Best Digital Marketing Tools for Law Firms

Whether you are a sole practitioner or a nationwide brand, law firm marketing is essential to your practice’s growth. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the UK legal industry is growing with an average 8-10% growth in fees, with firms remaining largely resilient in the post-pandemic landscape.

On the other hand, claiming your piece of the cake requires marketing campaigns that excel beyond your competitors. According to an assessment from Thomson Reuters Legal UK, too many law firms still only see marketing rather than trying to understand the dynamics of each market.

This philosophy shows that it’s time to level up your game. One way of sharpening your legal marketing efforts is digital marketing tools. Let’s look at the most effective solutions for the year ahead.

Should law firms use tools for their marketing?

Online marketing is where the money is. Today, over a third of potential clients begin their search for a solicitor online.

Although you can carry out your marketing processes manually, this isn’t the best way of handling it. Using tools increases accuracy, efficiency and performance. In one study from Think With Google, marketers using five or more tools for analytics alone were 39% likelier to see a performance improvement.

Taking advantage of cutting-edge technology can save you time while delivering better results. However, not all tools were created equal, so choosing your tech stack carefully is vital.

How digital marketing tools can help law firms

Despite the clear benefits of digital marketing – and marketing generally – UK law firms spend just 2% of annual gross revenues on their marketing efforts. This is evidence of an industry that’s still somewhat edgy about throwing money at marketing.

However, digital marketing tools deliver positive ROIs when wielded correctly. Some of the advantages of investing in these solutions include:

Better Understand Your Audience – Digital marketing tools deepen your understanding of your target audience. Acquiring detailed real-time data helps you refine your marketing strategy by understanding what your prospective clients really want.

Maximise Your Reach – Use tools to reach as many people as possible with your marketing content. This is especially helpful for UK law firms operating nationwide or looking to expand into new regional markets.

Measure and Optimise – Stop fumbling in the dark using a costly trial-and-error strategy. Instead, use state-of-the-art tools to determine what’s working for your firm.

Save Time – Time is precious in the fast-paced legal trade. Digital marketing tools automate many tedious, time-consuming tasks like social media scheduling, lead tracking and email marketing.

Reduce Your Spend – Switching your focus to technology-led marketing can enable you to cut out many of the usual expenses associated with traditional marketing. Plus, it’s not uncommon for tools to offer flexible plans, mitigating your costs.

Intelligent Segmentation – In the past, digital marketing focused on hitting a broad market and hoping some of them become future clients. Today, tools are helping lawyers to initiate hyper-targeted campaigns, increasing their returns.

It’s easy to shirk away from spending hundreds of pounds on building your marketing tech stack, but think about the big picture. Digital marketing tools are a proven way for legal eagles to reduce their outgoings while increasing their returns.

Ultimately, the firm that uses marketing tools will always beat the firm that doesn’t.

Work with a Digital Marketing Agency Contact Us

Best digital marketing tools for the legal industry

Thousands of marketing tools exist for every task and process known to man. If you’re unfamiliar with legal marketing, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the options available.

This is why many lawyers bury their heads in the sand and continue managing everything manually. If you’re confused, we’ve compiled a list of the best digital marketing tools specifically for the legal industry.

Legal Marketing Strategy Tools

Before you can launch a marketing campaign, you must plan one out. Strategising is where your marketing efforts rise and fall.

Here are our favourite tools for constructing your next campaign from the ground up.

Google Search Console

The Google Search Console is part of a suite of Google-made tools for improving your SEO efforts. With the Search Console, you can conduct an initial analysis or refresh an existing strategy with an updated set of keywords.

This tool aims to do more with keywords, find errors on your site, and test how mobile-friendly your platform is. It’s also where you can see how your pages are doing on Google.

Plus, Google Search Console integrates with all other Google tools, including Google Analytics.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

By far, the best web analytics platform is GA4, the fourth iteration of Google Analytics. Lawyers can use this tool to acquire a comprehensive overview of how users interact with websites, apps and other platforms under your banner.

Ahrefs

Law firms looking for paid SEO tools with more advanced capabilities should look to Ahrefs. The value of this tool is that it examines your website to produce a range of actionable data, including:

Keywords and search volumes
Link profiles
Ranking profiles

Other features include a site and content explorer to enable you to evaluate the performance of everything you’ve ever produced on your website.

AlsoAsked

Question-based long-tail keywords can provide opportunities to demonstrate your expertise and capture niche markets. The AlsoAsked platform gives you all the most commonly asked questions from real searchers.

For example, we typed in “personal injury law”, and some of the questions we got back included:

How long does a personal injury claim take?
What’s the average payout for personal injury claims?
Should I get a solicitor for personal injury claims?

LowFruits.io

Finding keywords is one thing, but the key to good SEO is discovering high-traffic keywords with low-competition signals.

Designed for website owners, LowFruits is a bulk SERP analyser that uncovers those signals, helping you to find blue-water zones to build your authority through.

Google Trends

Evergreen content is essential, but plugging your firm into current legal trends can help you join the conversations and address real people’s concerns.

While Google Trends doesn’t offer granular data, it effectively shows the legal topics and ideas people are currently exploring.

Website and Hosting Software

In the online world, your website is your most valuable asset. This is the digital equivalent of your office. Since it’s often the first thing prospective clients see, you’ve got to get it right.

Let’s examine the best way to get your site up and running.

WordPress

In 2023, WordPress continues to reign supreme. It’s the engine behind approximately 43% of all websites on the Internet – and for a good reason.

WordPress has millions of free templates, customisation options and plugins to create the ideal legal website without coding experience.

Even better, WordPress is completely free.

Kinsta

Free web hosting doesn’t work for every business. We recommend Kinsta because of its high-end performance using Google’s C2 cloud platform (our Kinsta review gives more details!).

Kinsta’s infrastructure includes state-of-the-art security features and world-class support. Moreover, it’s highly flexible, with starter plans costing less than your monthly coffee budget.

Its lowest-cost plan includes 10 GB of storage, a premium migration and a 14-day backup.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most effective avenues to explore. According to one study, email marketing has a 4400% ROI, meaning for every £1 invested, the average return is £36.

However, you need the right platform for email. Check out these two options.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is an excellent email platform choice for most law firms because of its fair pricing system. It has all the features you need to send out highly targeted campaigns to your list.

