Category: Roundups

Slowly but surely, small businesses are leveraging apps to automate tasks.

If you consider that operating a small business is such a big deal, especially in this data-driven era, you can no longer ignore mobile apps.

You should set big goals for your business, and work towards achieving them. According to Small Biz Trends, “72% of small/mid-size businesses expect their revenue to increase 10% from 2015 – 2016.

To fully be in control of your business, you need to know enough about social media and SEO, and how mobile apps can help you reach more audience through these channels.

Any small business has the potential to thrive. It all depends on the people managing it. It’s no longer about starting a business with big capital – but managing what you already have.

There’s a good chance that your business is well on its way to the top, where you can build self-sustaining system that runs your business on autopilot – generating sales and revenue at the backend.

No matter the business model, as long as you leverage the internet to drive leads and customers, you need to step up your game – through mobile apps.

If you’re looking to automate your business, you need mobile apps. A survey by Aberdeen Group shows that automating your digital marketing platform boost your conversions rate by 53%.

In fact, a quarter of all B2B Fortune 500 companies are already using marketing automation, along with 76% of the world’s largest SaaS companies.

Looking at the chart below, you’ll see the three most effective sources you can use to generate leads. Each of these channels can be automated using mobile apps to achieve better results – handsfree.

I put together these 25 powerful small business apps to help you navigate your way in this competitive marketing era, acquire new leads and engage existing customers – as well as create more brand awareness via mobile channel.

The first small business app to earn our number #1 spot is…

 

1. Expensify

Expensify is an attractive one-click expense reports app for small businesses.

The good thing about it is that the reports are real-time, which means that you can rely on it. If you’re looking for an intelligent app to automate your expenses in real-time, Expensify should come to mind.

Do you know the cost of your digital marketing campaigns?

The only way you can have an idea of the cost is by keeping records of your expenses.

Take a look at a scenario: The PR or social media firm that you work for as an employee nominated you to attend a workshop and represent the firm, probably somewhere really far.

On your return, you’re expected to present a detailed report of your expenses. And note, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a chartered accountant or not, you report needs to be clear to your Boss.

I can imagine how overwhelming it would be when you don’t have a detailed report of what transpired at the workshop.

You need to know, not only what you spend on as a small business, but the estimations associated with putting together: a social media project, mobile marketing campaign, as the case may be.

To reach more audience, as a digital marketer, you must know the cost implications of every tactics you may want to implement, the time it takes, at what pace, and more.

And you can have all these details listed out in a single dashboard, but with the right app.

 

2. LocalVox

Are you visible online?

Your digital marketing success depends solely on your visibility.

The best visibility to have in addition to being active on social media networks is organic search visibility. See, about 87% of consumers find business using search engines.

Yes, we can view LocalVox as an app, because of the specific tasks that you can do with it, but it goes beyond that.

LocalVox is a digital marketing company that provides online marketing solutions for local businesses that fall into these categories:

• Small businesses
• Multi-location & Franchises
• Featured industries

If you want local consumers (e.g., in Las Vegas) to find your business, you need to optimize for geo-specific keywords.

Let’s assume you’re a web developer based in Los Angeles, here are a few geo-specific keywords to optimize your web pages with:

• Los angeles web developer
• Best web developer in LA
• LA web designers blog
• Where to find web developers in Los Angeles

And so on…

Your business can only thrive online when you’re seen and heard by the right people.

Invesp estimated that if you’re not leveraging available social media, search, and mobile channels in your marketing, you’re likely to miss out on more than 85% of ideal customers who need your services.

As a digital marketing solution, LocalVox can help you in these areas to optimize your content and reach more audience.

It’s high time you keep control of your brand, while increasing your revenue and building a reputation that puts your business at an advantage over your competitors. LocalVox can help.

 

3. TweetDeck.com

Why use TweetDeck?

Well, a recent survey by MediaBistro found that if you use Twitter to promote your content and engage your followers, you can increase your business’ growth by 67%.

Here are more benefits of using Twitter:

It’s often said that the life of an animal is in the blood. In the same vein, the life of any digital marketing business is in the use of social media channels.

Twitter is a reliable channel. It’s integrated into TweetDeck to help you manage your accounts and achieve more. With this small business app, you’ll be promoting your business on Twitter like a pro.

A pro knows how to turn ugly moments into best moments. In the midst of the distractions on social media, trust TweetDeck to pull you through.

 

4. Majestic

Majestic is your marketing search engine and backlinks checker tool.

How good is your ranking on search engines?

No doubt, you’ll generate a lot of traffic if your web pages rank on the first page of Google, for related search queries. The traffic in turn translates into increased sales, loyal customers, and brand ambassadors.

You can also use Majestic to conduct competitive analysis. This way, you’re able to know which keywords your competitors are ranking for, and how where they’re getting their backlinks from.

All you’ve to do is enter your competitor’s domain name into the search box. Then click on the search icon at the right side:

Next, you’ll see your competitor’s backlinks, trust flow & citation flow, and so much more.

There are several ways to rank highly in Google first page.

Most people employ the blackhat techniques. Well, it works but it puts your website at a risk. Because, you may wake up one day and realize that your web pages have been de-indexed by Google.

The best strategy for improving your search rankings naturally is through inbound marketing. Here’s the most relevant and simple definition that Google trusts:

In a nutshell, inbound marketing involves the process of creating exceptionally great content that addresses the pain points of your audience.

Inbound marketing puts your business in such a good light, which makes your prospects and customers desire your brand. This makes it possible for your clients to come to you, instead of you going to them.

Although, there are other alternatives to Majestic. But what I like so much about this small business search tool is how it groups backlinks types.

This is really priceless, especially when you’re aiming to build more educational and governmental backlinks.

 

5. The Search Monitor

The Search Monitor is a precision ad intelligence tool for small businesses.

It helps you monitor your digital ads. In fact, you can:

• Monitor for compliance
• Monitor for ad insights

Keeping track of the performance of your ad campaigns equip you with information of what works or doesn’t work in your industry.

It gives you a detailed report of your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. You can’t afford to ignore this tool.

Since search is the most common starting point for mobile research, it means that you’ve an opportunity to reach tens of thousands of mobile users with your mobile ads.

For example, when you advertise on Facebook and target mobile users, Facebook provides a detailed user report. With this report, you can create better ad copy using Google AdWords.

Like the saying, “testing the waters,” you’re now equipped to make very good marketing projections, and thus, reach more audience – because of the discovery you just made.

 

6. AdGooroo

“Truly, mobility drives agility and efficiency.” – Vala Afshar

Our economy is driven by small, private businesses. In fact, only 1% of U.S. businesses are publicly traded.

If you want to build a thriving and agile small business, you need to leverage mobile technology. Data from Huffington Post found that small businesses project to see triple-digit-growth in mobile apps in 2018.

In turn, this should improve customer experience – which is the ultimate focus of every business.

That being said, you need the right marketing landscape and solutions. And that’s where AdGooroo comes in.

AdGooroo is a small business application that allows you gain complete insight into the paid search marketing landscape.

With AdGooroo, you can understand how your campaign is performance vs. your competitor’s across text ads, product listing ads and search engine optimization on both Mobile Search and Desktop.

Running ads online to generate leads and customers is good. But a detailed update on ad performance is even greater.

