a little more daunting to set up than MailerLite, the tools it contains are incredibly powerful and we use it every day in our business.
Starting at only $29 a month for up to 1,000 contacts the real power of ActiveCampaign comes in its incredibly powerful automations which allow you to segment and send highly personalised emails to your customers. An AI automation builder has recently been added to make creating powerful automations even easier.
Check out ActiveCampaign HERE
Need help setting up your email platform? We have some great ‘How To’ videos inside The Marketing Insiders Club on how to use MailerLite and we can also work with you to set up ActiveCampaign and give you personalised tutorials on how to integrate it into your business via our agency Enjoy Marketing®.
Website
If you’re serious about business a brilliant website is an absolute MUST. You can only go so far with social media only where you are at the behest of tech titans who, it’s safe to say, don’t seem to have your best interests at heart - and ultimately own your data and content. Likewise we have recently seen a huge uptick in people losing their social media accounts for good. Sounds awful doesn’t it? As a place to curate and showcase your offer you cannot get better than your own website and all of our websites are hosted on Squarespace.
Squarespace is a wonderfully intuitive and easy to use website builder and website host which is packed with easy to work with templates to get you started. And after your site is up and running, it’s a cinch to look after, add pages, all the good stuff made simple.
Squarespace is a template website builder, there are of course other website builders out there, we also look after Wordpress sites in our agency, but if you want something that is super simple to maintain and update yourself, our strong recommendation is Squarespace.
Check out Squarespace HERE
Need help creating a stunning and easy to navigate website for your business? We can work with you to create a website you love via our agency Enjoy Marketing®.
Course and Membership Hosting
Choosing the right platform for your memberships and courses is a very difficult proposition, there is sooooo much to think about from a smooth user experience to having it nativelly integrate with the rest of your set up from your payment and email platforms. There are now so many membership and course platforms out there all offering slight different set ups it’s difficult to know where to start. It’s also a total pain to move once you have onboarded a bunch of people so you want to make sure that you get it right straight out of the box. Our memberships are hosted on Mighty Networks, however, we have also regularly worked with clients who use Circle and we can wholeheartedly recommend both platforms.
One of the real benegits of Mighty Networks is that you can host both Memberships and Courses on there and it also has a built in community platform. There are apps for both Android and IOS and it’s also easy to navigate via your browser. Via their Mighty Pro set up you can also have those apps fully branded under your business. Mighty Networks is made up of Spaces which you can set up individually for each different course, event, and membership that you. You have full control over the branding for each seperate space so they can be different for each product you host. There are also some nice little touches such as being able to livestream into all your spaces at once or just one of them should you wish. Each space has it’s own community and there is also one overarching community were all of your users can network together. It now has AI setup, unlimited members and spaces, powerful analytics chat and direct messages.
Check out our membership The Marketing Insiders Club which is hosted on Mighty Networks.
Check out Mighty Networks HERE.
Circle is perfect for memberships, coaching groups and courses. It has community at it’s heart so if you are looking for a platform where you can encourage interaction between clients it’s a no brainer. Users can DM each other and participate in discussions. It can intergrate seamlessly with your own website as well as other course platforms such as Kajabi and Teahcable via a Single Sign on (SSO). It’s also easy customisable so you can bring in all of your own branding.
Check out Circle HERE
Payment Platforms
There are a few payment platforms out there right now with SamCart and ThriveCart being the biggies in our particular online space. There’s one very big difference between to two and that is SamCart has a rather hefty monthly payment (currently $79 per month paid monthly) on their basic package and (currently) $159 a month if you want their Grow package which includes some rather essential checkout automations. ThriveCart on the other hand is a one off payment (currently $495). We use ThriveCart and can wholeheartedly say that it does everything that we need it to do with ease.
We have been using ThriveCart for a few years now, it’s relatively easy to set up and super easy to set up checkout pages for individual pages once you have it up and running. You simply integrate it with your payment processor of choice e.g. PayPal or Stripe and they work together to take and process your payments. The interface is well laid out and intuitive to use. You can set up one-off payments or take monthly subscriptions. It’s fully customisable so you can set carts up with your branding or re-brand every individual cart for each different product.
It also has a powerful affiliate centre if you want others to sell your products for you.
Check out Thrive Cart HERE
Quiz
I can’t recommend quizzes enough for both generating leads and helping build a detailed picture of your potential and current clients. It’s no understatement to say that we have pivoted our whole business strategy with the help of a well structured quiz. As well as bringing in lots of information a quiz is also one of the best lead magnets out there, bringing in leads almost on autopilot.
Business Level : All
Having trialled several other quiz platforms over the years with varying levels of success we recently moved to ScoreApp for our quiz and it was nothing short of a revelation. Delivering incredible information about our clients, it also has fully integrated AI to help you build the quiz and ask the right questions. ScoreApp also natively integrates with ActiveCampaign to help you log all the quiz results within your email platform/ CRM so you can send out follow up emails to help you move your quiz takers ever closer to becoming clients.
Check out our quiz The Marketing Powerhouse Quiz HERE
Check out ScoreApp HERE
Need help setting up your quiz and integrating it with your email platform? We can work with you to create a high converting quiz which will deliver mountains of knowledge about your clients via our agency Enjoy Marketing®.
Client Proposals and Contracts
If you want to be taken seriously as a service provider, you need to make sure that your client proposals and contracts look professional, are properly branded and make it easy for your prospects to sign. I used to use a system called Dubsado, which is probably the least intuitive online platform I’ve ever used in my business. I paid for not one but two Dubsado professionals to set it up and integrate it into my business and it was still a horror to use. After losing a ton of time and cash I removed Dubsado from my business and replaced it with Better Proposals which is a slightly different proposition, but soooooo much better! We now create proposals and contracts with ease and get them signed super-fast.