Plus, you can customise your campaigns and split-test email subject lines with ActiveCampaign to determine what engages your list the most.

MailChimp

MailChimp is another prominent email marketing platform for lawyers. Like ActiveCampaign, it possesses all the features necessary to create custom emails and gain detailed analytics from each campaign.

Moreover, building custom templates is simple due to its drag-and-drop interface. However, beware that MailChimp tends to get expensive with larger lists.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM software streamlines how you interact with current and prospective clients. With a solid CRM in your tech stack, you can simplify building client relationships and supercharge the processes that lead to more business.

In our opinion, there’s only one choice for CRM software.

HubSpot

HubSpot isn’t a dedicated legal CRM, but it works equally well for all professional services. Some of the standout HubSpot features that make it the most effective CRM on the market include:

Automated execution
Well-configured databases
Marketing source capture
Marketing channel evaluation
Full integration with other systems

Social Media and Youtube

Social media is critical for growing your legal practice. As you’d expect, plenty of tools exist for managing your social media channels, including ones designed around specific platforms.

Here are our top social media tools:

Linkinbio – Share all your most important links in one URL to maximise your bio space.
Actual Platform Analytics – The fact is that all of the most prominent platforms have built-in analytics tabs that provide all of the data you could ever need.
TubeBuddy – YouTube SEO, analytics, keywords and tags. TubeBuddy is specially built for the world’s largest video-sharing platform to help with law firm video marketing.

Link Building

Getting backlinks to your content signals that your content is relevant, trustworthy and authority-led. Even today, backlinks are among the most effective ways of getting your content to the top of Google SERPs.

Other than reaching out to known bloggers directly, we recommend:

HARO – HARO allows journalists to ask questions of professionals. If they choose your answer, they’ll reward you with a link to your website.
Directories – Backlinks from general directories also provide some juice for your website. Ensure you’re listed on Yelp, Yellow Pages, DMOZ and others.

Supercharge your Law Firm Marketing with Tao Digital

Building your tech stack with legal digital marketing tools is the first step to accelerating your law firm. With Tao Digital, our team can help you assemble everything and gain the competitive edge you need.

If you want to learn more about the secrets of digital law firm growth, contact the team today.

Email Marketing for Law Firms: Software, Tips & Best Practices

Getting your firm in front of your audience is the hardest part of gaining clients in today’s digital world. In the UK, the average marketing cost for law firms ranges from 0.5% to 5% of annual revenues, far below that of other industries.

It’s no secret that law firms often find themselves behind the curve in digital marketing, but in that lies tremendous opportunities for forward-thinking legal professionals to take advantage. One such avenue to explore is email marketing.

With 59% of marketers claiming that email is their most effective channel, harnessing its power can supercharge your bottom line. But starting an email list isn’t enough. You need to go about it the right way.

Do law firms use email marketing?

Law firms are gradually discovering the benefits of email. Although stats from UK firms are unavailable, the American Bar Association revealed that 41% of law firms were using email newsletters for marketing in 2021, up from 26% in 2020.

This is far below other industries, meaning that unlike other forms of marketing, such as PPC and social media ads, this is a blue-water zone to be exploited.

What can you expect from adopting an effective email marketing strategy? According to the Digital Marketing Association, email marketing has an average ROI of 42:1, meaning for every £1 spent, you generate £42 in business.

How can law firms benefit from email marketing?

Email marketing is yet another channel solicitors must add to their marketing mix. Unlike other channels, email marketing offers several unique benefits.

Understand that an email is a personal conversation. It’s an intimate communication technique that allows you to speak directly to prospects. This is why it’s so effective at building relationships: the message can be customised and delivered to the right people at the right time. It’s an alternative to the legacy scattergun approach.

Mastering email marketing is an opportunity to humanise yourself while demonstrating thought leadership. It’s the action that builds trust and formulates genuine relationships between you, your prospects and your existing clients.

Ultimately, this results in more brand awareness, leads and business.

Considering the low-cost barrier to entry of email marketing, this is a cost-effective marketing option requiring little investment. You can benefit from email marketing, whether you’re a large firm or a one-man operation.

Creating an email marketing strategy for your law firm

Gathering emails and blasting out corporate news is no strategy at all. People want information that’s relevant to them. For example, if you specialise in tackling unfair dismissal cases, there’s little point in sending out a newsletter on human rights.

Understand that despite the high ROI of email marketing, MailChimp research reveals average open rates for the legal industry are a relatively low 22%, with a paltry 2.81% click-through rate. So, it’s vital to avoid being disheartened.

You need a strategy that reflects your firm and the interests of the future clients you’re targeting. So, what aspects make up an optimal email marketing strategy?

Target Audience – Who are your target audience, and what do they care about? This will be specific to every law firm. Typically, you should begin with your primary practice areas when divining content for your newsletter.

Competitor Research – What are your competitors sending? One of the easiest ways to conduct competitor research is to sign up for a few of their newsletters and create a database of the subjects they’re tackling.

Goals – What is the purpose of your email list? Not every firm’s primary goal is generating direct business. Some use them to create brand awareness and generate industry authority. Defining your goals establishes the line between success and failure and the KPIs you prioritise.

Content Type – What sort of content are you planning to send? This could be anything from promotional emails and legal guides to invoices and special offers.

Frequency – The frequency of your emails is another defining factor. Setting expectations early is crucial to avoid annoying/abandoning your audience. Make it clear what your subscribers can expect from you.

Thankfully, email marketing strategies don’t require a budget because of the minimal startup cost. The primary challenge for law firms is setting aside the time to write newsletters and measure the results.

Plan your Email Marketing Strategy Contact Us

Email marketing best practices for law firms

Email marketing requires constant learning and development to master. After all, the habits of subscribers change over time. However, certain best practices remain. Let’s discuss some top tips for law firms getting to grips with email marketing.

Set Clear Goals – Every email marketing campaign should have its own goals. Whether it’s acquiring more clients, retaining existing ones, or increasing awareness of your legal niche, you need a goal because this is what influences your measurables.
Keep Your List Pruned – Building your email list is always a priority, but so is keeping your list clean. Only 56% of email subscribers stay on a list for 12 months, meaning you may be swayed by results from emails that are no longer monitored.
Offer Value – Your emails are not a place to discuss why you are the best solicitor in the country. Instead, seek to offer value in as few words as possible. Stay away from complex legalese and leave your subscribers coming away feeling like they’ve learned something.
Monitor Your Performance – Pay close attention to your metrics for each campaign, and don’t be afraid to change if something isn’t working. A/B testing is as relevant to email marketing as any other channel.
Beware of Legal Compliance – The legal industry has more stringent policies to protect client confidentiality. This extends further than legislation like GDPR. Familiarise yourself with what you can and cannot feature to prevent potential problems.

