We’ve heard a lot about Arianne and wanted to hear about the digital tools she uses every day to make her work as good as it is…
As Strategy Director at Epiphany Search and a regular on the conference scene, Arianne Donoghue is a big name in the Digital Marketing industry. So we asked her to put together a list of the digital tools she couldn’t live without!
Over to you, Arianne…
It’s been good fun putting this list together and thinking about how different the tools I can’t live without at work are compared to the ones I can’t live without at home. There’s a few common to both but’s interesting to think about the huge number of digital tools we use daily.
This list of the tools I use at work also looks very different now to how it would have done only a year ago. My role has moved on from one that was very operational in terms of managing Paid Search, Social and Display every day. Now, my job focuses more on the agency itself, including more of a focus on things like new business, marketing and ways of working. This means that whereas until now, Excel would have easily been the main tool I used over the last decade or so, now it doesn’t even make the top 10. (Cue existential angst – can I even call myself a PPC-er anymore?)
Replacing my beloved Excel is another Office product – PowerPoint. I put together a lot of presentations and due to the number of technical snafus I’ve seen at events involving Google Slides, good old PowerPoint is my go-to.
I’m one of those people who tries to live a paperless lifestyle as much as possible, so I need somewhere to store all my digital notes. For me, the app I use to do that is OneNote. I’ve tried apps like Evernote in the past and really liked them, but I because I use a PC, OneNote makes sense.
For managing tasks and deadlines, I love using Trello. I’m one of those people who use Trello for a ton of thing in my personal life, whether it’s planning a holiday, finding recipes or keeping track of some of my bigger goals.
While I’m not a fan of Google Slides, the rest of the Google Suite is super important for collaboration and moving forward on key projects with others in the agency – Google Sheets and Google Docs get used multiple times a day by myself and pretty much everyone else.
For keeping in touch as we collaborate, the tool I couldn’t live without is Google Hangouts. We do also use Slack at Epiphany, particularly within our Studio and Dev teams, but Hangouts is the most universally used.
There’s a couple of apps that I can’t live without at work or at home. 1Password is my go-to password manager to keep my logins and personal details as safe as possible (it’s much easier to use secure, complicated passwords when you don’t have to remember them all) and one of the first apps I always install on a computer the first time I use it is f.lux. It adjusts the colour balance of your monitor to filter out the blue light as the sun goes down, with the aim of hopefully stopping the devices we use from interfering with our sleep. I use f.lux over the Night Light built into Windows as it offers different colour modes and functionality.
It’s really important to keep up to date with what’s going on in our fast-moving industry and one of my favourite ways to stay informed is by using Tweetdeck. As well as my own personal Twitter accounts it helps me manage and stay up to date on everything going on with She Does Digital.
A tool I’m increasingly finding I can’t live without is Power BI. It’s something I’ve begun to look into to help automate some of our reporting and analysis and while I’ve barely scratched the surface, there’s so much potential for how tools like this can shape how we do things for the better.
Finally, ScreenToGif is indispensable when putting presentations together. If you need to show more than a screenshot and you want to keep file sizes small, it’s a great way to record what’s going on and share it.
Huge thanks to Arianne for sharing her list of digital tools, and for including some that we could all do with at home as well as at work! I’d never heard of f.lux before and I’ve now installed it onto my work and home laptops!
I hope this blog series can help you continue to find the right tools for you and improve your own work and skills. If you’re looking for your next career move, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our expert recruiters to discuss digital jobs by emailing your CV to jobs@clockworktalent.com. You can keep up with clockworkTalent on our social media: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram & Pinterest.