You can use AdGooroo to measure the performance of your campaign.

Generally, customers will see your ads at different times, under different circumstances. Therefore, paying close attention to ad performance across these channels while monitoring the timing is critical to your success.

In this era of digitalization, your ideal customers are online, which implies more reach for your business if you know how best to get your ads in front of them.

Your ad campaign may be dysfunctional because of the poor technique you use in tracking them. Notwithstanding, AdGooroo is here to revive your mobile marketing campaign – and provides you with these insights:

 

7. iSpionage

What are you waiting for?

Isn’t it high time you steal your competitors’ traffic & uncover their conversion strategy?

If you desire that, iSpionage can help you.

iSpionage is an AdWords Competitor Keyword Tool and PPC Intelligence tool for marketers.

Driving targeted traffic is the primary focus on every digital business. Getting the traffic to convert into customers is the ultimate goal.

But no matter the amount of traffic you drive to your website, until you engage them you may not be able to get more sales.

For example, Slideshare is able to average 60 million unique visitors each month, because it engages the users with compelling visual content.

Great content is what results in increased page activities. So, the time you spend producing irresistible content in variety of formats will pay off big time.

For your PPC ads to generate more leads, you must have a way to find profitable PPC keywords lists, as they have a potential of setting you ahead of your competitors. iSpionage can help.

 

8. SpyFu

One way your digital marketing brand can become exceptional, is learning from your competitors.

As you spy on them, you’ll pinpoint what gives them the edge, and what they’re missing out on that you can take advantage of.

Spying on your competition reveals areas that you can improve on your own campaigns, because you have known the areas where competitors are weak, or not doing so well, and so, built on them.

Do you know the keywords that generates the most traffic for your competitors?

SpyFu is a trusted search marketing app that allows you to download your competitors’ Most Profitable Keywords and Ads for paid and organic search.

 

9. SEMrush

Are you satisfied with your SEO results?

SEMrush provides service for competitive research, shows organic and Ads keywords for any domain name.

Search engine optimisation is the new fair advantage you must consider as a mobile marketer. On-page SEO is one practice that helps you drive more organic traffic and improve rankings.

If your web pages are ranking highly in Google, then you should see the results in terms of increased organic traffic, more clicks – since 42% of users click the top-ranking search results.

Digital marketing is becoming more competitive as the days go by. As a result, a host of sites are hidden because they can’t be found on the search engines.

If this is the only reason why you execute SEO, then it’s a good one. Remember that when your business is easily seen in the top results pages, you’ll generate more traffic to your website and grow your revenue.

 

10. Tweepi

Social media is such a great resource that can’t be ruled out in today’s digital marketing. It provides platforms that elevate businesses especially via mobile, since mobile users enjoy accessing their favorite sites using their devices.

One of such social media platforms you can’t ignore is Twitter. And if you’re going to use Twitter to grow your business, you’ll need an app.

Tweepi is a social media app that allows you to get more Twitter followers.

Tweepi is trusted by over 1,000,000 people, who use it to grow their brands and make more impact on social media.

Given the numerous platforms available, social media presents an advantage for small businesses to make more money.

According to Social Media Examiner, “64% of Twitter users are more likely to buy the brands they follow or are a fan of.”

Yes, your mobile marketing results can soar even in the midst of distractions, but you’ve got to arm yourself with an accountability partner. Tweepi is a proven and trusted app to make your investments worth your while on Twitter.

 

11. Buffer

Most small businesses waste ample time managing their social media accounts?

If you’re one of them, it’s time to make a U-turn. Rather than managing multiple accounts manually, you can use Buffer – a social tool that provides a smarter way to share your best content on social media.

When it comes to social media, your next biggest challenge is scheduling and sharing content, at the right time, across your different social media channels.

You’re probably going to spend more time than necessary, if you choose to share content on Facebook and Twitter manually.

Imagine the time it can take to first log into your Facebook account, then Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.

Worse, you might get into your account and bump into an interesting image that you may consider checking out.

From there, another fancy quote gets your attention, before you suddenly recognize your purpose of logging into your account.

All of these unnecessary distractions can be taken care of by Buffer. Buffer is your one-shot solution to save time sharing content across multiple social media channels – on both desktop and mobile channels.

 

12. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is trusted by agencies, and relied on by businesses for scheduling, publishing and analyzing social performance across different channels.

Your ability to follow up on your audience across social media while serving them with compelling content is a sign that you truly care. A timely update on social media can engage them.

According to Salesforce, showing users how much you care has a potential of increasing your sales by up to 29%.

Sprout Social furnishes you with a detailed report of every activity, especially where you’re expected to manage your clients’ multiple accounts.

It takes away the stress off you. Such that comes with searching unnecessarily, and wasting time.

Sprout Social is an app that takes your mobile marketing beyond making most of a good relationship with user, but it gets your visitors engaged, seamlessly manages your accounts on multiple social media channels.

Additionally, the app allows you get a reporting on your conversations, mentions, direct messages, to follower requests and comments.

 

13. Happy Cyborg

Happy Cyborg is a small business and social media app that uploads your personality to the cloud as a cyborg on Twitter.

In a nutshell, Happy Cyborg is a simple Twitter personal assistant. Once your personality is uploaded, the cyborg acts as you would.

The cyborg initiates conversations, engages people based on your interests, and filters tweets to find the ones that you will enjoy reading. This is priceless.

With billions of active social media users as of 2015, you need to always be there for your audience. You should post compelling content and engage them at all times.

How can you follow up on these people?

You need a Cyborg.

Twitter is one of the social media sites that tops the ranks. And Happy Cyborg is an app you don’t want to ignore as a digital marketer. It’s not a bot per se, so it works with you to say only the things you can say.

 

14. Pocket

Why use Pocket?

As marketers, we scour the web for relevant information that could help us get ahead in business. While at it, you’re sure to find articles, infographics, photos, videos, and more.

When you find something you want to view later, put it in Pocket.

You can save insightful content for that will help you improve your marketing campaigns on social media and search.

Pocket helps you safeguard your best content, so that you can retrieve and use them at any given time. Avoid losing delicate information or data, as this could affect your business growth in the long-run.

In a survey by Centre Technologies, it was discovered that, “60% of businesses that lose data are more likely to shut down within six months of a disaster.”

Among other things, you can reduce such a loss to the barest minimum.

You’re sure to overcome such an occurrence when you use Pocket, which is proven by hundreds of top brands and marketing influencers.

In addition to the many functions and compatibility, Pocket is free to use. And it doesn’t require you to have internet, in order to view your saved files.

Pocket earned a reputation as the best tool of choice for saving files. It also won the 2015 Webby Awards for best productivity app.

 

15. RescueTime

Do you want to find your ideal work-life balance and get more productive?

Your small business and social media activities require a lot of time investment. For example, you need to spend adequate time on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and more.

No doubt, the frequent use of these social media sites, especially when you’ve a goal can help you generate more leads and make impact.

With so many distractions on the web, RescueTime App, it’s easy to get scattered. But the good news is, RescueTime helps you understand your daily habits so you can focus on what matters and get more productive.

RescueTime can transform your business life in a dramatic way.

