One nice thing I've discovered using the vim-surround plugin for vim is that you can wrap a visual selection.
The S key lets you wrap the visual selection with the input afterwards.
For example, the following text when visually selected in vim:
Hello world
After pressing S followed up by " will result in the following:
"Hello world"
It works as well with ( and [. And one more great thing is that it also works with HTML tags! Given the same text as before, pressing S and then typing <b> will create:
<b>Hello world<b>
It pays to sometimes dive into the documentation by typing :help surround or in the source code to find better ways.