Best email marketing software for law firms

Countless email marketing platforms exist to help you write newsletters, consolidate lists and launch campaigns. Let’s look at some of the leading options law firms use today.

Active Campaign is widespread across multiple industries because it integrates email and marketing automation. Although it’s often used for B2B clients, it’s also perfectly serviceable for B2C clients.

It allows you to tag contacts based on their behaviours, enabling you to drill down into different subscriber segments for more targeted communications.

MailChimp is one of the largest email marketing platforms in the world. It’s mainly designed for small and medium-sized businesses and offers several unique features.

For example, you can build landing pages in minutes, deliver personalised email postcards, and even send surveys to gather client feedback. However, beware that MailChimp gets expensive as your list grows, so some prefer MailerLite.

Most email marketing platforms’ fees are based on how many people you have on your list. However, Sendinblue is among the few that charge based on the number of emails sent.

Newbies to email marketing will love their drag-and-drop editor to design their emails, and their customer support team is proficient in helping with things like GDPR compliance.

If you’re ready to step into the law firm email marketing world, Tao Digital is waiting to support you in growing your firm. To get started, read our Beginner’s Guide to Digital Marketing now.

The Best Email Marketing Software for Insurance Agents

Email marketing is a bit of a hot topic at the moment, not least because it has one of the highest returns on investment out of any form of marketing. Although this type of advertising has been a key staple for eCommerce businesses for many years, it is quickly emerging as one of the key revenue areas for B2C/B2B insurance brokers. In this article we’ll be exploring why, plus our top software picks.

Benefits of Email Marketing for Insurance Brokers

There are so many benefits to email marketing in general, but for especially those in the insurance industry – it is a bit of a goldmine!

Here are just some of the many benefits for insurance agents:

Automate renewal emails: Sending renewal reminders can be a tedious process if done manually. Save time, effort and money by connecting your insurance software with email platforms that can automatically follow up with a client a couple of months before their contract expires.

Lead generation: If a lead submits their email in order to get a quote from your website you can ask them to opt into receiving emails from you. Based on your follow up/sales process you can set up a series of automated emails for contacts tagged as warm leads.

Advertising directly to your target audience: Other forms of marketing, such as traditional PR, may not get directly in front of those who may actually be in the market for your services. However, those on your email database have directly opted in and so are open to hearing from you.

Access to valuable analytics: Most email marketing platforms will provide you with a decent insight into your audience. This can directly feed into your overall content marketing strategy. For example, if you see that you are getting more clicks about a certain email topic (e.g. adjusting your insurance during inflation or new industry laws), this can spark ideas for longer form content on your site that your audience may be interested in.

Top Email Marketing Software for Insurance Brokers

There are a wide variety of email marketing platforms out there that can suit many different budgets and number of contacts. Here are our top recommendations:

Active Campaign

ActiveCampaign integrates email marketing, marketing automation, sales automation and CRM categories. We prefer to use this platform for our own marketing and for our B2B clients due to its combination of site tracking, app integrations and AI.

You can set up ‘tags’ that will automatically be added to contacts based on certain behaviours, e.g. if they have entered their email to get an insurance quote or have clicked on a blog within the body of an email. Read more about our favourite features in our extended email marketing software guide.

MailChimp

One of our insurance clients uses MailChimp for their email marketing and finds it very useful. The platform is aimed at SMEs and has a number of unique features, such as its built-in survey creator (great for getting client feedback) and landing page builder.

Along with decent tagging abilities, the platform comes with thorough reporting, an easy template editor and over 500 integrations with other pieces of software. There is also the ability to send personalised email postcards.

Sendinblue

Sendinblue describe themselves as a ‘SaaS solution for relationship marketing’ and is the only email marketing platform that we currently know of that does not have a contacts-based pricing system – the price is based on how many emails you send.

They are also incredibly helpful when it comes to GDPR compliance and respond to customer service requests promptly and effectively. The drag and drop editor is a great feature, especially for those who may be new to email marketing.

Which email platforms integrate with insurance software?

All of the email platforms we have mentioned above have hundreds of integrations with apps. We’ve taken a look at three of the most popular pieces of insurance software (Acturis, TAM from Applied and Go-Insur) to see if they integrate with the above email marketing platforms.

Acturis

One of our insurance clients uses Acturis to store all of their client data. This can be integrated with Outlook to store and send email traffic directly from the platform. It also allows them to quote commercial insurance products automatically as it integrates with a number of insurers’ back office systems too.

So, does it integrate with email marketing software? It doesn’t look like it integrates with ActiveCampaign as it doesn’t show up on ActiveCampaign’s integrations page – same for Mailchimp and Sendinblue.

That being said, Acturis does have an API that allows for the development of connections between software applications. So, with a little effort and a developer on side you could have all your data flowing between Acturis and your chosen email provider.

In theory, you could even build a connection into Zapier and then you can connect your Acturis account with all the apps Zapier connects with. You can read Zapier’s full list of apps here.

TAM from Applied

Another one of our clients uses The Agency Manager (TAM) from Applied. Our client tells us they rarely connect the software to external systems as it is not particularly configurable. Alerts for renewals etc. are added manually. As with Acturis, it doesn’t appear to be listed as any of the email platform’s integrated apps.

Although TAM has been traditionally closed off, Applied (owner of TAM) do shout about the open technology and promote it heavily on their site. That, alongside a list of existing partners, would suggest it is similar to Acturis in that if you make contact and the solution works for both Applied and customers, it would be likely a connection could be developed.

Go-Insur from Pancentric Digital

Go-Insur describe themselves as ‘the modern way to do insurance’ and allows you to unlock new efficiencies and revenue streams, rapidly expand distribution, and improve servicing for your clients.

The website doesn’t talk directly about what software integrations it has out of the box but it does reference integrations. The platform also comes with an inbuilt email automation system to help tackle some of the benefits mentioned above.

