There are a few things every business needs to keep in their arsenal when carrying out online marketing if they wish to survive. Your passion, determination and guts might mean nothing if you do not have the right tools helping you with your online marketing campaign.
There is a diverse mix of free, and not-so-free online marketing tools available all around. If you are new to business or do not understand the online marketing intricacies, you are bound to feel overwhelmed and dumbfounded when choosing the right marketing tool. The point being, it is hard to make the right decision when there are too many options to chose from and too little knowledge. In this blog post, I aim to introduce you to the eight most powerful marketing tools that will organize and simplify your digital marketing campaign.
(1-2) Web Analytics
For online businesses today, it is all about numbers and measuring data. Is your website generating traffic? If yes, where is the majority of the traffic coming from? From which demographic, gender, profession or age is the most of your traffic coming from? Questions like these are critical – and their answers even more so when you are running a business. You need all the help you can get in order to track these statistics and data and analyze them. Luckily for you, there are plenty of online tools that can help you track and measure your required data. Below, I have mentioned two of the best tools that might come in handy frequently during the course of your business.
1. Google Analytics
Rumor goes about that the data generated from Google Analytics is used by Google to rank websites. Though, we know better than to believe in rumors, it would not hurt to in this case. Best case scenario, the rumor is actually true and your website gets a chance at top ranking. On the other hand, worst that could happen is that the rumor is not true and Google does not really take into account the Analytics data to rank websites. Nevertheless, it offers features that can assist business owners manage their advertising and campaign performance, track traffic sources and determine audience behavior, as well as help with researching accurate keywords for your campaign and basically improving your overall Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. Most of all though, with clearly marked charts and graphs displayed on their social reports that an awesome New York SEO company could get for you, Google Analytics turns out to be immensely user friendly. You do not need to be adept at the analytics stuff or be technologically savvy to read and understand the reports.
2. Mint
As a business owner, one of the most important things you need stay on top of is your budget and finances. Having the record of all of your expenditures and getting to-the-minute updates on your finances is necessary today. This is where Mint comes into to play.It does so by accessing your online banking account (contingent to your permission, of course), familiarizing itself with your spending habits and then eventually categorizing and displaying your expenditures via concise reports and simple graphs. Also, you can set up a budget limit for a particular expenditure and activate notifications for when you reach your limit.
This tool does not only focus on keeping track of your expenses, but it can also manage referrals, visits, searches as well as feeds to assess where most of the interest is being generated from.
(3) Content Marketing and Content Generation
I cannot stress enough on how content is indispensable and central to the continued success of your business. It is one of the most important things you can do to make your business visible on search engines. Let us take a look at the tools that are known to be very helpful to businesses with content marketing and content generation.
Buzzsumo
It would not be an overstatement when I say that Buzzsumo is every marketer’s wet dream. Whether it is the trending topics you are searching for, analyzing captivating headlines that are effective or seeking for a way to come up with the next viral topic for your blog, Buzzsumo will never disappoint you. It is a brilliant tool to research content that your target audience is likely to find relevant as it gives you a detailed report on how a particular subject or content type performed previously. You can even filter the results by specifying the type of content – images, infographics, etc., you are seeking.
(4-5) Social Media Management
Give or take, 71% of consumers who base their decision on social media referrals are more likely to make a purchase than those who do not consider social media referrals. It is indeed a premiere platform to conduct word of mouth advertising and connect with your customers on a more personal level. Not only do these sites (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) provide a platform for your potential audience to hangout at, but they are also indexed on search engines. As such, you need to build your social presence on multiple social channels. Now, you do not have to create a business page on each of the social networks out there, but you do need to create your business account on the sites that your target audience frequents the most. The issue here, however, is that not everyone can spare a few hours to update each of their social media accounts. Fortunately for you, there are numerous tools out there that allows you to integrate all of your social accounts and lets you manage them together, saving you a lot of time.
1. Hootsuite
If you wish to manage multiple social media channels simultaneously, look nowhere else but Hootsuite. Often businesses do not have spare hands (read employees) to take care of each of their social media accounts. Acting as an employee replacement, Hootsuite provides you with features like post scheduler time, which allows you to schedule posts ahead of time if you are busy or are away on a holiday. By activating the advance scheduling time feature, you can also maximize the exposure and engagement your post generates by scheduling them to be posted when there is high engagement.
