I love the holidays. There are some things that come out during the holidays that I can’t get any other time during the year. I love decorating the house, and my husband looks forward to eggnog and pumpkin pie. Every year, my mother-in-law makes this fudge that is just amazing. I guess you could say these are a few of our favorite things.

Don’t worry, I’ll spare you from breaking out into song like Julie Andrews in “The Sound of Music.” You definitely don’t want to hear that. However, what I would like to do for you is share some of our favorite things that we use here at GoldBear Media. They’re our favorite things because they help us do great things for our clients. 

With that, we’d like to share with you GoldBear Media’s Favorite things of 2022. If you’d like to get more information on any of these products or would like to purchase them, we will include affiliate links to each of them.

1. Mailchimp

2. Monday

3. Cloud Campaign

4. Squarespace

1 // MailChimp

MailChimp is a very simple and easy to use email program to help you stay in contact with your audience. Laying out emails is simple and offers a lot of different format options. Adding contacts is also very easy, and can be linked to any email offers you may have running. With it, you can do newsletter campaigns, sales campaigns, and general email marketing. We have even seen some clients use it as a CRM to track client conversations. While it’s not necessarily designed for that, it is a nice feature. We’ve used MailChimp for 3 years now and we’ve enjoyed it.

2 // Monday

Monday is our project management software and has become invaluable in our business. We use Monday to plan everything from our content calendar, upcoming GoldBear projects, and client projects. What makes it so user friendly is that we can use it to include the right people in every discussion. We are also able to use it to break down projects into bite size pieces to get them completed.

One other thing we like about Monday is the different views we are able to use inside the program. Depending on what we’re doing, we can choose to track tasks through a calendar or a list, and with the simple click of a button, I can view just the tasks that I need to complete and see when they are due. If you’d like to check out Monday, here’s a link you can use.

3 // Cloud Campaign

Cloud Campaign is our social media management program. With Cloud Campaign, scheduling social media is a breeze, and we get solid analytics to see what’s happening with every post. 

Within this program, we can also completely design social media posts for our clients and get their approval on a group of posts, not just one at a time. This is great for content planning, that we can get social media content done well in advance so our clients can be sure that their content on social media goes out on time.

While there are a number of different softwares that do social media posting and management, we chose cloud campaign because it had everything we needed and it was more cost effective for us. If you’d like to give Cloud Campaign a try, you can click here to check it out.

4 // Squarespace

Squarespace is one of many web hosting and design platforms and happens to be our favorite. We like it because it offers simplicity and flexibility in designing websites while still giving options for more complex designs if the client needs it. Simply pick a template and start designing. With lots of options for fonts, colors, templates and more, it’s a great platform for building websites. Squarespace also integrates with Google to get your analytics and track the traffic on your site.

If you’re interested in starting a blog, you can definitely do it here and Squarespace includes options to tag and categorize your blog posts in a number of different ways to help you stay organized. If you’re considering migrating your website or switching hosting platforms, call us, and we can get you set up and migrate your site if needed. You’ll get 20% off hosting for the first year and a free domain name.

5 // Canva

We’re huge fans of photoshop, but not everything needs something that advanced. Canva makes creating graphic images a snap with templates, fonts, images, and more. We also love the collaboration elements of Canva, where you can see team members make edits in real time. This is an awesome resource for people looking for quick, professional design! If you’d like to try out Canva, click here.

We hope you have a fantastic holiday season and we look forward to working with you in 2023!

Happy Holidays

Kelly