Inkwell’s marketing manager shares her favourite time-saving tools

Hey I’m Talicza, the new marketing manager at Inkwell.

I’ve been working in marketing for almost a decade, handling everything from financial services to nationwide music festivals. I’m also co-host and one-woman-marketing-department for my podcast, Transatlantic Crime (listen now!). 

One of the hardest parts of marketing is staying organised. You might be running a dozen social channels at once, plus there’s paid advertising, newsletters and big-picture planning to keep on top of. Anything that helps you to stay on track and save time is a winner.

I wanted to share my five go-to tools to manage your day-to-day social media activity:

1. Canva: Instantly convert your artwork to the correct size

Each social media platform has an optimum image size. A picture that looks great on LinkedIn won’t work on Instagram and vice versa, and keeping track of the right size for each platform can be a nightmare.

The Canva resize feature means you can instantly convert images to the correct size in seconds. It saves you a huge amount of time, particularly when you’re queuing up content for the week. 

You’ll need to sign up for Canva Pro to access the resize tool, but I think it’s well worth the money at only £10.99 a month. In addition to the ability to resize, you also get countless stock photos and premium illustrations, and can upload your brand’s font, colours and logo. 

2. Instagram saved messages: Create a bank of replies

Manually replying to messages on Instagram eats up a lot of time, especially if it’s your main social channel. 

Instagram’s saved messages function makes the process a whole lot easier. It allows you to create a bank of canned messages that appear when you type a shortcut word, so all you have to do is hit send. 

Your saved messages might include thanking people for following you or pointing them in the direction of your customer service team if you get a lot of queries that way. Scheduling tool Planoly has a short, useful guide to explain how it all works.

3. Social media scheduling: Post multiple announcements

Posting on every social media channel for every announcement takes you a silly amount of time. Use a tool like Buffer, Hootsuite or Later instead.

Scheduling tools allow you to plan a week or more’s worth of content across three channels for free, or even more if you use a premium option. They also have great analytics features so you can see how your posts are doing.

4. Headliner: Instant video clips with captions

Investment in video marketing is growing exponentially – it’s gone from being a nice-to-have to an essential part of marketing strategies.

A quick glance at the fastest growing social platforms (TikTok has 100 million monthly active users despite only launching five years ago) gives you an indication of how popular video has become.

Headliner allows you to make small video clips from podcasts, video and other audio, which are famously difficult to do from scratch and can cost thousands from an agency. You can also add captions, which again is a premium service from most other providers. 

5. LinkTree: Keep multiple links in one place

Social media platforms like Instagram allow you to add one link to your bio and prevent links in photo captions – a problem if you want to channel your audience towards multiple pages.

The best way around this is to get yourself a free LinkTree account and add the link to this in your bio on Instagram and Twitter. With an account, you can add as many links as you like and title them appropriately.

LinkTree accounts are super easy to customise too, so you can make the page feel like an extension of your brand.

Get more tips and insights from the Inkwell team by following us on social – we’re on Twitter and LinkedIn.