Conclusion

Email marketing can be a great way to create warm leads, stay in touch with your clients and generate revenue. If you don’t know where to get started, read our Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing or get in touch with us today.

ClickUp Review: Ratings & Features 2023

ClickUp is one of the most popular project management tools out there, and for a good reason!

We use the software day in, day out at Tao Digital and have done so for many years – it’s a great way of keeping the team on track and organised.

As we’ve been using its many features for some time now, we thought it was only right to put together a review with our honest thoughts!

What is project management software?

Project management software is exactly what it sounds like – software that allows you to manage your projects, meet deadlines and manage costs. The main aim of them is to help you to save time by automating your workflows and streamlining processes. It isn’t just limited to project managers, though – anyone within a team can use it.

What is ClickUp?

ClickUp is a cloud-based project management tool founded in 2016 with the focus of streamlining your workload, claiming to save you one day per week by helping you to work more efficiently.

You can organise your whole team within the platform, setting up client folders, tasks, deadlines, workflows, processes etc. Its main features are team collaboration and shared task-setting functions, allowing you to see time spent on tasks, the status of the task, comments, links within tasks and more.

What industries would benefit from using ClickUp?

Any industry that carries the majority of their work out online would benefit from using ClickUp – the platform is great for businesses both big and small. It is used by the likes of Nike, Netflix, Google and Airbnb to manage a huge variety of projects.

ClickUp Best Features

There are many features we enjoy within ClickUp, as follows…

Time Tracking

Time is tracked via a ‘stopwatch’ on each task, which your team begins or ends when they start/stop a task, or can be added in manually afterwards. This really helps with client reporting and allows you to see easily if you are over or under servicing a client each month.

It can also help you spot if you are running over budget in terms of time – e.g. if you expected a site build to take X amount of hours and it is seriously running over, you may have to review with the team and re-assess the budget for the allocated project.

Workload view

We love the visual aspect of workload, which provides an at-a-glance view of the team’s workload. This is calculated by adding estimated times to tasks in order to provide an accurate calculation. The workload capacity is represented in a green, orange and red system, showing who is close to capacity or over capacity. This can allow us to see who may be struggling or where workload needs to be distributed more evenly.

You can also click individually within these days to get a full overview of what that team member is working on, including estimated times and the names of the tasks. You can then individually click on these to view status, time tracked, who else may be assigned to the task, any links within the task, etc.

Within tasks you can also see any briefs that were set, the status of it, who is a ‘watcher’ of the task, any comments, links added etc.

Ability to create automated tasks

Are you working on a long and complex project that has a similar process whenever you work on it? Save time and effort by creating an automated process. Simply create a master task, set up your subtasks and save it as a template within ClickUp’s template centre. You’ll need to adjust due dates and possibly assignees each time, but it ensures you don’t miss a step of the process.

Cost Effective

ClickUp is very cost effective compared to other project management tools, such as Asana and Trello. ClickUp even has a brilliant free version, which allows you to create an unlimited number of tasks and allows you to use their sprint management tool, which is a great option for those using scrum management within the Agile methodology.

Depending on the number of users you have on the platform, ClickUp price plans range from 0 to $19 per member per month, Asana is 0 to $24.99 and Trello is 0 to $17.50. There are bespoke increased price options for large businesses, but most SMEs won’t need this option.

What are ClickUp automations?

Another feature we really like within ClickUp is their automations feature. This means that you can set certain subtasks to only open once its predecessor is closed, e.g. a task won’t open to approve a piece of content until the content writer has closed the writing task and therefore won’t appear in someone’s workload until this happens.

This saves time as you won’t need to keep rearranging tasks if any become overdue or keep checking in on the main task to see where everyone is up to.

There are so many different ways to automate your tasks – ClickUp operates on a ‘When X, X happens’ feature. Here are some of their official examples below:

You can also automate across integrated apps, such as Calendly, Google Sheets, Dropbox, Slack and much more. We have an automation set up within Slack which alerts the team when a task has been closed for a certain client and reminds us that the client needs to be made aware.

What are Spaces in ClickUp?

Spaces are essentially a way to manage all tasks for the different areas of your business. They are the second level of ‘hierarchy’ within ClickUp, as follows: Workspace, Space, List (within a folder), Task, Subtask and Nested Subtask.

At the top of the hierarchy is the workspace, which contains your entire organisation and all of its work. Most businesses have one workspace per company. You may, however, have several ‘spaces’ – we have one for our retained clients, which contains sub folders of all our clients and individual tasks, one for Tao projects and one for one-off projects/clients.

If you view the above screenshot, you can see our Tao projects space. Within this we have folders of our own projects, within which are lists and tasks we work on.

Pros and Cons of ClickUp

The pros and cons from our personal experience are as follows:

Pros

Improves efficiencies: The main pro of ClickUp is that it improves efficiencies for us across the board, as much as 20% as the platform claims. It’s easy for us to make sure our workload is evenly distributed across the team and that no one is over capacity. This then allows us to see when it’s time for a new hire.

Real time reporting of workload: We love the live view of what the team is working on at any one time, as well as the ability to look into tasks and see its current status, when it was last worked on etc. This is much easier to digest than a traditional written task list that doesn’t have real time updates.

Collaborate from anywhere: Our team works from home two days a week and have the freedom to work from anywhere thanks to ClickUp – we can assign them tasks that they could be working on in a different country! We also have some of our freelancers signed up to the platform.

Setting up workflows: As we have discussed, the ability to set up automated workflows has been incredibly helpful to us and has saved us a lot of time. If we’re working on a big yearly campaign that involves a lot of different departments and steps, it saves a lot of time that would have been spent searching through emails/folders to see what steps were taken last time and potentially missing vital tasks, compared to having the process set up waiting for you next year. A little bit of weight off your shoulders!

Time tracking: This really helps with client reporting and allows you to see easily if you are over or under servicing a client. It can also help you to see where extra capacity is needed, or may lie within the team and so can ease the workload off those who may be under additional pressure.

Cons

Onboarding can be difficult: As you can see, there are hundreds of different ways to use ClickUp to suit your needs. However, the huge amount of customisation can be a slight downfall when it comes to onboarding as it can be overwhelming and difficult to find where certain options are.

