Out-of-office functionality just keeps getting easier with mobile technology like the iPhone, which now has more than 30,000 applications it can run. And while games remain the most widely downloaded apps, developers haven't forgotten about those of us who have work to do.
In fact, we found quite a few apps that could prove useful in a marketer's day-to-day life. Take a gander, and then feel free to add comments about the applications you've found useful for improving productivity and staying up-to-date on all things marketing.
Marketing news and resources
Moritz Philip Recke's asap Marketing and asap Mobile display the latest marketing and mobile-marketing news feeds from industry publications such as Ad Age, the New York Times, and Mobile Marketing Watch. ($0.99 each)
Get to the Po!nt newsletters—bite-sized nuggets of information that marketers can consume in less than a minute—are available on call through the MarketingProfs application. Or, for more direct feedback on specific marketing questions, ask the MarketingProfs Q&A application, which also allows you to search through, read, bookmark, and email all other queries answered by your fellow expert marketers. (Free)
Key Insights from Impleo Software offers a series of whitepapers and presentations on business and marketing topics from Insightory.com. (Free)
Intersog aims to test your smarts with two applications, Marketing Process Test, which covers a range of marketing topics from identifying and analyzing target markets to search engine optimization, and E-Commerce Test, which emphasizes online marketing. (Free)
Additional inspiration
Creative Whack Pack from Creative Think ditches the cards and brings the creativity-boosting exercises straight to your phone. ($4.99)
Twitter Trend by Wizag keeps track of topic trends on Twitter, organizing them by most popular, fastest rising, and newly emerging (free), while Summizer—Twitter Trend Search by Mustache tracks trends for the specific keywords you input. ($2.99)
Biz Quote by Leading Vision Technologies delivers daily quotes from the likes of Warren Buffett, Andrew Carnegie, and Albert Einstein. ($0.99)
McWood BV's Sloganizer mixes and matches three sets of power words to form 375,000 broadly applicable phrases. ($0.99)
Brainstorming tools
Napkin Genius by Adam Talcott relieves the need to locate pen and paper, allowing you to sketch, edit, and share your ideas, as well as photograph and upload images to incorporate into your drawings and notes. ($1.99; the free "Lite" version offers sketch without photos)
Insight4's ScribbleShare is a collaborative drawing program for facilitating team cooperation and multiparty contribution to ideas and sketch designs, while its ScribbleChat enables chat with up to 16 people via Wi-Fi and using drawing and text. ($0.99 each)
For recording ideas (or the team meeting or a conference keynote) with audio, there are several options, including Pinwheel Development's ANT—Audio Note Taker, which records and organizes messages by category or project ($0.99); or JOTOMI's JMDictate, for a more full-scale professional system ($9.99, with a free version available for testing). Epiphany Recorder is another, but it operates a tad differently. By continuously running in the background, it lets you save at any time the previous two minutes of audio with the click of a button. The idea is to preserve only the clips worth remembering so that you don't waste time later searching through lengthy recordings for those golden nuggets. ($2.99)
Evaluation tools
WebFight by A2rt pits two of your ideas head-to-head to see which one has the most demand, as determined by the number of current related Google search results. ($0.99)
BoxOnline's Break-Even Analysis offers suggestions for increasing profits and helps predict the sales volume necessary to make your idea worthwhile using inputs for production costs, fixed costs, the sales forecast, and the selling price ($19.99), while iMargin—margin calculator by SUI Solutions requires just two value inputs to compute margins, sell prices, and cost caps. ($1.99)
For those really tough decisions, EdibleApps' MyDecider ranks the various criteria and weighs the pros and cons associated with each option. ($2.99) Or for a quicker, more straightforward approach, there's always the (virtual) coin toss—the basis of Splaysoft's Heads or Tails application. (Free, or $0.99 for Heads or Tails Pro, the ad-free version)
Project management tools
Goal2Action by Equilibre k.k. might help spur motivation by assisting you in setting your game plan and visualizing the route to success. ($29.99)
Yammer by Geni Inc. helps keep track of what everyone on the team is working on, using a collaborative community communication feed that mirrors the Web-based Yammer platform. (Free)
iNvite by Yaniv Kalsky sends out new or updated meeting invites and cancellation notifications. ($2.99)
