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Terminalfour’s team loves to work with smart tools. Browser extensions help us to be more productive and efficient and let us work our marketing magic in the online world.
And there are plenty to choose from.
In this post, we list our favorite Chrome browser extensions we think are worth adding to your digital stack, ideal for digital marketers.
They won’t actually do the work for us, but they certainly help us save a bit of time.
We’ve listed these extensions for the Chrome browser (we like it because it’s fast, has great analytics, works with email services, and works great with extensions), but most of these extensions are available on Safari, Edge, and Firefox, too.
Design extensions
1. ColorZilla
We work with lots of images and design elements, and we love ColorZilla for its ease of use.
ColorZilla is an ‘eyedropper’ extension that allows us to get a color reading from any website and paste it into Photoshop, Illustrator, or other programs. It can also generate gradients and palettes.
2. WhatFont
If you’re a developer, you can simply use “Inspect element” to see the font used on a web page, but for the rest of us, WhatFont is a helpful little tool that tells you what font is being used simply by hovering over it.
An alternative to Loom, Awesome Screenshot is a very stable and popular screen capture and screen recorder. You can take a screenshot of an entire page or just a part, annotate it, draw on it, and blur sensitive information. If you’re recording, you can include your voice and/or your face, too. We love being able to share these with colleagues and clients.
With 700,000+ users, this is a popular extension that lets you resize a browser window so you can emulate what the website would look like on different devices. There are more advanced tools, but this is a flexible one to use for higher education teams that want a quick way to see various screen resolutions immediately from their browser.
Productivity
5. Feedly
Feedly Mini is a great all-rounder RSS reader. You can save and tag news feeds and pages for later from the little icon that’s added to the bottom of web pages. You can also email them to yourself or others and share them on social.
6. Toggl Track
If you’re working in an Agile way, you’ll be used to time tracking. Toggl Track is great for individuals and teams to track how much time is spent on a project, with a timer and automatic reminders. You won’t need to leave a website to start tracking, and it can be used on its own or integrated with other project management tools.
7. Grammarly
Who doesn’t use Grammarly? We love this extension, and it’s one of the most popular ones on the Chrome Web Store. When it comes to marketing (or any content), no one can afford embarrassing typos and grammar mistakes. Grammarly to the rescue!
8. Wordtune
If you need to go a step beyond Grammarly, try Wordtune. It uses AI to improve your writing and suggests alternatives to your phrasing, lets you set tone and length, and translate your content, all in one.
9. Evernote
This great little extension is used differently by our different Terminalfour teams, who love the flexibility of using it on phones and desktops. Evernote allows you to save ideas, pages, and content for later and lets you categorize, annotate, and label them. Genius.
SEO and Social Media
10. Buffer
Buffer is a must-have for digital marketers on social media, and if you’re using the extension, you can share images, links, and posts to your social media without having to open the Buffer dashboard. You can schedule them as you would normally and content is synced back to your Buffer account.
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Similar to MozBar, SEMRush’s Social Media Poster lets you schedule a post to social media or share an item with a single click that helps you automate and analyze your posts. Simple and easy.
If you’re looking for another alternative, try SEOQuake, which gives you similar information with keyword density, word count, links, and other information.
12. Serpstat
Need something a little more powerful than SEMRush’s extension? If you want to know what another college or university is doing with their SEO, you can snoop around with Serpstat. It’s an extension that lets you see key metrics on a page or site, with some of the most useful SEO features.
With more than 1 million users, Keywords Everywhere is a great tool for marketing research and offers tons of features, like keyword finder, related keywords, what people are ‘also’ searching for, trending keywords, Moz link metrics, and more.
14. Bitly
As many higher education marketers will know, Bitly is a great companion to marketing efforts, and the Chrome extension just makes it that little bit easier to streamline everything from your browser. It’s great for tracking campaigns on social media, letting you shorten links, customize UTM tags or branded domains, and share them while saving you precious character space.
A word about security
Browser extensions can be enormously useful and convenient.
But not all extensions are created equal, and they do carry a privacy and security risk.
Some extensions may be able to track what you do online on your browser, even when you’re not using them, while others can even carry malicious code.
Here are some ways to mitigate risk:
- Only install extensions for Chrome from the Chrome Web Store. Be aware, however, that it may take some time for Google to identify and remove malicious extensions.
- Avoid using too many extensions—use the bare minimum that make you more productive and efficient, without adding too many other bells and whistles.
- Only install extensions from only trusted developers and sources. Look for known brands rather than individuals.
- If you’re not using an extension anymore after some time, delete it.
- Look carefully at the permissions the extension requires (this will be displayed as you’re installing it).
Are there browser extensions you couldn’t do without? Share them with us in the comments below on or social.