Slow to load: We have been experiencing a number of lagging issues over the past few months while new features have been added, especially when it comes to workload view – this can sometimes take up to a minute to load. In a December 2022 tweet ClickUp replied to a Twitter user who was concerned about the loading speed and said: ‘Our Technical team is currently investigating the slow speeds that you are experiencing. If you have any questions about their investigation, please feel free to reach out to us via chat or email at help@clickup.com.’

Inability to assign more than one person to comment: One feature that could be improved is the ability to assign people to comments within tasks. Assigning comments means the individual gets both an email notification and an alert within the notifications bar. Although people will be notified if they’re tagged in a comment, it isn’t as prominent as if they are both notified to have been assigned one and that they have to resolve it to clear it from their notifications bar.

Difficulties within the ClickUp app: The ClickUp app can be a little slower than the desktop version and it isn’t as easy to access certain features, such as the workload view. It’s also more difficult to see what folders tasks are in, which can be a limitation when it comes to subtasks that may all have the same name – e.g. research – so you may struggle to know which project/client this is for. Example below:

How Much Does ClickUp Cost?

The price of ClickUp depends on what you want to get out of it. As mentioned earlier, they have a ‘Free Forever’ option. Please note that prices are correct at the time of writing (January 2023).

For the first paid tier, the $9 a month Unlimited option, you will also receive features such as:

Unlimited automations
Unlimited dashboards
Email in ClickUp

For the $19 Business plan, which is their most popular option, you also receive:

Custom exporting
Advanced public sharing (great for keeping clients in the loop)
Workload management (one of our favourite features)

On the Business Plus plan, which is $29 per month and a good option for multiple teams, the extra features include:

Custom capacity in workload
Priority support
Increased automations

There is also an option for ‘Enterprise’, best for many large teams, but the price of this is only found out via contacting the sales team as it is bespoke. This includes everything in the previous packages plus white labelling, a dedicated success manager, live onboarding training and more.

Our Rating

Overall, we believe that ClickUp is an excellent project management tool, and we have been using it for quite a few years now.

We’d give the software 4.5/5 stars. Our only areas of improvement would be the cons we mentioned earlier, mainly loading time. It would be difficult to run an agency which works on so many projects and different clients without a system like the one ClickUp offers!

If you like the sound of the platform and would like to sign up, you can do so by clicking here.

The Six Best Free Design Tools for Entrepreneurs

Being an entrepreneur is no easy task, it takes serious effort, investment, and time. Keeping your overheads as minimal as possible is an important part of running the business, at least at the start of its life. There are, thankfully, a whole host of free design tools out there that you can use to kickstart your entrepreneurial journey.

Benefits of Using Free Design Tools

First of all, there’s the obvious reason that they’re free. There aren’t many people out there that don’t like free tools! The following tools are great for starting a business and the majority of them allow you to upgrade to unlock further features and tools. They’re essentially offering you a free trial with no time limit.

Using these free tools offers the major benefit that everyone in your team is able to use them, be perfectly aligned on production, and you don’t have to worry about purchasing extra seats if a new team member joins.

The beauty of the majority of these tools is that they’re all online-based, meaning that you can access them from any internet-enabled device, from anywhere, at any point. That’s a whole lot more convenient that having to download software onto a specific device.

6 Best Free Design Tools For Entrepreneurs 2022

Canva

Canva has rapidly become one of the world’s leading design tools for the entrepreneur market. Its easy-to-use accessible software makes it incredibly simple to create stunning artwork in seconds. If you’re not a graphic designer, Canva has everything you need to create branding for your business from business cards to videos, and infographics to logos. There are literally thousands of templates, all of which you’re able to use for your business.

The free version is extensive and has the majority of tools that the typical user will want to use. Upgrade to premium if you want access to a huge library of images, videos, and premium graphics, plus additional features such as background removers and animations. There’s also a handy mock-up tool, however it doesn’t work fantastically and sometimes stretches images, so you might want to consider Pixelied’s iPhone mockups tool as an alternative.

Wireframe.cc

Within Wireframe.cc, you can create mock-ups of websites and apps easily within their online software and then share them with the team that will create them. It’s a great choice for when you want to retain some creative input without creating a website or app yourself.

WhatTheFont – MyFonts

Creating your brand takes time and effort, and a great deal of that time can be hunting around the internet for inspiration and similar effects or fonts that you’ve seen before. WhatTheFont takes some of the guesswork out of inspiration by helping you identify fonts and showing you where you can download them.

Simply take a screenshot of some text from a website, upload it to WhatTheFont, and within a few seconds, it will have either identified the font precisely or will offer you the closest alternatives that it can find.

Coolors

Another great branding tool, but rather than focusing on fonts this one focuses on brand colours. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be used for branding, simply anything that requires a palette of colours.

Head to Coolors and load up their home screen, you’ll be presented with 5 random colours. If this is your first time using the site, start hammering the spacebar and you’ll see the colours change. Coolors aims to show you colours that complement each other and work well alongside each other.

If you already have some colours locked in, simply type in the # code and then hit the padlock to lock that colour in. You can also find shades of colours, check the contrast levels, favourite colours, and change the order.

It’s an incredible free tool, especially when combined with the export options so you can share your created palettes with your team.

Unsplash

Finding stock photos for your website, content, or social media is a bit of an onerous task, especially if you can’t find them affordably or without complicated royalty issues. This is where Unsplash makes life easy.

Unsplash is a huge library of free images taken by photographers (not necessarily professionals) from all around the world. The search engine lets you explore anything that you like, but relies on the photographer uploading using keywords in order to be found. Each image is free to download in a variety of images, they just ask that you name-drop the photographer or link to their portfolio (no obligation).

Eye Dropper – Chrome Extension

Finding out the codes of colours can be complicated if you don’t have extensive knowledge of pantones. Realistically, that’s a small segment of society. To make life easier, download the chrome extension Eye Dropper. When launched it turns your cursor into an eyedropper tool that allows you to pick any colour on any website, it’ll then tell you the specific hex code and RGB of that colour.

Key Takeaways

These free tools give you a superb base to build on, they’re certainly worth investigating before you dive into paying for more expensive paid tools. At least when you’re launching your business journey these tools will help you keep overheads considerably lower.

There’s no harm in trying these tools, and you’ll find they do almost everything similar paid tools will do.
Ensure you’re happy with the tool before upgrading to a paid version.

Thrive Apprentice WordPress Plugin Update 2021

Thrive Apprentice is one of the most easily customisable, online course builders available and is considered to be one of the best WordPress LMS (Learning Management System) plugins.

