The tools of the trade! With millions out there to choose from, how do you know what is right for you and how do you know if they’re any good or not? In today’s episode of the podcast, I’m chatting all about the tools I use to make my socials stand out, why I love them and create everything I do with ease of transaction.
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Transcription
Hi, guys, welcome to another cracking episode of The Hayley Osborne show. We’re talking tools of the trade today, guys. And it is a cool episode because I really wanted to come in and share with you what tools I use in my business. With the millions out there to choose from How do you know the right tools for you? How do you know if they’re good enough or not? How do you know? If you invest the money? Will it be? Will it do its job.
So today’s episode, I really wanted to talk about the tools that I use. And hopefully, there’ll be something new in there for you to try it as well. So again, a huge thank you for tuning in and listening wherever you are today. This podcast means so much to me. And it means a lot that you take the time out of your day to listen so that you can up skill your learning along the way.
I’m here to teach you as much as I possibly can when it comes to you being the number one in your local community, both online and offline, and really being the superhero marketer in your business because your business deserves that small businesses are definitely the backbone of the economy. I strongly believe that. And it’s my role through this podcast to really demystify local area marketing, and make you help you to become the number one so that’s why I’m here.
But lets chat tools of the trade when it comes to marketing your business.
So the number one I’m gonna get straight to it, the number one tool of my trade is Canva is well worth the investment. If you have the free version, the paid version is definitely like for the year worth the investment, it’s worth its weight in gold. Now, I’m not going to single out graphic designers at all, because I do feel like there’s a place for graphic designers. But when you have limited budgets when you are in small business, you need to spend your money wisely and investing in graphic designers when there is tools such as Canva I feel is money, not well spent. So Canva is definitely my go to for everything graphic design, I literally do everything in that I create. Everything you see on my social media, or my tiles, some stories and even reels is all done in Canva. And I have so many Canva boards. And I use that for my clients as well my private one on one clients. Canva is also used for any, anything I teach. So all of my presentations get done in Canva it literally everything. And I also present using Canva. So I don’t necessarily need to download anything. It just lives within Canva and I presented that way.
And it’s a really like modern way to teach a master class. Everything is you know, even down to like the mouse is a round kind of aqua colour, instead of like boring old PowerPoint Canva is definitely the way to go for presentations. And not to mention how nimble it is in terms of like colours. And the one thing that I absolutely love as well about Canva is that you can upload your brand fonts, your brand colours, your logos, everything to do with your business. And for me, it’s really handy because I work with lots of different businesses. So Canvas, that element of Canva is pretty amazing. And then you know you can actually schedule your social media through Canva to I don’t actually do that but Canva is becoming the number one stop shop for most business owners, which I absolutely love and I recommend you know the paid version is a very small investment for the year and it’s worth its weight in absolute gold. Especially now you know we are creating more and more video content, there’s some really beautiful video in the backend of Canva that you can just like drag over and overlay it with a quote or something like that to get really clever about how you make your reels, then, so that’s Canva. And if anyone has any questions, feel free to like, send me a DM, but everything’s created in Canva.
I do however still use a graphic designer. My fiance Mark, he is a web developer and graphic designer. Mark is the brains behind my brand. He runs his own business called Brain Box Media, that’s Brain Box Media, if anyone listening wants to go and have a look, he is the clever guy behind all of the neon, the podcast, artwork, anything that lives on my website, he’s the one that’s built the brand.
There is a place for graphic designers. If you want to be edgy, you want to different you know what you want, but you can’t create it in Canva. And then, you know, he created a, like a basically like an Instagram concept folder for me. And that really laid the foundations to execute what I do on my social media and how it all kind of comes together. So once I had that Instagram concept folder, it kind of all took place from there.
So I highly recommend both. But you know, for small budgets, Canva is amazing. And he also is a web developer, he’s built some of the most amazing websites for both small and large businesses. He has his portfolio on his website, I might actually get him on the podcast one day, and we can have a bit of a chat that might be funny. But he’s very creative. He’s a creative genius. So don’t think it’s all just me. And he’s the web guy. So I’m very lucky to have an in house web guy, which is cool. All right, so that’s Canva. That’s graphics, that’s, you know, Canva, one of my favourite tools of the trade when it comes to marketing your business. Another one is in shot. So in short, is an Instagram up. And I use that to edit videos as well. So the thing with editing within Instagram is if something happens to Instagram, or if you uninstall the Instagram app on your phone, which I know some people do for a break. I’m not one of those people, but everything that’s sitting in your drafts will actually be lost. So it’s in your best interest to create using your camera and edit either in short, or in Canva. I don’t recommend editing within Instagram because it can be a bit clunky. And, you know, I would like not like you to lose your work.