David Reeves, Director of Product Management at Limeade has this to say,

“RescueTime teaches me things about my workday I would never otherwise have the time or perspective to learn. It’s a great tool for anyone who wants to be intentional about improving their productivity.”

 

16. Trello

Here’s why I love Trello:

“Trello lets you collaborate with more people and get more done.”

Executing any project successfully depends on how efficient you organize and communicate with your team members. With Trello boards, lists and cards, you can seamlessly manage a complex project with ease.

Vital information and how you relate it needs to fit perfectly into the project at hand, even as you carry your team along every step of your work system.

So the entire process boils down to effective communication. When the communication isn’t clear, nothing gets done.

A finding by Coreworx reveals that companies risk $135 million for every $1 billion spent on a project and new research indicates that $75 million of the $135 million (56%) is put at risk by ineffective communication.

Trello, is not just a name, but a good friend. It’s got you covered. The dashboard looks amazing.

In addition to the reduced cost, Trello is user-friendly, with enhanced visual appeal.

Update on Trello is done in real-time, irrespective of your business’ location, and every team member gets notified immediately.

This is in addition to the standard setup of Trello, which makes your setting it up unnecessary.

 

17. Buildfire

Do you know that you can build mobile apps in 5 minutes, for your small business?

As every small business takes a giant leap to target and acquire mobile users, it would be a misguided decision to disregard building or using apps.

Mobile apps revenue is predicted to exceed $50.9 billion in 2016.

Buildfire is the easiest way to build mobile apps in under 5 minutes, publish to both iOS and Android. While all that is happening, you can retain customers and increase revenue.

Not only do these mobile apps make running a small business stress-free, you can save time and money as you reach the target audience. In fact, 26% of mobile research started on branded apps.

Mobile apps enable small businesses to do a whole lot, from engaging the customers, to organising social media contests, and more.

Interestingly, mobile users spend 80% of time on mobile apps – either on games, messaging, productivity, chatting, and so on.

 

18. HipChat

How fast does it take your message to reach your desired audience?

HipChat is a group messaging app for team communication. Every small business wants to get the word out and work efficiently with others.

HipChat is such app that equips you with speed to reach more people via live chat. As of January 2014, its instant messaging services handles 60 messages per second. Can you imagine that?

Funny but true, Pingdom Royal predicted that instant messaging is set to get louder and faster with time.

 

19. Skype for Business

How do you reach more people outside your city, state or country?

Yes, you can send emails, put a call across, but nothing beats a face-to-face communication.

Dan Brutto, the President of UPS International suggests trading beyond the local shores, on observing that about 95% of the world’s consumers are located beyond the United States borders.

In the same vein, you can expand your reach as a small business marketer, no matter the location of their target audience.

Skype for Business allows you to collaborate with anyone on any device. You can make calls, host online meetings, and do much more.

For a small business, the challenge of managing a team at one end of the globe, when you’re domiciled at the other end is now a tale of the past.

With Skype for Business and its rich features, you can communicate with your team, clients, and fans anywhere in the world.

With its instant messaging, voice-over IP, and video conferencing, Skype for Business is integrated and compatible with a host of other apps.

In addition to this, it functions via whiteboard documents, which enables team members to share texts.

Also, with Powerpoint documents, polling lists, desktop sharing, and more.

 

20. Nimble

Yes, you can grow your small business faster with the right CRM and lead generation tool – Nimble.

Nimble is a marketing CRM application that enables you to turn communities into customers. It provides smart contacts, smart insights, smart results no matter where you work.

Leveraging a marketing CRM is really that important, if you want to make more sales, and win customers that are loyal for life.

According to a study by the American Express, “70 percent of Americans can spend about 13% more with companies they believe provide excellent customer service.”

Excellent customer service is only traceable to what your particular customer considers to be important, especially when their needs are met.

Regardless of what you may think you know as a business, your customer is king.

Nimble, as both an automation app and a social media tool enables your business to keep record of your customers profiles, coordinates social listening, email conversations, and activities across known social platforms.

 

21. Insightly

Is your customer relationship management effective?

Though your primary goal as small business is to add value and consequently make profit – but at the heart of any thriving business is relationship.

You’re bound to lose it, like the proverb, when you put the cart before the horse. This is similar to counting your gains, before caring for your clients.

Establishing strong relationships with your customers is certainly what would gain your business customers for life.

Insightly is a CRM and Project Management software. Use Insightly to classify your contacts with notes, link social media profiles, and keep you informed of latest happenings.

 

22. FreshBooks

Invoicing is a major part of any small business.

And if not properly done, it can affect every other aspect of your business. For example, it can result in unexpected debts and credits.

Issuing your clients the due invoice puts them in a position where they’re able to consider their debt, a priority.

Take for instance, a situation where one of your clients owe you for more than the agreed time. Paperless invoicing is the new trend right now.

If you want your business invoicing to be automated and paperless, FreshBooks is your best bet. FreshBooks is a small business accounting software in the cloud.

If you dread accounting tasks, FreshBooks will make them easy and enjoyable to you. Start sending invoices, tracking time and capturing expenses in minutes.

 

23. Wave

Wave is a free small business application, which handles credit card processing, and payroll management. Small business owners use Wave to run payroll for up to 96,255 times a year.

It won’t be right if you were to pay for goods you didn’t consume. I’m sure such would be labelled an abuse.

Such can be the lot of a small business.

More often than not, small businesses bring this upon themselves. One instance is making purchases you don’t need.

Your expenditure as a digital marketing firm for example should be limited to your status, and such as what your business is in dire need of. But keeping track of your purchases is one way to hold yourself accountable.

It enables your business to service other maintenances, pay employees, draw up a profit margin, plan expansion and more.

 

24. Tune.com

Do you want to drive more traffic, build engagement with customers, and discover opportunities to make more money with your mobile apps?

If yes, then you need Tune.

As a small business owner/marketer, you can make more money and impact with Tune.

The future of your small business depends on how you leverage social media and mobile technology.

As you embrace mobile apps marketing, you need to understand your customers.

Tune will track them for you.

There are opportunities to grow your small business, and increase mobile apps engagement.

Don’t be deceived, you need a robust mobile apps analytics tool like Tune to run your small business.

Sure, your your growth may be from mobile ads or organic search – but irrespective of the source, Tune analytic tool will track them all in a single dashboard.

Here are the core benefits of Tune.com:

• Measure the value of each marketing channel you employ (e.g., social, search).
• Get authentic reports right on your dashboard.
• Easily gather all your marketing campaign reports in one place.

You must know that a lot of people using mobile devices are just visitors. According to Localytics, about 4% of them become into qualified leads.

The good news is that with Tune, you can set up the right campaigns to re-engage these casual mobile visitors into customers.

Depending on the size of your market, but 4% of out 100% is small. Hence, the need to track your mobile apps performance and optimize your small business campaigns accordingly.

Tune improves your decision making process, by allow you gain better understanding of your customers and collect more sales data.

 

25. Admob

Admob is an extension of Google Analytics.

Truly, getting the right can cheap, but tracking performance is usually expensive. For this singular reason, you need to make more money from your mobile apps the smart way?

Admob is a unique tool that displays advertisements from a host of Google advertisers. It generates reports from more than 40 networks through AdMob Mediation.