The course builder has been well loved since it’s release back in 2014, but it was only last year where it really began to improve.

With the latest update, released on the 30th June 2021, users are set to have complete creative control and total visual design freedom over their online classroom.

What is changing in Thrive Apprentice?

As of June 30th, Thrive Apprentice is set to become one of the most powerful WordPress LMS plugins available on the market. Their new updates promote complete user control like never before.

Here are the key features of the new update, explained:

New Design Tab Dashboard

This new integration makes editing your courses simple. Through a single access point, you will be able to:

Choose your course ‘skin’
Set your chosen typographies
Edit course templates

You will also have access, through the new Design tab, to the all new…

Check out Thrive Apprentice and the update by clicking here

Thrive Apprentice Quick Start Wizard

The new Course Setup Quick Start Wizard can guide users through the steps it takes to create an effective online classroom. You’ll be able to customise your online school with ease – simply use the tool to modify branding such as your logo, colours, templates, headers and footers. Easy!

Page Customisation

With Thrive Apprentice, you’ll now have complete custom control over all elements of your online school. Each section, each individual page in fact, will be customisable.

Course Overview Page Customisation

This is where first impressions count. Your students will see your course overview page first when they enter your online classroom. Now, you’ll have access to:

New, professional templates designed by the Thrive experts
Full creative control over your Overview page, from scratch
The option to create multiple templates and save them

Lesson Page Customisation

Your lesson page in your Thrive Apprentice classroom is where you prove your worth as an online teacher. You’ll now be able to access simple drag-and-drop control over all of your content and easily display your resources in any way you’d like.

School Homepage Customisation

With the new School Homepage update, you’ll be able to choose a starter template, upload it and customise each and every element to suit your desired brand.

There will even be access to new course content sections, including:

Lesson Lists
Course Lists
Lesson Resource Lists

You can use these elements anywhere on your school homepage, only displaying the features that you want.

Header and Footer Customisation

A simple, yet useful update to the LMS. There will now be multiple header and footer designs to choose from and, like the homepage, you’ll be able to customise these templates as much as you’d like.

Course List Element

Once again, you’re going to have total design freedom when it comes to customising classroom elements. There will be multiple, new Course List templates available to choose and change.

Choose where your course list sits, how it looks and fits in with your theme and branding and how it all works. No restrictions, just control.

Rapid Course Sales Funnel Building

Complete customisation control is negligible if there has been no focus on conversion. Your sales page is hugely important in convincing students to join your course – this is why Thrive Apprentice has integrated their custom control options with their smart Landing Page templates.

Your tutorial demo can now be completely customised through online course-specific templates. Now, you can easily present exactly what your prospects will learn from you, right on that all-important landing page.

You will also be able to use the above course list element on your landing pages to really promote your courses, using full customisation techniques to your advantage by building a conversion-focused, lead driven, well branded online school.

Is Thrive Apprentice a good WordPress LMS plugin?

Thrive Apprentice has always been a highly successful LMS, regardless of its new, impressively hefty update.

With a recent UI update, Thrive Apprentice is a flexible, easy-to-use online course builder that rivals that of its competitors with complete entrepreneurial control in WordPress.

Prior to the new update, users benefitted from new, pre-designed course templates for Overview and Course Lists. Now, with these elements being enhanced through new customisation capabilities, your online classroom can look and feel exactly as you envision.

Better user experience and unique student experience

The Thrive Apprentice team has already stated that there will be more, fully-customisable templates to come. Through full visual editing of all elements of your courses, modules and lessons, your online classroom can look just how you want it. Simple.

With detailed editing capabilities, such as edits being allowed to:

Styles and themes
Colours and branding
Spacing and typography
Mobile responsiveness

… you’ll have all the customisation options you need to create a unique learning environment that both looks and performs extremely well. With all new, full customisation options to improve branding, an integration with WooCommerce to make selling easy and a focus on visually improving classroom landing pages, there is no reason why your online school can’t thrive, with Thrive Apprentice.

How to use Answer the Public to boost your SEO

There are absolutely loads of helpful SEO tools out there, but when it comes to helping with content marketing, we do have our favourites.

One such favourite is Answer the Public, which is the holy grail for our content writers. Not only does it make coming up with content ideas so much easier, it shows you what people are searching for in real time. Responding to these searches and providing useful content is a sure way to move yourself up the pages on search engines such as Google.

In this blog, we’re going to explain what Answer the Public is, why it’s useful and how it can help you to boost your online presence.

What is Answer the Public?

Answer the Public is a long-tail keyword tool that shows you questions and autocomplete searches around a certain topic. This can help you to understand what people are searching for so that you can provide content featuring relevant, in-depth answers that people are actually searching for and looking to find answers to.

Is Answer the Public free?

Answer the Public is free, but only for a few searches per day! Otherwise, you’re going to run into this guy…

The downside of this is that it works off your IP address, so if a colleague is also using the tool they can hit the day’s limit for your whole team. Not good news for those needing to churn out content consistently.

If you’re stuck for content ideas and want to improve your SEO, it’s definitely worth investing in the tool, which costs $99 per month, or $79 per month if you pay annually. This lets you have unlimited searches and users, as well as allowing you to compare data over time.

Looking for help with generating more sales leads?

Speak to one of our team today about our SEO services

How does Answer the Public work?

As mentioned above, the site shows you what people are searching for. We’re going to use the example of one of our clients, Complete Koi & Aquatics, here. Through another SEO tool, Ahrefs, we saw that ‘Ghost Koi’ was being searched for around 1,900 times per month with a keyword difficulty of 0 – what a goldmine!

If you don’t have another SEO tool to help with this, simply note down some topics that you think potential customers would be interested in reading about.

We then headed over to Answer the Public, typed this phrase in and had a look at the results. There are two ways which Answer the Public will display results, the first is through a visualisation wheel. Although the tool will never tell you the exact amount of searches for each question, the darker the dots on the wheel, the more they are searched.

Be warned, though – it can also mean that the particular question or phrase is trending at the moment and actually has relatively low search terms in comparison to others. You’ll never get 100% accurate numbers as search engines like to keep this information top secret.

The screenshot above is just the ‘questions’ section. As you scroll down, there are more wheels for prepositions (i.e. ‘ghost koi for sale near me’) comparisons (ghost koi vs goldfish), and finally alphabeticals, which list every searched term from A to Z.