I know it takes so much time to do these things, we want to be able to carve out as much time saving as possible. So in short, is the app and you can download that app via the app store on your phone. There’s a free version, I use the paid version, I think it’s about $54. And that was like lifetime once off payment. And I think that’s really worth it because my prediction, which is in a couple of episodes time on video content that it’s not going anywhere soon. So it is well worth the investment. And if you’re not too keen on creating videos, just give it a red hot go. And once you get started, it becomes easier. I think the hardest part is getting started. The next app that I use for creating epic social media content is Planoly has basically saved my life. So it is the planning scheduling tool that I use for Instagram. And the reason that I love Planoly is a number of reasons. So firstly, there is a desktop version. And I’m a much faster typer with my computer obviously. So I like to have everything typed out very quickly, as opposed to on the phone. But then you find that over time you do create a lot of content on your phone and the app so you would Download Planoly. And you would download the app as well. And I upload images through the app on my phone. And then when I go to login on my desktop, they’re all that. So you don’t have to worry about like uploading to your computer and transferring files and blah, blah, blah, everything is already there.
Obviously, this isn’t for everything. But it really does take a big chunk of it saves a lot of time, there is a free version. And again, there is a paid version, I do use the paid version of this, because it’s just got more functionality, it allows me to plan more in advance what the grid looks like, you can shuffle things around, it also suggests like days that are coming up, you know, like Black Friday, and like things like that, as well as you know, world Kindness Day, like any kind of world days Planoly suggest it. It also suggests hashtags to use to which I love planning really saved me when I was heading into the end of my pregnancy this year, because it allowed me to pre plan really easily all of the content that would see me through like the hardest first month of being, you know, having a young baby. And I absolutely love it. Like I love it, I tell the members inside my membership superhero marketing about it. It’s something that’s my go to, I think I found a discount code somewhere too. So if you know, think outside the box where you can with these things, it’s really important to be resourceful. Planoly also schedules to Facebook, but only if you are scheduling something to Instagram. And same as with Twitter, it doesn’t schedule to Facebook as an independent.
So that brings me on to the next tool is meta. So obviously I use meta to schedule as well for Facebook, and Instagram. So it just depends what it is as to where I schedule it. So that’s really another, you know, obviously go to tool that’s really important. The fourth thing I wanted to talk about was Asana. And that’s not necessarily something that I use for my social media, but I use it for my social media plans. So that’s a project management tool. And I use Asana within my business to manage all the projects that I am working on. So between myself and my assistant, that’s where we work from. And it is such a great project management tool. And it’s got a little bit of bloody, it’s got a lot of integrations as well with other systems, which I love. The next one I use. Again, this is just a side kind of a sideline tool is jot form. So whenever I want to get feedback about something for a bigger group, I always use a, a jot form, survey and that that’s wonderful for collecting feedback, even for collecting testimonials. So that’s something that you can also integrate into your social media. And it’s a great way to harvest like feedback. So that’s awesome.
And then another thing that I use which I love this one, absolutely love it is stream yard. So stream yard is a godsend. So when I go live through my Facebook and my Instagram, my LinkedIn stream yard broadcast simultaneously, and you can go live or you can pre record. So if I want to say share a podcast interview with video footage of myself and my guest, I can upload so I’ll do the interview and then I’ll use that video footage as content. And I will upload that into stream yard and push it out at the same time through to Facebook and LinkedIn. I absolutely love it. So sometimes my interviews go for maybe 40 minutes but that’s max and that is awesome. And then when I go live so when I go live simultaneously you may have seen with my recent launch of doors opening to superhero marketing, I went live every day through Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. Now I do that with obviously the live on my phone with Instagram and then through stream yard for Facebook and LinkedIn and it all happened simultaneously which I love stream yard is my go to and you can actually overlay your camera with your own brand and templates over the top which looks amazing.
So i’ve got all different ones and then when I go live inside the membership once a month, there is a different element for that as well which I love. Then Another piece of social media. So I use Libsyn. For my podcast, that’s what I scheduled the podcast through. And again, I would consider the podcast kind of to be like social media, which is a really effective tool that kind of pushes it out across all platforms if you’re wondering. And then I also use otter, which is a wonderful transcription tool. And if you ever have a meeting and you want to transcribe the audio, or you are doing a podcast interview, and you want to transcribe the audio onto your website, that’s something you just literally drag and drop and it spits it out the other end obviously, you need to edit it a little bit. But that is a super time saving tool, which I love. And that’s a summary that’s it, they’re my favourite tools guys. They are my favourite tools of the trade when it comes to creating epic social media content and marketing your business so one of my absolute favourite topics, if anyone has any questions about anything I’ve said or anything that I haven’t said, even send me any of your go too’s as well.
I love to hear, what people are using what makes their job easier. What makes what you do easier, what, what programmes have I do I not know about that you might think would be amazing. Send me a DM on Instagram. That’s where I hang out the most. It’s at Hayley K Osborne. And also you know, remember that your learning curve becomes shorter when you surround yourself with the right tools and the right people. And that is it my friends for another episode of The Hayley Osborne show. Thanks for tuning in, guys.