You can use AdMob to manage 40 Advertising Networks are managed from a single interface. And you seamlessly track the highest paying adverts using AdMob Adverts Network Optimization.

Data like “user destination” and “type of mobile devices” used is monitored by Google’s AdMob Network.

You can also engage users with innovative video ads using AdMob’s native ads. It will in turn preserve your user experience.

We all know that when the users or customers have a good experience, it can lead to sales and business growth.

Compass has authenticated that you can grow faster by 75%, if you engage in Mobile app campaign – and share them on the App Store.

Therefore, consider Google AdMob Network for a smart choice to understand your mobile apps users better, and earn extra income.

 

Conclusion

Apps have made it possible for small businesses to overcome most bugging challenges.

Yes, starting a small business is easy. Because, managing communications, being accountable, and handling every aspect of your business can be automated.

Behind every successful business is a great automation tool that helps the organization generate leads, acquire customers, and build a great customer experience pipeline.

To get started, look through these 25 small business apps to find the right candidate that fits well with your goal. Easy, right?

All in all, small business app must never entirely replace personal contact. Always remember that intimacy is what your customers want.

You’ll agree with me that building a thriving business takes time and effort.

In my opinion, it’s important to have an open mind and learn new marketing strategies for today’s competitive markets.

The truth is, marketing has changed, and smart businesses are leveraging the power of the internet to drive qualified leads and increase revenue.

Without a doubt, online marketing has taken over the wheel. Does it mean that traditional marketing no longer works?

Actually, no.

However, if you’re looking to build a thriving community and attract loyal customers to your website or brand, even if you use native advertising, you still need content marketing – because it’s the easiest way to build trust, nurture a raving fan base, and get repeat customers.

And no matter how well-crafted your marketing plan is, without the right marketing tools, you’ll fail. These tools can come in different forms.

A recent study from Constant-Contact shows that 98% of small business owners already use their website as primary marketing tool

The traditional marketing methods pose the challenge of engaging the customers. Because the ads tend to be pushy, whereas digital marketing strategies (e.g., content marketing, blogging) is welcoming and drives trust to the roof.

On the web, there are several channels that you can leverage to drive customers to your website, like social media, PR, search, display, authority websites, and so on.

Irrespective of the channel you make up your mind to use, you still need the right marketing tool.

Since the sole objective of every business is to make profit, it’s important to reach out to ideal customers wherever they are on the web.

Your customers are your greatest business asset, whether online or offline. That’s why you need to appreciate and answer their questions with helpful content.

Data from Accenture shows us that 72% of customers have switched providers due to overall poor quality customer experience.

All marketing channels and strategies are effective in their unique ways. The overall success that you get from one channel (say social media) is essentially dependent on another channel (e.g., blogging).

For example, as you generate organic traffic and leads to your business, you need social media to communicate with them, and builds strong relationship via email marketing.

Obviously, leveraging on these lead generation and nurturing strategies only becomes effective and easy when you know and choose the right marketing tools.

As a marketer, do you wish to have “die-hard” customers and fans who will stand for your brand any day?

I know you want customers who will identify with your brand and refer other loyal customers your way. Come on, haven’t you heard that 51% of facebook fans are more likely to buy the brands they’re passionate about?

Building a loyal fan base doesn’t happen overnight.

Trust me, it’s a daunting task. But the rewards are well worth your time.

The 23 marketing tools that I’ll recommend are powerful enough to help you on the path to building trust with your target audience.

Engaging your audience with compelling content is the right step to take.

Create content that your email subscribers will find irresistible. Else, you’ll be overwhelmed at the rate by which several of them unsubscribes from your list.

Recent statistics from Hubspot found that 91% of email users are unsubscribing from a company email list they once enjoyed.

If they must stay, you have to deliver immeasurable value through content marketing.

Of course, content marketing cannot thrive in the absence of marketing tools.

 

What Are Marketing Tools?

Marketing tools designed to automate repetitive processes, tasks, minimize human errors, manage complexity, build strong customer relationship, maximize effort, and brings your brand to spotlight.

An effective marketing tool should help you achieve either or all of these:

If you desire to be more efficient and productive, then, these marketing tools should be an integral part of your business.

Since you can’t watch over your own shoulders and that of your competitors, manually, these marketing tools does that for you.

Marketing tools cuts across diverse markets. For example:

• Website analytics tools
• Social media management tools
• Conversion rate and funnel analytics tools
• SEO tools
• Marketing automation tools,
• Email marketing tools

…And so on.

In this in-depth article, I want to show you 23 of such powerful marketing tools that you can use to power your lead generation, customer retention, customer service, sales management, and at the end of day, boost your business revenue.

If you’re ready, let’s dive in.

1. Charlie App

Charlie is an attractive marketing tool that helps you create a positive impression when meeting people (especially for the first time).

A positive first impression is critical to winning over that customer, or closing a deal.

In a recent article on Harvard Business Review, by Dorie Clark…

“People may have built up a certain, inaccurate impression of you – you can’t expect to overturn that thinking with subtle gestures, you need a bolder strategy to force them to re-evaluate what they thought they knew about you.”

Truly, you need to work hard to overcome a bad first impression.

If you’re a social person or your job involves meeting with customers and clients, whether online or physically, Charlie App will help you establish a stronger relationship between with customers.

You should know that relationship with your customers is almost everything in business. It can make or mar your strategy.

Charlie scours through 100s of credible sources and automatically emails you a one‐pager on every potential customer/client you’re going to meet with, before you see them. Isn’t it powerful?

This marketing tool (let’s call it app) does this by capturing customer’s bio data, email address, phone numbers for follow up and getting them acquainted with your brand.

Charlie has gone far to introduce personalization in its marketing campaign. This is a campaign where attention are given to customers on-one-one instead of group.

It’s a simple but effective way to answer people’s questions and comments quickly. In fact, 53% of customers want response to their tweet within 1hr.

Don’t make your customers or social media fans perceive you as an unserious marketer, who doesn’t care about them. Use personalization to drive user engagement on social media and during meetups.

2. Oktopost

We’ve all been there – accidentally wishing to make more impact through social media. Yes, we know how powerful social media is, but it seems as though we’re lost.

If you can relate with this, you’re not alone. Oktopost is that social marketing tool you should give a shot.

Oktopost is great for B2B marketers. If you choose a social media tool that’s designed for B2C marketing, your results will be mediocre. Trust me, the plan, approach and features you need are different.

Lee Odden, founder of Top Rank Blog shows the distinction when he said that, “B2B marketers who are goals focused, strategic in planning and action are more effective.”

Oktopost is a B2B social media marketing tool designed to help you power your social campaigns and drive hungry buyers. It enables you to schedule your best posts to multiple social profiles, from a single dashboard.

Stay informed about social media, study the detailed reports on clicks, conversions, and other engagements for each of your posts.

You can also use Oktopost to determine quality contents to share with your audience – and keep them engaged all the time. As you already know, magical things happen when customers derive value for your content and get their questions answered.

An earlier case study by Gallup revealed to us that customer engagement boost sales and average revenue per user.

.

Truly, it’s difficult to manually determine which type of content your audience prefers you post on social media. But with Oktopost it’s simple. The tool finds relevant conversations and leads you into it naturally.