The other way the information is presented is as ‘data’, as below:

This is a bit easier to read than the visualisation wheel, but the downside is that you don’t get hints as to what is searched the most.

This information is really useful, because when you know so much about your niche, you forget the kinds of information newcomers might be looking for. You might be surprised with what people are asking about!

Using Answer the Public for SEO

Using these questions in a piece of content can really help to boost your rankings. It shows search engines that you’re an expert in your field. Generally, the more questions you answer and the more in-depth you go, the better. This is of course dependent on the number of searches and content, as sometimes people are just looking for a small amount of information.

Based on our research, we then created a piece titled ‘Everything you need to know about Ghost Koi’, which answered many of the questions from Answer the Public. This piece was published in July 2020 and naturally it will take a while for search engines to pick up on this content, but at the time of writing (December 2020), Complete Koi are now position #1 on Google for ‘Ghost Koi Carp’ and ‘Butterfly Ghost Koi’, even though their domain rating is 3.7. We expect this to continue increasing!

Similar results can be expected if you follow this process. Ensuring that the questions are formatted as H2s, H3s and H4s will mean the keyword is in the questions too, and that search engines will understand that they are your headings and subheadings.

For an extra boost, add FAQ schema to your content. This means that your questions and answers will appear when people type in related search terms, as below.

This is much more eye catching to users, and they can get their answers without even having to click on a site. Even if you’re not ranking for the term they typed in, you can appear in excerpts on the page as above, which is especially useful if you’re just getting started.

Another way that Answer the Public can help with SEO is the feature that helps you to compare data over time. For example, if we head towards Winter and suddenly spot that people are searching for questions such as ‘Do Ghost Koi hibernate?’, we can add this into the content and keep it up to date.

Also, if a new cool gadget for ponds has been released but there aren’t many searches around this yet, we can get the product page ranking as searches increase and keep an eye out for more questions trickling in as the product gains popularity. This can help us to answer those questions before anyone else does.

Finally, if one of your old pieces of content previously had a lot of traffic but is slipping down in the ranks, it could be that your competitors are answering questions you aren’t. Keep an eye on old content and update it as and when new questions arise.

In conclusion…

Answer the Public is a fantastic tool for any content writers looking for more ideas and to boost their SEO.

If you’re stretched for resources and would like to outsource content research and writing, we’re your people! Get in touch today via hello@taodigital.org or call 01204 282 213 and we’ll see how we can help.

Looking for help with generating more sales leads?

Speak to one of our team today about our SEO services

Aero Commerce Review

The Latest E-commerce Platform

We love Aero!

OK, we’re a bit geeky when it comes to websites and new platforms. So when we heard about the latest ecommerce platform on the market, Aero Commerce, we were just a little excited. And for very good reason to, it’s impressive!

We’ll talk you through what it is, the features of the platform and the benefits it provides for both the business and user.

With an increasing shift to online shopping and a digitally focused experience, it’s no surprise we’ve seen a surge of ecommerce platforms recently. From Shopify, Volusion and Magento, they’ve transformed the way we buy online. So with leading platforms already dominating the market, is there room for another ecommerce solution? – Let’s find out…

What is Aero Commerce?

Aero Commerce is the latest ecommerce platform to enter the market, with the aim of providing a quick and friendly solution to both retailers and their customers.

It’s performance-based solution is designed with power, striving to be the world’s fastest ecommerce platform. And, we witnessed first hand how it intends on achieving this.

We’re proud to be an Aero Commerce agency partner, helping to generate sales through your ecommerce store.

Aero Commerce Features

Aero Commerce offers all the features you would expect from a ecommerce platform but it’s agility and flexibility is what we think really sets it apart from it’s competitors.

Whilst it’s feature-rich, it also offers a simple interface for retailers to control products, sales and orders efficiently. It’s intuitive dashboard allows beginners to take advantage of this platform too.

Compared to the other popular ecommerce platforms, Aero Commerce provides a wide range of truly bespoke and customisation opportunities, which is exciting for agency partners such as ourselves to offer retailers a scalable ecommerce store.

User Experience

Aero Commerce is built with a high regard for user experience, from both the back and front end. Making it easy to navigate for retailers and customers can support conversion rates and a pleasant customer experience with your business.

It’s fast and easy navigation to check out makes purchasing hassle free, minimising abandoned sales and increasing that important sales target. Many retailers have already seen conversions increase dramatically, thanks to their online store delivering a world-class experience for customers.

It’s no secret that a positive customer experience leads to potential future spend with that customer. Happy customers means happy business.

It can also mean some positive reviews, which is increasingly important across the online world today. This can help build trust with customers, and could be the decision between purchasing or choosing a competitor they are more familiar with.

Whilst online reviews are crucial, a happy customer can in fact be your brand ambassador and local salesperson, spreading the good word about your business and products.

Speed & Efficiency

With page loading speed being increasingly critical to search rankings it’s never been so important to have a fast loading website. And, Aero Commerce does not disappoint!

There’s nothing worse than the circle of despair when impatiently waiting for a website to load. Customers will just leave your site and move onto your competitors. Potential sale lost.

Well you don’t need to worry about that here, it’s lightening-fast speed coupled with it’s fantastic user experience features means users can quickly and efficiently make a purchase.

A slow or frustrating process will also not sit well with your brand image, so providing a good digital experience will reduce that risk. A fast journey to checkout is what makes Aero Commerce stand out.

Customisation

No two businesses are the same, they may offer the same product but your brand, mission and business are unique. This should be carried through to your online store too!

Aero Commerce offers absolute flexibility for developers to create a bespoke e-commerce site that fits with the unique needs of the business.

The platform remains lean and deploys with ease. Additional functionality is also available through it’s wide integration options supporting business processes.

Reduce infrastructure costs dramatically

With the way Aero Commerce has been developed, it not only helps you with site load speed but can dramatically reduce an e-Commerce infrastructure cost.

Garment Quarter was previously on Magento and paying around £2,000 per month in infrastructure costs. On Aero, and now several times faster, monthly infrastructure costs have fallen to £300. But cost savings don’t just end with infrastructure.

Since Aero gives retailers the ability to integrate with whoever they want and doesn’t tie itself to a particular payment merchant, retailers have the freedom to process their transactions with however they like and not worry about paying fees to the platform as they do with some other mainstream platform solutions. By way of example, Wave Spas saw a reduction in costs of £10,800 per month (the majority of it related to merchant services fees) compared to their Shopify store.