Apart from integrating your Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social media channels and featuring automated posts, Hootsuite allows you to create campaigns and analyze things like where your social media traffic is coming from, when your audience appears to be more engaged or which type of content is doing really well across your social media sites.
Although the free package is pretty basic in the sense that you can sync maximum three accounts at a time, you can always test the free plan and see for yourself if it is going to be a good investment or not. Once you upgrade from the free plan to the business package, you can integrate more than three profiles in exchange of a small monthly fee.
2. Buffer
Similar to Hootsuite, Buffer is another social media automation tool which offers businesses more or less the same features. We have already established how business owners and employees are already short on time and cannot bear to spare more than a few hours each week when it comes to managing social media. This is where Buffer comes into play. It allows you to schedule your posts way ahead of time (months, if you believe!) so that you do not miss out on the optimal timing in case you are busy and forget to update your company’s social profiles. Buffer also offers the social analytics feature which helps you track the pathway from where most of your audience is coming from.
(6-7) Email Marketing
Despite being four decades old, email, as a marketing tool remains highly relevant and far from dead. Unbelievable, is it not? Let us take a look at a couple of statistics that will convince you:
- Around 91% of the customers check their emails daily.
- According to Direct Marketing Association, email marketing generates an ROI (Return on Investment) of 4300%.
- Direct Marketing Association also reports that 66% of customers make an online purchase as a result of email marketing.
All these numbers suggest that email marketing is very much alive and running. It is an extremely interactive channel to nurture customer relationships and get your leads to effectively convert. In order to improve and strengthen your marketing campaign, you can always make use of tools that support email marketing.
1. MailChimp
This program comes with total email management services, making your life much easier. We have already discussed how social media tools help you reach and connect with potential customers, but how do you retain them and keep them enraptured? MailChimp is a very useful tool in such a case. By allowing you to create email newsletters with the help of easy-to-use templates and filtered instructions, you can design a visually appealing newsletter and send it to all of your subscribers regularly. This will keep your clients/subscribers updated regarding any and all of your new projects, hence, ensuring a continued traffic flow to your website. Let us take a look at a few more features that come with MailChimp:
- Designer templates to give out a professional feel to your emails
- Personalized contact forms
- Social sharing buttons
- Email marketing analytics
Although there are plenty other such tools to help you out with email marketing, MailChimp is much more preferable as it is a free tool. As long as you have not more than 2,000 subscribers and need to send under 12,000 emails per month, you can enjoy the features MailChimp has to offer completely free of charge. However, if your business is growing rapidly, you will need to upgrade to the pro version in exchange of a fixed amount of monthly fee.
2. InfusionSoft
Though a bit pricey when compared to MailChimp, InfusionSoft is worth every cent you pay. Here is an overview of what this particular software has to offer:
- Imports and organizes your contacts with tagging and segmentation
- Closely studies the marketing interaction and collects data on your leads’ behavior
- Prioritizes your most important and hottest leads based on the information collected
- Marketing automation feature makes sure that you never miss out on potential leads
- Triggers personalized email communication based on the customer behavior
- Ensures that the cash keeps on flowing by setting up online storefronts and payments
Personally, I believe that marketing automation feature is the best of what InfusionSoft has to offer. It allow you to build a stronger relationship with your customers by sending out an automated yet personalized follow-up response to them. Once you have learned the system basics, you will realize that it saves a lot of time which is great. After all, as they say, time saved is money earned!
(8) Evernote
Being an information organizational tool, Evernote ensures that every aspect of your business is completely and utterly organized. When you have too many ideas and thoughts running through your mind, Evernote organizes them and keeps them synced across all of your devices – smartphones, laptops, desktops, tablets and what not – making it easier for you to access them from wherever and whenever. The best part though? It is absolutely free!
While the above mentioned marketing tools are the very best, remember that change is inevitable. In order to keep up with the current competition, you need to keep on upgrading your marketing tools and not stick to them forever. Also, these tools need expert guidance and may not be easy for a layman to use. This is why it is recommended that you hire professionals like us to do the job for you. We use these and several other tools when making your online marketing campaign so that the end result is as good as it can be.
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