3. WordPress

If WordPress sounds strange to you, then you’re probably new to blogging, digital marketing, or you’ve been hiding under the Old Harry Rocks in England.

WordPress is a simple and powerful content management system (CMS).

It’s actually a publishing software used mostly by bloggers, authors, digital companies, and content marketers to create and publish content, and build robust website.

These days, starting a business is damn simple. Because you don’t need to have programming skills or hire a professional programmer to build a website for you.

With this free and helpful WordPress software, you can design a website within 20 minutes. There are tens of thousands of free themes and plugins to make your website as professional and dynamic as you want.

The beauty of WordPress is that most authority news channels lives on it. For example, Mashable, CNN, Techcrunch, and more than 60 million other sites started out on WordPress – and I don’t see them switching to Joomla or Typepad anytime soon.

WordPress themes are popular too. Infact, 51% of marketers are now using WordPress themes to power their blogs.

No matter what you’re looking for in a website, I can assure you that WordPress is powerful enough to support it.

Even if you operate a brick-and-mortar business, you can always build a website and use it to attract motivated customers on the web.

4. Crowdfire App

Launched February 2010, Crowdfire is a social media engagement app for Twitter and Instagram. It’s great for managing user accounts. It’s built to generate automated answers to questions often asked by your fans, especially on Twitter.

If you get Crowdfire, you’ll never be intimidated by your Twitter and Instagram accounts irrespective of the numbers of followers.

Email Monday confirmed that getting 70% conversion rate is as a result of using  marketing automation tool like Crowdfire.

You can collect useful data and insights about inactive users and those about to unsubscribe. You can clean up those that ain’t converting and ignite fire inside the inactive ones.

5. Medium

Medium is a community of ardent readers and writers offering unique perspectives on ideas they’re passionate about.

Typically, Medium is a tool used by authors, publishers, bloggers, and writers.

Hey, these professionals don’t think alike. More importantly, the goal of a blogger is quite different from an author.

For example, a blogger is looking to build an audience via his blog, whereas an author may not even have a blog. He was to get on the bestseller list.

Does that make sense?

Primarily, you can use Medium to amplify your content: reach hundreds and even thousands of people, republish your old posts and garner more social shares.

Medium is very good and helpful for beginners and intermediate writers.

You’ll benefit from the ready-made audience, and this will show in the number of views your first post will generate.

People can subscribe to get updates when you publish new post on Medium. You’ll agree with me that this is another viable way to put email marketing to good use.

Don’t you think so?

6. Wistia

While no two video streaming sites are created equal, the goal and motivation behind using one often are.

If you have awesome video to share, I’m sure that your mind will go to YouTube,  right?

Yes, YouTube is powerful, great, attractive… it deserves all the accolade.

But, YouTube hasn’t dominated visual streamings online. If you aren’t concerned much about views as you’re with conversions, then Wistia is a video marketing tool to rely on.

If you want your audience to spend more time engaging with your video content, then, you have to use Wistia. Because, it has so many controls, features, and welcoming ads which I’m sure your audience will enjoy.

Would you like to know how your videos are engaging your customers? Wistia provides a clearer analytics and serves you the right video metrics on a platter.

Video content still remains one of the most effective ways to engage prospects.

Hubspot stated that 87% of marketers today use videos in their marketing campaign.

In the past, creating a marketing video was difficult. But today, you can create professional videos at an affordable rate. It’s no longer about the cost of purchasing video production equipments, but the expertise.

7. Buffer

I know a few brands that have built thriving businesses, though they didn’t have a Facebook fan page, Twitter account or participate in any form of social campaigns.

As you’d expect, the journey from $0 in profit to $100,000 per year was a hard nut to crack.

Come on, don’t shy away from social media. Millions of active user are waiting for you on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and the like. Social media can play a key role in your customer service.

Jayson DeMers highlighted the 7 reasons why you should use social media as your customer service portal.

In my own opinion, there is no effective marketing today, without social media.

Buffer was initially a simple app for scheduling Twitter posts, but it’s become a more powerful tool that helps you save time managing your social media.

You don’t have to be there physically to keep your social media users engaged.

Buffer will act as your representative, while you make out time for other pressing and urgent matters that will impact your revenue.

Buffer app works tirelessly at the backend to engage your audience. You can schedule as many posts as possible.

You see, as your customers get busy with your brand on social networks, they’ll feel excited about your product.

This engagement strategy enables you to to nurture your leads without coming off offensive or pushy, which is exactly what you need to build loyalty with customers.

8. Hotjar

If you are looking for a website optimization tool, search no more. Hotjar is the all-in-one analytics and feedback tool.

Understanding your web and mobile visitor is critical. Nick Leech listed the 5 proven ways to understand website visitors. One of such is by conducting a Five Second Test.

The test is easy. You could do it manually with your friends and family.

Better yet, enter your URL into the fivesecondtest.com, and let other people will carry out a test on your site for free. To make it win/win, you should return return the favour and do a few five second tests of other people’s websites as well.

The Heuristic test (where you involve your colleagues) is effective too. But the easiest way to pinpoint how visitors are interacting with your website is by using a heat map and recording tool.

Hotjar is a powerful and easy marketing tool that shows you how your web and mobile site visitors are interacting with your website. You can use the tool to find hottest opportunities to optimize for conversions.

As a smart marketer, you need to know what’s trending in your landing page.

From capturing users behaviors with Hotjar, you will get insights of what they truly care about.

9. Simply Measured

Are you tied down by big data?

Simply Measured believes that social marketing should be simplified, and not tied overwhelming with all the data. Ideally, the social data should drive your marketing.

Simply Measured provides an easy social media analytics and measurement solution for small and mid-size companies.

Who are your Twitter followers and what do they care about?

Use the measurement platform by Simply Measured to fuel your social campaigns and gain deep insights in your fingertips.

Simply Measured is provides Facebook analytics, Twitter analytics, and more. You also get to know how healthy your Instagram fans are and what’s trending in your Facebook fan page.

Yes, being sensitive to what is trending in your social media accounts guarantee that you acquire customers from these networks, especially Facebook.

Simply Measured rich features enable you to compare your Facebook fan page with your competitors – to know their weaknesses and strengths. Give it a shot today.

10. Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer is a search marketing tool that enables you to develop a high quality inbound link profile.

For example, OSE helps you research backlinks, find link-building opportunities and find potentially damaging links.

Specifically, you can determine the number of backlinks your website or web pages have generated over a period of time (say 60 days).

Once you’ve found damaging links, the next vital step is to get rid of them. Else, your search rankings may drop.

Optimizing your web pages can dramatically improve your search rankings and drive qualified traffic to your website, especially when your content page ranks at the top of organic results.

11. SumoMe

Website traffic is the fuel that powers your online business machine. Without traffic, you’re going to fail. Sorry.

In a recent article on the Huffington Post blog, Ian Mills summarized the importance of website traffic.

In Mills’ words,

“The single aim of all marketing efforts is to increase sales and in order to achieve this online, your website needs to have traffic to convert into a sale or a lead. You can’t convert anything without traffic, and without conversion your traffic is pointless.”

As you read this article, marketers are actually looking for ways to generate and grow website traffic.

If you’re one of them (well, I am), then Sumome is the simple but powerful marketing tool to leverage.