The simple way to send and keep track of documents, proposals and contracts. It has a fully integrated document editor which makes it simple to brand everything that you send out so that your business comes across as extremely professional. You can track who has opened, how many times and where they are in reviewing the document. Better Proposals also integrates with your payment processor meaning you can take payments directly from inside your documents as well as collecting all the information that you require for a project.
Check out Better Proposals HERE
Podcasting
Communicating with your audience is a key part of marketing. I do it in a variety of ways, I host a weekly podcast The Audience Growth Podcast where I talk about what’s working in our business and the marketing world right now. I also talk to a variety of guest experts from across the business and marketing world about how they have build their audiences and what they do to promote their businesses. Our Podcast platform of choice is Captivate.fm.
I conduct all of my interviews via Riverside.fm. It’s a virtual studio which roughly similar to video conferencing tool Zoom but delivers so much more quality.
Business Level : All
Setting up a podcast is much easier than you might think given the fantastic advances in technology over the last few years. One of the main things that you must decide on straight away before you launch is where you are going to host your podcast. We use Captivate.fm. It’s a one stop shop for content management, insights, episode planning, monetisation and promotion with everything in one handy dashboard.
You upload your episode to Captivate and then they deliver it at the click of a button to Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, basically all the biggies. It really couldn’t be easier to get your podcast out into the world.
Once you get further on you can also start to add in ads right from within Captivate.
Captivate is also packed with tons of information about how to start a Podcast, a free podcast course and tons of other useful resources for all stages of the Podcast journey.
Check out The Audience Growth Podcast HERE
Check out Captivate.fm HERE
Business Level : All
Originally when I started my Podcast I used Zoom to conduct interviews but it has some serious limitations in the quality of audio and picture so it was quickly removed from our set-up. Our platform of choice now is Riverside.fm which records you and your guest locally on your own computer and then transfers the recordings up to the cloud. This allows it to record both the sound and video in high quality which is essential if you want to have a professional podcast and have the video to use either for a video podcast or for promo clips.
One of its handiest features is that it also has AI transcriptions meaning you can add captions, or re-use the text for blogs and more. It also allows you to edit the whole podcast within the app utilising the Transcriptions so you can quickly delivery the perfect podcast by simply removing sections of the text. Clever, isn’t it!
Going even further a brand new feature lets you create short-form clips for your social media with built in AI sizing and styling them.
Check out The Audience Growth Podcast HERE
Check out Riverside HERE
Descript
Business Level : All
Descript is a one stop shop Video and Podcasting tool where you can write, record, transcribe, collaborate and share your videos and podcasts. Perhaps it’s most essential use though it as an editing tool. You can edit from the transcript. It’s as easy as finding words, hums, haw’s, spaces, mistakes and simply delete them and they are in turn removed from the recording.
If you are thinking about starting your own Podcast but are put off by the complexity or perhaps the cost of a good editor then this is the tool that you want.
One of the really fun and also very useful aspects of Descript is that it has an AI voice cloning tool so if you have made a mistake you can write the text into the transcript and Descript will match it to your voice.
Descript also has a studio quality noise removal and echo cancellation so you can get the best possible sound for your podcast.
Check out Descript HERE
Blue Yeti Microphone
Business Level : All
One thing that you shouldn’t scrimp on if you want that professional podcast sound is a microphone. You can only do so much after the recording has been made to fix poor sound, you really want to make sure that it’s crystal clear with a nice warm feel right from the outset. To do that you need a good mic. There are a million mics out there and the one that I use is the Blue Yeti from Logitech. It’s a USB plug and play mic and has a nice warm overall sound with a simple set up.
Check out The Blue Yeti mic HERE
Pro-Tip - Want the best sound possible? You also need a pop guard and filter HERE and a microphone isolation shield HERE. All of these help keep background sounds and nasty pops at bay.
Video Broadcasting
You may well have arrived in my world via one of my many live challenges, masterclasses or workshops. Whilst you perhaps viewed the broadcast from within a Pop Up Facebook Group I don’t broadcast natively from within Facebook as it has quite a few limitations. I use an online app called StreamYard
Business Level : All
StreamYard is hands down one of the best live stream software options out there. Everything is hosted from your browser with an intuitive interface, it’s a cinch to set-up and use. Its most powerful feature is that you can multistream to up to 8 platforms at the same time including Facebook, Facebook Groups, LinkedIn and YouTube. You can have your own logo on the screen so it looks super professional, you can go split screen so you can present with slides and still be on the screen and you can host guests, hosting up to 10 people screen at once. It also records in Full HD (1080p)
Check out Stream Yard HERE
Ring Light
Business Level : All
If you are planning to regularly create video content and want to look your best during your challenges and masterclasses or perhaps you are really into doing Reels or TikToks I highly recommend making sure that your lighting is spot on.
Daylight is best but for anything else you are going to need at least one ring light. We currently have 4 of various sizes set up in our studio.
Check out Ring Lights HERE
Website Pop Up
Want to sell more of your courses / memberships / digital products? Or to let people know about special events as soon as they land on your site you need a good pop-up option. The easiest one we’ve found to set up and maintain is Convertbox from the team behind Thrive Cart
Business Level: All
Convertbox allows you to deliver personalised offers, lead capture forms and surveys to the right visitors at the right times. You can have them pop up on all pages or just one, whatever works for your product. It has A/B Split testing, powerful segmentation and is simple to set up with drag and drop technology. You can also set up multistep funnels from within each pop up.