In small companies and RAL Quality Assurance Associations, a few people are often responsible for a multitude of different tasks – and sometimes find themselves outside of their own comfort zone. However, there are some free marketing tools available to help make your daily work easier. We will present four of them to you here: the organisational and planning tool Trello, the graphic design tool Canva, the text composition tool ChatGPT and the translation tool DeepL.
Trello is available as a smartphone app or can be used via a browser. This tool is synchronised in real time and can be used for many applications in project management, team organisation, editorial planning, etc. You can use it to set up so-called boards – which are like digital whiteboards with lists and columns – to work together with various different team members, plan tasks, work on an editorial plan and much more. The free version of the tool allows you to use 10 boards.
The advantages of Trello:
Canva is a graphic design platform that allows you to create visual content for use in social media posts, videos, posters, post cards, presentations and much more without any prior knowledge of graphic design. The tool allows you to select from thousands of templates, images, fonts and graphic elements. Canva not only provides you with inspiration but also allows you to integrate your own logos, photos and elements into your content. You can thus use the templates to create your own design, which you can then use across all channels and for all purposes. The more time you invest, the higher the quality of your output – if you only use templates than the results will not be very individual. Incidentally: As a non-profit organization, you can even use the full version of Canva free of charge.
The advantages of Canva:
ChatGPT is a chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to produce human-like text in the same language as the source text. You can use ChatGPT as a sparring partner for ideas or as a ghostwriter. This tool can not only be used to generate texts but also to program codes or find errors, help with Excel issues, solve maths problems, create a motto for your next company celebration and much more. You are able to easily submit tasks around the clock and ChatGPT will produce really good texts for many different occasions at the push of a button – which you can then ask the chatbot to edit in a subsequent stage. However, we should also inform you about the drawbacks of an AI-based tool: Although a lot of different texts were used to train ChatGPT, it is not possible to evaluate the quality of the sources. This means that the text you generate at the “push of a button” may contain fake news or discriminate against certain groups of people.
The advantages of ChatGPT:
DeepL claims to be the “most accurate translator in the world”. However, the quality of the translation is highly dependent on the quality of the source text. This means: Poorly formulated expressions or spelling mistakes can confuse the tool and lead to errors. The translations are also less accurate when the target language is more complex than the source language – which means that translations into English are usually of a higher quality, while translations from English to German or French are more prone to errors.
The advantages of DeepL:
What’s next? Now it's your turn! Try one or more of these free tools and benefit from these highly versatile technical aids in your everyday working lives. We wish you every success and lots of fun in the process!
Please watch the recording of our free webinar to find further information on this topic: https://youtu.be/bGuVwvvZTUA