Adding social sharing buttons on your posts alone can encourage people to share it. However, without Sumome, you’re allowed to customize the appearance of your sharing buttons to blend into your theme.

One of the greatest features of SumoMe is its mobile responsiveness. All of the accompanying tools that Sumome provides will fit into any mobile screen – and engage the audience.

Are your web visitors actually reading your blog posts?

It’s hard to tell. Really.

The Content Analytics, a tool in the SumoMe warehouse will give you rich insights in this respect.

When building social media campaigns, there is no room for assumptions. Don’t assume that your posts will be shared. You may not like the end result.

Again, if you place your call-to-action wrongly, you won’t get people’s attention.

To know where to place your call-to-action, you need to analyze user behavior using Sumome’s tools.

12. Segment

Segment is an analytics software made simple.

Segment captures customer’s information through the API and makes them easy to understand and beneficial for your business. Here’s how it works:

The processes done in your website and mobile apps can be captured and kept in the Segment Libraries, for your use.

13. Google Trends

Google Trends is a solution that shows the graphical representation on how a particular keyword or topic is trending in US or globally.

It’s a free Google services for topic analytics. It’s very helpful in market research and web surfing behaviour tracking.

For example, let’s see what’s trending right now around the world.

With this tools you can know what the world is thinking about your product and services.

You definitely need Google Trend.

For example, if you’re a small business consultant and wants to know how popular the market is, all you’ve to do is input the keyword into the Google Trends search box and search it.

Sadly, from the graph below, you can see that the demand for “small business consultant” is constantly going down. It’s now left for you to decide whether to move on or quit.

14. Blog Topic Generator

Do you know what your next blog post topic is?

How do you craft the headline? Truth is, the headline is the most important element of your content. According to Brian Clark, founder of Copyblogger, 8 out of 10 people will read your headline.

If you’re stuck right now and don’t know what to write about, you’re not alone. You can use the HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator.

To get started, simply enter your keywords into the blank spaces. Then click on the “Give Me Blog Topics.”

Next, the tool gives you a Week of Blog Topics:

Note: These topics are analyzed based on the keywords. The chances of going viral if you promote your content is high. You can see how clear the headlines are.

Moz confirmed that clear headlines with numbers are preferred by users.

15. Content Idea Generator

Portent’s Content Idea Generator functions in a similar way as HubSpot’s blog topic generator.

The tool generates trending and irresistible blog post titles, so you don’t have to. Simply enter your keyword in the space provided and click on the white arrow.

Next, the tool gives you an idea for a blog post. It may not be grammatically correct, hence, you need to tweak it.

Content Idea Generator is your content creation guide, when you’re looking to get more content out there – but don’t have the time to always write headlines from scratch.

When inputting your keywords, avoid CAPITALIZATION. Else, the tool will return headlines that don’t read well.

Moz confirmed that using Sentence Case in headlines convert 64 % while ALL CAPS convert at 21%.

It’s ironic, but despite knowing how powerful content is in today’s digital marketplace, so many marketers have a hard time creating compelling content.

Creating a successful content marketing strategy is almost difficult, without making room for content creation and distribution. Let this tool guide you.

16. Evernote

It’s time to remember everything.

Evernote is a cross-platform marketing app, developed for taking note, organizing, and archiving ideas. These notes can be in form of formatted text, full webpage/excerpt, voice memo, photographs and even handwritten ink.

Jotting down few notes whether on a business call or meeting, helps you remember and make smarter business decisions.

But instead of using pen and paper, use Evernote app on your mobile device and you’ll be fine.

When taking notes, they’re immediately updated on all your devices and stored in the cloud. So accessing your ideas from anywhere won’t be a problem.

A recent study found that 54% of the most effective B2B Marketers have a documented content marketing strategy.

As we all know, ideas rule the world. Lots of successful entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook started with an idea. I’m sure your business was a simple idea that you’re passionate about.

With the search button on Evernote, it’s very easy to find any note you’ve saved, even words on PDF documents. It also allows you to share your ideas in notes with your team.

17. Buildfire

Buildfire is the easiest way to build mobile apps. And these are not your average mobile apps – you can check out the features.

The use of internet via mobile devices is always on the increase. As a marketer, can your customers access your products through their mobile devices?

According to a statistic by Statista  in 2012, mobile in-application sales was predicted to exceed $36,887 billion in 2017.

In-app marketing is too competitive with over 1.8 million mobile apps already available on Google Play store and Apple store respectively.

If you wish to leverage mobile apps in your marketing, you need a robust drag and drop builder like Buildfire.com.

Irrespective of what your business looks like, Buildfire has a variety of templates that will suite your business. Funny enough, you don’t need programming skills, yet, your mobile app can be reader in 15 minutes.

18. Buzzsumo

One of the reasons why most brands embrace content marketing is to create brand awareness. And this can only happen when you leverage social media.

But the surprising fact is that only 38% of B2B marketers are reported to have an effective content marketing. How sad?

How effective is your content marketing?

If you’re looking to improve performance, and get your content shared across social networks, Buzzsumo is the right tool.

Buzzsumo is a powerful tool that scours the entire web and shows you content that generated the most social shares – for a given keyword or topic.

You can also use the tool to identify the social media influencers who can amplify your content reach.

19. VWO

Do you wish to get the best out of your web marketing?

With different marketing ideas and strategies available, integrating them into your business can be confusing at times. Because what worked for Mr A. may not work for you.

To eliminate guesswork from your web marketing campaigns, you should split test.

Knowing firsthand what people want from your landing page or ad copy (and why) is a huge step toward implementing a successful content marketing strategy.

That’s why you need VWO – the A/B Split testing software for marketers that work. Use VWO to tweak, optimize and personalize your website with minimal IT help. You can conduct A/B testing, Url split testing, multivariate.

What an easy way to ascertain the best strategy that works for you.

VWO also provides you with real user feedback, and analysis of your landing page performance.

This tool keeps you informed with analysis on your revenue, visitor segment metrics – improves your audience targeting, and uses personalized content to engage your audience.

This case study at Unbounce showcases  several brands that uses split testing to improve their conversion rates and increase revenue.

20. Contentful

It’s always been difficult to get the right CMS that provides seamless word processing tasks.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to know that Contentful is a content management developer platform with an API at its core. The developers have done a great job – and users are happy with this solution.

It’s clear that content consumption is stronger on mobile than PCs, as more people use smartphones to browse the internet.

Infact, marketers are now creating content in mobile format, hence, multi-device publishing seems to bring good results.

What CMS do you recommend to support true multi-device publishing?

Contentful is an easy to use content editing tool, with the adjustable platform that integrate with the best CMS features. This this tool, you can increase your publishing speed and efficiency.

Top brands like Nike, eBay and Red Bull have succeeded with Contentful. You should try it.

21. Pixxfly

If you’re a marketer whose content needs a little polish to get results, don’t worry. With Pixxfly and some actionable tips from established writers, you can create a truly impressive content that people will love.

Pixxfly is an action-driven tool to power your content marketing. It’s time to unleash the viral potentials of your content.

This all in one solution supports content distribution, syndication, publishing, PR, video, research & content performance measurement.

And talking about the Content Distribution feature, which allows you to upload your marketing videos, images, podcasts, infographics, and press releases and schedule distribution to one or multiple social media accounts with one click.

