we subscribe so you don’t have to

If you’ve ever tried to handle your own marketing as a small-to-medium business and suddenly felt like you’ve opened a can of worms, you’re not alone. While we’re used to the plethora of marketing tools, techniques and tactics, it’s completely reasonable that you aren’t.

As well as a seemingly overwhelming selection of platforms and products, is the overwhelming price of them! And we hear you, it’s a lot!

But one of the big benefits of working with a consultancy, like ours, is that we’ve tested the best of the best, and we’ve subscribed so you don’t have to.

marketing tools we subscribe to for our clients

Do you really want to get me started on all of our subscriptions? Well, maybe, but I’m warning you, there are a lot! So instead of listing them all, here’re our GOAT paid-for marketing tools that we use pretty constantly!

Canva Pro

Here’s our big shout-out to Canva – we love you guys! I’m always recommending Canva to clients – it’s a fast-developing, easy to use design tool and they have packed it out with nearly everything. 

Don’t get me wrong it’s not replacing Adobe Creative Cloud and other heavy-weight tools… at least not just yet! But for your day-to-day design tasks it’s fantastic. 

Adobe Creative Cloud 

Canva is good – but we can’t live without our Adobe Creative Cloud – and neither should you. 

If the design is extremely important, if it’s going to be printed, if it’s the cornerstone of your business/brand – then have a professional use something as professional as Adobe Creative Cloud.

Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere, Acrobat, and that’s not even an extensive list. But these are pro tools, and you probably want a university degree in them or 10+ years experience using them to be able to do it right!

Lucky for you the Unicorns are pros, eh? 

So if you need a logo, a brand, artwork for any print purpose, then we’d likely be doing that in Adobe for you.

Figma

Oh we LOVE Figma… Figma is a really clever design tool that bridges the gap between design and development for digital creativity. It’s packed with clever features that have us repeating ‘why wasn’t that always a thing?!’

If we design a website or app for you, we’ll be doing it in Figma, because then when it comes to developing having a Figma design to hand makes the process much easier. And if you want pixel perfect – trust me you do – then you want Figma! 

Typeform

Typeform forms hit different – to use a phrase the Gen Z will approve of. I remember Typeform’s early days, right at the start in 2012 (which should help you figure out I’m not actually a member of Gen Z – no cap) and they were boldly different, with a really slick user experience. They knocked the other form platforms out of the water. I was desperate to get a job with them – their HQ being in Barcelona also had something to do with that!

And they haven’t disappointed since, either. They’ve made huge strides in conversion, rich data, and their integrations are exceptional. And they’re doing some really clever things with AI now too. 

So if we’re doing anything form-esque for our clients, it’s usually on Typeform.

Hootsuite

We’ve tried so many social scheduling tools over the years, but we keep coming back to Hootsuite. I’ll be honest here, I don’t have phenominal things to say about Hootsuite – except for the fact that it actually works. And I can’t say that of any of the others we’ve used… 

That’s not to slight Hootsuite, it’s a great platform, it helps us schedule social posts in quickly for clients (honestly this takes an AGE without one of these scheduling platforms) and it’s easy to use. But it’s ££££££££££. Aren’t you glad we subscribe so you don’t have to? 

Claude AI

So we’ve dabbled in AI for a while here and there – so many of the tools mentioned above have been integrating AI features for a while now. But when it comes to having our own little AI helper at Unicorn Marketing we knew we wanted to make an ethical choice and to use it wisely. 

And it’s still a learning curve for us. But we’re finding ways to use it to benefit our clients and advance our marketing. We’ve just begun offering AI marketing services which will benefit clients in a wide variety of ways. 

Before you start worrying we’re generating all our client content by popping a lazy prompt together, check out our ‘How we’re using AI – hint, it’s not the way you’d guess’ blog here. 

Google Drive

We’re Google-people. Google Drive is super helpful for marketers. It’s our filing system, our storage, our one single truth for all documents (that sounds inflated, but it’s really not!). 

Each client gets their own space on our Google Drive, and they can have access too – so whenever you can’t remember where that dark-version logo is, or that leaflet design you needed to re-print – it’ll all be there on Unicorn’s Google Drive! 

marketing tools our clients pay for

Now unfortunately, we can’t cover it all, there may be circumstances that mean a marketing tool needs to be paid for by the client. But there are usually really good reasons for this.

Email marketing platforms, for example. Once you get over a certain number of audience members or need specific functionality, these tools typically come with a subscription. And for data control, email marketing platforms are best kept separate and paid for by the client. 

Our favourite email marketing platforms range from the complex CRMs like Hubspot, to our B2B go-to Brevo, and our B2C go-to of Mailchimp. But we have used (and still do use) a huge selection of email marketing platforms based on each clients’ individual requirements. 

are we the right fit for your business?

It’s true, we suit a particular type of business best; we sit somewhere at the intersection of agency and in-house. So if your business has these requirements then it might be time to call Unicorn Marketing:

• You have the time to help us understand your business and audience
• You don’t have time for your own marketing (in part or in full)
• But you also don’t have the budget to hire a full team in-house
• And you don’t have the budget for all these fun marketing tools either
• Maybe you’ve tried agencies but had mixed results
• You do want to see better results from your marketing
• You’re not sure where to start but you know there’s growth potential
• Your business deserves better marketing

contact us to find out what we could do for your business