Overall, Aero Commerce offers simplicity and convenience, but this coupled with performance and customisation makes it our ecommerce platform of choice.

Making the shift to an ecommerce site or improving your online presence has never been easier. The platform is incredibly reliable and cost effective, giving you the ability to run and grow your online retail business.

Looking for more information about Aero Commerce?

Find out how we can help – we’re an Aero Commerce Agency

17/03/2020

Matt Tomkin

We’ve been a Thrive member for years now and the toolset just keeps on growing. Every new iteration helps improve our workflow and how we service our clients.

Thrive Architect has long been one of the best drag and drop WordPress builders we’ve used but the addition of the new Thrive Theme Builder is next level.

We have been using Generate press as a base theme alongside Thrive architect and were wondering if we’d actually get to the point we didn’t use this anymore as Tom and the team at Generate press have created a great theme; add to that the GP premium plugin and you’ve got full control over what your site will look like.

Thrive Theme Builder is a complete game changer though! I would go as far as to say that even the most entry level marketer could use this tool to build out their own custom theme!

What does Thrive theme builder do?

So, instead of having a theme and a drag and drop builder; this new theme builder is both.

You can literally drag and drop elements into the header and footer of the site theme along with being able to set-up page templates that can be selected from the right hand column the same as you would if you’d hard coded the theme templates.

Thrive Theme Builder allows you to build a full theme in less than 15 minutes! It's workflow is so easy to use!

Shapeshifter theme (Comes with Thrive Theme Builder)

Thrive Theme builder comes with a pre-built theme out of the box called Shapeshifter. This has everything you need to get your first theme built on thrive theme builder as soon as you install it on the site.

The real beauty of this is that it has a number of different templates available for pretty much every part of a website you would want. See the video below to see all the options available to you just on install for the headers.

Along with header templates, you have the same number of options for the footer of the site. And all page templates are available in the set-up wizard.

How quick can you build a new WordPress Theme?

The fastest we’ve managed so far is 15 minutes! But this was with everything we needed saved in a folder and also only had about 3 template pages.

Make sure you check out the Thrive Theme Builder Today

If you use WordPress then you need to take a look!

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE

Have you used the new Thrive Theme Builder? Give us your thoughts in the comments section below!

Does it support Woocommerce?

As of the start of July, Woocommerce is now supported by Thrive Theme builder.

This presents so many fantastic opportunities for small businesses looking to set-up a e-commerce website. Especially with the effects of Covid-19 on the high street.

There is a full tutorial of how to use Thrive Theme Builder to build a woocommerce store can be found on the Thrive themes blog. Link is below; make sure you check it out!

How fast does Thrive Theme Builder load?

With page loading speed being so important to both Search Rankings and with the announcement of web vitals becoming part of the Google algorithm within the year it's never been so important to to have a fast loading website.

So, we tested it. To be honest we were pretty surprised with the results. Normally a builder based theme is pretty slow when compared to a hardcoded theme from scratch.

We recently built a website for a new start-up business energy comparison website call Essential Utility Solutions and were amazed by the results. On our dedicated server we were seeing loading times of just under 2 seconds for the home page when looking on GTmetrix. Which is good.

But, we got it to go faster! Much faster!

Recently, after hearing rave reviews about how good Kinsta was for hosting WordPress websites we started to test it out before making a final decision on moving hosts. We have always had a dedicated server environment to make sure our clients have fast websites.

2 seconds to 800ms load time! The results from moving to Kinsta WordPress Hosting was unbelievable. The site now loads lightening quick!

Thrive Architect review – An in-depth look into the drag & drop WordPress builder

Ever since I started using WordPress I’ve been looking to find a drag and drop page builder that is as easy to use as Thrive Architect. I just had to get that out right at the start, this product is fantastic.

The Thrive Architect plugin is from the well known Thrive Themes and is the next step on from the famous thrive content builder.

There were teething issues, don’t get me wrong, but the result now is that the thrive team struggles seem to have been caught up with. Certainly the support has been nothing but brilliant in the last month or so.

How much is Thrive Architect?

Architect page builder is a onetime fee of $67, it’s nothing. The features you have with this page builder are worth an awful lot more than the price.

Even better you could go for the Thrive membership that gives you access to every one of the Thrive plugins.

What are the main features out of the box?

Over 220 landing page templates
Fully Responsive design – build for mobile, tablet and desktop all from the same screen
Thrive Leads direct integration
Vast number of content section templates
Works with any theme
Works with most other page builders

Who is it for?

Its for anyone who wants to use WordPress. It makes editing your pages and posts so much easier. If you then join it up with the Generatepress theme you can pretty much customise everything you need to in order to get the website you want as an outcome.

You could use the thrive themes they have created but for me the best combo is using the builder plugin alongside Generatepress.

An example of an e-commerce site built using Thrive Architect and Generatepress is Biobug Cricket Flour make sure to check out what can be produced.

How good is it?

We love it here at Tao Digital Marketing, we will install it onto nearly all of the websites we look after on behalf of our clients. We tend to pair it up with Thrive Leads, which is just a conversion boosting dream of a plugin.

We’ve had one or two issues with it conflicting with the pre-existing systems and plugins on wordpress websites. This is particularly apparent with websites using Fusion builder. One of our large clients has a site built with this and we can’t use Thrive architect to edit existing pages or landing page design.

For building a website from scratch though or building new pages with thrive architect it proves itself as a great builder plugin for wordpress.

Can a novice webmaster use it?

With an installed WordPress CMS and a theme already installed, there is no reason whatsoever that a novice WordPress business owner can’t use this wordpress page builder.

The Thrive team have built a plugin for wordpress in architect that provides everything a website designer or developer might want.

One of the great things we have found with Thrive are the vast amounts of helpful resources they offer. There doesn’t seem to be a day that goes but without them sharing a video resource or adding new features to the offering.

For closer inspection you can check out their tutorials on the use of the Architect web page builder here

100% Satisfaction Guarantee

The Thrive team are that confident in the fact you will love Thrive Architect that they have a full 100% money back Guarantee. Check out the terms here!

If you decide it’s not for you after 30 days then you can get a full refund. Let’s be honest, it’s just worth trying!