A multi-tasking marketing tool that simplifies every aspect of your content strategy.

Pixxfly helps you to engage your customers easily directly on the major social platforms. This is so important, because most customers expect to have their brand’s presence on different social platforms.

With over 1,000 top news sites, social sites, journalists, and database made accessible for your content to be shared – from a single dashboard.

Pixxfly keeps tracks and measures the effectiveness of your content across all your social accounts – and notifies you of your most effective campaign, with detailed analysis.

22. BrightEdge

A lot of marketers and brands spend so much into digital content marketing with the hope of generating quality leads and customers.

Sadly, 51% of these marketers fail because they can’t measure content performance.

But with BrightEdge Content Performance Tool, you can plan, optimize and set up campaigns based on actual content performance. Do you know that your content is competing against billions of pages?

In case you don’t know, you need a tool that can target demand, optimize content, and measure results.

With BrightEdge, you can eliminate guesswork from your content strategy, and run content by the numbers. As an Enterprise SEO platform, you can use content insights to optimize your pages and improve search rankings.

According to BrightEdge, last year marketers invested over $135 billion in the creation of digital marketing content.

As you would expect, this content has limited value unless it’s well optimized and distributed. More so, it must be connected to ROI. You can use the Content Optimizer to polish your next content.

23. MailChimp.com

Is the money in the list?

Yes, to an extent, that phrase is correct.

However, a list of subscribers means nothing unless you nurture them and make them trust you.

In all, email marketing still remains one of the best ways to engage and retain customers through personalized emails.

According to the 2013 MarketingSherpa Email Benchmark Survey, “67% of marketers say that delivering highly relevant content is a strategic goal their organization wants to achieve through email marketing.”

Several studies have shown that it takes more resources to acquire a new lead than to retain an already existing one.

That being said, you need to get serious with email list building. Start today.

Don’t you think it’s high time to send better emails and sell more products.

MailChimp is an email marketing tool that you should use to build a customer acquisition strategy for your brand.

At the surface, MailChimp looks rather simple, but it’s powerful. Check out how you can use MailChimp to grow your brand.

The tool uses your customers purchase history and behaviors to segment your list – so that you can recommend relevant products to specific segments and boost your conversions rate.

What a powerful way to personalize your email campaigns for your subscribers?

Funny enough, this is what 75% of your customers want you to do.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is thriving for most brands thanks in large part to the different social channels and marketing tools.

Okay, we can’t forget mobile marketing, which has swept the entire web like a rushing flood.

Indeed, when you dig into marketing data, any notion that social media, email, search, mobile marketing, or PR is “dying” with consumers is a joke.

Evolving – yes. Dying, absolutely not.2

Developing and maintaining a good marketing campaign takes time and effort.

When it looks as though nothing is happening to your business, you may need to re-evaluate your strategy and marketing tools.

Because at the end of day, your results is dependent on how you adapt to changes in the marketplace to align with consumer behavior.

Being in real estate is tough business, especially when you only get paid for the performance and results you deliver. We’ve talked to 19 of the top experts in real estate, real estate marketing and real estate PR to bring you their best real estate marketing ideas. These will get you the close you are after whether you’re working with a buyer or seller.

 

#1. Pam Danziger – Unity Marketing

@PamDanziger

 

As a high-end real estate marketer, your primary responsibility is to create a perception of luxury for a home that becomes the reality and expectation of the potential home buyer. Creating that luxury perception becomes the key. It requires effective marketing strategies that draw the affluent home buyer. That means every potential customer contact – from online listing, advertisements, listing flyers, brochures, direct mail contact – must communicate the luxury story aimed to entice the potential luxury buyer.

The Secret: It’s Not About More Marketing; It’s About More EFFECTIVE Marketing

To sell a million-dollar house in a slow market, you don’t necessarily need more marketing or advertising, but you need more EFFECTIVE marketing and advertising. Here are some research-based ideas to help real estate marketers sell more million-dollar homes in a luxury housing market that has suddenly gone cold.

Brand Name Drop

In today’s marketplace, luxury brands are cultural currency. They talk to the quality and value of a million-dollar home. Real estate marketers should take a full inventory of the brands reflected in the home, not just the appliances, but the fixtures, local name-brand architects, designers, and contractors that are reflected in the home. Luxury brands in the home testify to the luxury price tag, Use them.

Tell Stories About The Home, Don’t Just Describe It’s Features

Real estate listings are just that: fact-based objective listings of the home’s features. But such listings – square footage, lot size, number of bedrooms, baths, etc. – tell the prospective buyer nothing about the experience of living in the home. Story-based listings that weave the home’s facts and figures into the story romance the listing and make it come alive. Don’t just write a listing, tell a story about the home.

Hire A Writer

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in today’s internet-powered, social-media driven, content-marketing world, a thousand words need to go along with that picture. Those thousand words must tell stories engaging enough to make the prospective home buyer curious enough to call the agent and set up an appointment to experience the home for themselves.

Real estate agents think nothing of hiring professionals to do their photography and videography, yet they write the listing themselves. This is a huge mistake! Writers can take that fact-based listing description, including the extensive brand-name inventory, and tell a story about the home that will romance the listing and make it pop! Plus, writers are fairly inexpensive to hire. Put one on the payroll and see the difference it makes to the listings and your sales.

#2. Bob Gordon – Remax

@BobGordon

Blog

This is a low cost, organic route to lead generation.   Beyond blogging, you can share your content in Groups on Social Media, use your posts as material for a Drip Marketing campaign and even share Client Testimonials in your Blog. I do all of this and more with my website: boulderrealestatenews.com

Recently I’ve created a electronic newsletter, using my BLOG content as the stories, so that interested consumers can click to my website.

Interact on Social Media

Interact on social platforms, especially in Groups. Specifically, in a local FB group called the 8-Oh-Oh-27 (named after a zip code), I posted I was looking for recommended contractors to create a list to share. I had a massive response. Over sixty LIKES, and another 50 comments, about a 1/3 wanted in the material, the rest wanted a copy.

Utilize Video

I have published over one hundred videos, some of which have been viewed extensively. My favorite videos are quick post-closing client testimonials. My clients thank me by name and share how excited they are to be in their new home. They mention the things I did well – the marketing, the communication, the strong negotiation skills. Then I post the video to my Blog, share on Social Media and I TAG everyone involved when sharing — the closer, the other agent, the client, the title company, the mortgage lender. These videos get great exposure.

 

#3. Luca Alessandrini – Online Optimisim

@_Luca_Luca

Building and Maintaining Relationships Online

A key activity to building relationships is an email newsletter. Through platforms like Emma or Mailchimp it has never been easier to handle create and distribute your own email newsletter. Letting past, current and potential clients know your activities including listings, speaking opportunities, closings, open houses, even personal events like weddings, births and graduations are a great way to keep clients engaged. This contributes to increased trust, referral opportunity and relationship building. Newsletters are a more direct method of communication compared to social media or blogging, two other strategies commonly used to build connections.

Building Confidence in Your Ability Through Social Media

In 2016, especially in the real estate industry, it is essential to show movement, progression, and of course, great sales. Most house buyers are not looking for the house of their dreams, but the best home for them. By connecting clients to the best home for them, they can provide strong testimonial, key content to be published on your social media accounts. Overall, real estate agents must communicate their ability to match homes with clients and build relationships with past, current and potential clients to best increase their leads and improve their business..