Meeting Timer: Time is Money by Elegant Technologies keeps project managers in check by calculating the irrecoverable expense of making people sit through drawn-out meetings when they could be actually working. ($1.99)
Excuse Maker by Inner Four saves you from coming up with your own explanation for why you missed that deadline. ($0.99)
Networking tools
SnapDat by SnapDat Networks creates custom-designed virtual business cards with the ability to link to your social-networking profiles and incorporate personalized messaging for individual clients. (Free)
myCard from Open Door Networks "beams" your contact information into your clients' phones using secured connections via email or a designated short code ($0.99); DubMeNow's DUB application performs a similar function using text or email invites. (Free)
Card Snap by Beach House Software lets you photograph the physical business cards you've collected and upload them into your phone automatically ($9.99); CardLasso by Model Metrics will also incorporate the data into your Salesforce CRM software. (Free with subscription)
InTouch Contacts and InTouch Social Contacts by Objects Etc organize, manage, and group your contacts by category, organization, events, interests, and more, with notices for upcoming birthdays, anniversaries, and other occasions. ($2.99 each)
Social media tools
For updating your blog en route, there's illumineX's Blog with iBlogger!, which supports many blogging features such as pictures, tags, categories, links, and location, and is compatible with most publishers, including WordPress, ExpressionEngine, MovableType, and TypePad ($9.99). Blog Press by Coollittlethings Studio offers a less-expensive option for users who simply wish to post images and text. ($2.99)
Twitter agents available include TwitterFon by naan studio, which provides a basic interface (free); Tweetie by atebites, which allows you to manage multiple Twitter accounts through the same application ($2.99); Twiltr by Brent Coursey, which filters your Twitter account so that you see posts only from your favorite "tweeps" ($2.99); and Birdhouse by Sandwich Dynamics, which lets you jot down your ideas, plan your tweets, and publish when ready. ($3.99)
Statuso, available from Up To Speed Limited, simultaneously updates your status on multiple social-networking and microblogging sites, including Twitter, Yammer, Facebook, and Friendfeed. ($0.99)
Web/SEO tools
Instant access to your complete Google Analytics data and up to 50 reports pertaining to visitor trending, visitor loyalty, traffic sources, network properties and browser capabilities, content, and e-commerce are available through Zap Bang Done's Analytics Pro ($3.99) and Inblosam's Analytics App. ($5.99)
SenseApp by Hans Schneider also helps keep track of your Google AdSense revenue data. ($3.99)
Domain Tracker by Muthu Arumugam displays Alexa rank and PageRank according to Google, along with PageRank history. (Free)
iSEO by Needham Logistics analyzes keyword density of any Web page with reports that can then be emailed to you or a colleague ($1.99). Or for a few bucks more, Infinidigm's proSEO—SEO content analyzer analyzes complete source-code listings, keywords, descriptions, and tags, and dissects a page's marketing copy to determine which content is considered search engine–friendly and which is likely to be ignored by crawlers. ($9.99)
Additional marketing tools
HTML Email by Western ITS Limited lets you write HTML emails from your phone. It comes with help files and reference guides and has features for inserting tags and templates, as well as for saving your documents to edit and send at a later date. (Free)
Ifbyphone's Voice Broadcast provides a platform for voice-marketing campaigns by allowing you to broadcast recorded messages to multiple recipients simultaneously. (Free)
Results tracking
Chart It—Mobile Data Collector by Sudeep Chandra collects inputted data as you go and displays it as raw data and in charts, which can then be emailed, imported into MS Excel or Mac Numbers, and published on the Web. ($5.99)
SVT Software's Sales & Commissions tracks and breaks down sales by category or associate. ($1.99)
Sales 2 Target by 100 Proof Software calculates how many more sales you need to reach your goal. ($0.99).
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Which applications do you love for working on the go? Comment below and add to the list!
MarketingProfs note: We are not endorsing or recommending these applications, and we advise that you check out each application thoroughly before purchasing or downloading.
Now that you have all these great apps for your iPhone, how about adding mobile marketing to your marketing mix? Check out dozens of articles on the subject like Mobile Marketing: What is UR txt msg str@tegy? in the Marketing Articles section of the MarketingProfs Library.
Premium Plus Members may also enjoy viewing Mobile Marketing: How to Harness the Power of the Small Screen in the MarketingProfs Seminar Library. We hope these resources help you create an effective mobile marketing program.