#4. Karim Wahba – Realty One Group

@WahbaRealtor

 

Price Under Marker Value

If the fair market value of a house is $500,000 for example, sometimes I advise my sellers to list slightly below the market value. What this does is it exposes the property to so many more potential buyers & so many buyers schedule appointments to view the property. This often results in multiple offers being written on the property & a bidding war ensues. This benefits the seller, in many cases the final purchase price ends up surpassing the fair market value. People want what other people want, so they keep bidding up!!

Limit Showings & Create Deadline

By limiting the showings of a property to one open house, this means many buyers will come in to see the house during this 3 or 4 hour window as that’s the only opportunity to see the house. This almost ensures that an open house will be packed with potential buyers. The more crowded the open house, the more buyers feel like everyone else is going to bid for this property so I’ll bid the highest.

If the open house is on a Saturday, I like to create a deadline to receiving all offers by noon on Monday. What this does is it also creates a sense of urgency & subconsciously buyers automatically prepare to compete with other offers.

Again it just plays on the notion of “people want what other people want”.

 

#5. Sam Williamson – Aims Media Glasgow

@AimsmediaUK

 

Retargeting

Most consumers considering purchasing real estate deliberate for months (or even years) before finally deciding on a property, and they’ll often spend significant time using the Internet to look at the various options available to them. This means it’s likely that they’ve visited your website several times to take a look at any available properties, which presents the perfect opportunity for retargeting.

For real estate, email retargeting is probably the most effective marketing method to use. The emails can be kept in the inbox and referred to when the customer feels ready to purchase the real estate.

#6. Blake Philpott – RE/MAX City Realty

@blakephi

Facebook Ads!

Great way to let literally hundreds of thousands of people in the community know about the listing, I will do this for all my listings, it works like magic. Exposing the listing to the highest number of people is what really brings in the money for the seller once people start to compete for the property.

Professional Videography, Photography, And Even Drone Footage

According to the real estate association 90% of buyers are first drawn to a property (online or otherwise) by good quality photographs. Don’t use your smartphone! This is one area you want to spend your money. Bright, spacious, clean photos bring people in!

Special Events

On some listings I will use facebook, instagram, and community outlets to advertise an event in the home for sale. This is not just an open house – this is a social gathering for everyone in the community to visit a well staged home fit to sell, complete with food, drinks, and even live music (if the home is large enough).

Network – Use Others’ Businesses To Your Advantage

One thing I love to do is use other people’s talents in selling a home – They will advertise for me! For example, I have many friends who are very talented artists, I often stage homes with their art. It helps sell the home and they do a lot of advertising for me as well to show of their work. It gets a lot of attention.

 

#7. Alex Barshai – Third Temple Digital

Always Hire a Professional Photographer

Images sell. As simple as that. By our nature we are very visual and professional photography makes the property shine. In fact, realtors that invest in real estate photography sell homes 32% faster and for 10-20% higher prices.

 

#8. Jay Seier – Jolly Homes

@JollyHomes

 

Make Sure All Your Marketing Is Trackable

Why would you spend money on marketing and not be able to track it? If it’s not trackable, how do you know it is even producing.

3 tips to make sure all of your marketing of a property is trackable:

1. Use unique URLs for all of your properties and attach Google analytics to them. www.123AnywhereSt.com or www.yourwebsite.com/123anywherestreet

2. Use tracking numbers in all advertising. You could use a toll free number with extensions or use local numbers you rent to track the incoming calls.

3. Make sure all paper materials, (flyers, postcards, etc.) point people to these unique numbers and webistes.

4. If you syndicate your listings to Zillow, Trulia, etc., make sure your profile is up to date and you make sure that the comments include your contact information or at least your name.

If you do all of these things you will not only be able to track the effectiveness of your marketing but you can also show your results to new prospects and you know that hardly anyone is doing that.

#9. Sep Niakan – HB Roswell Realty

@sepmiami

Professional Pictures Go a Long Way

Don’t skimp on pictures. Spend the money and get a professional to make your place look like a million bucks. Yes, your property will essentially sell itself, but to do that you need to entice people to walk in the front door, and pictures (and video) are what make that happen.

Speak Directly to the Perfect Buyer in All Your Marketing

Don’t just regurgitate the features of the place. Instead, put those features in context of the target buyers’ daily life. Think about the most likely buyer profile for your property, and “speak” to that person in the marketing you do. For example, will the space be perfect for a young single professional, a couple with a newborn, or a couple of empty nesters, or someone who simply must have a calm, serene view? (Be careful not to touch on anything that will smell like you are referencing or pushing away any protected classes.)

 

#10. Sacha Ferrandi – Source Capital Funding

@SourceCapital

Face-to-Face Marketing Generates More Sales

Go out and talk to people face-to-face. Interact with local businesses and ‘network’ as much as you can. In real estate, people often buy from someone they like and when you have an opportunity to talk with consumers in person your chances for a sale increases dramatically.

Leverage Social Media to be ‘Fun’

No one likes advertisements on social media these days. Leverage social media in a way that shows your properties, but has a light, fun message for your followers. This will not only result in more engagement, but will help you connect with millennial consumers that are just now entering the industry.

Don’t Forget About Your Website

Most people just build a real estate website and forget about it. You should be constantly trying to improve your site and adding content and photos to increase your rankings on Google and other search engines.

 

#11. Henry McIntosh – Twenty One Twelve Marketing

@2112_marketing

Utilize Visual Content

Selling real estate predominantly comes down to aesthetics, use strong, high-resolution imagery across social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Use hashtags that relate to the location of the property and its selling points to help entice people to view more on your website.

You should also produce video content. Live videos ceded out on Facebook and Periscope can be highly effective. By producing a house viewing style video, you can show a huge amount of potential clients around a property in one go. Don’t do anything differently in the video, act as if you had a client physically in the property. Viewers can post questions as you go, which you can answer in real-time. Record the video so you can use it on your website and other social media channels too. This form of informative content is loved by consumers and will help physically get them to the location.

Advertise

Advertising doesn’t have to be expensive. Once you’ve created great content, advertise it across social media. This is a cheap and effective way to reach people who may be interested in the property. You can target people based on location, age, gender, interests and much more, allowing you to target your ideal demographic and encourage them to come and view the property.

#12. Brian Davis – Spark Rental

@SparkRental

Consider Inexpensive Ways to Boost “Sexiness”

The trick is to find items that are inexpensive to install, but that stand out in real estate listings. Buyers and renters make housing decisions largely on a subconscious, emotional level, then use reason to justify those decisions, so as a seller you want to brainstorm ideas that make the home feel chic, modern, sexy… without breaking the bank. For example, you can install almost any type of “smart home” technology for less than $200: smart door locks, smart thermostats, smart security systems, smart smoke and CO detectors, even smart coffee makers… each can be bought in the $100-200 range. I once bought a used Jacuzzi tub on Craigslist for $700, put it on the rear deck, and then asked $5,000 more than we were originally planning. The phone rang off the hook for showing requests.

The Right Words Really Can Add $10,000 to the Sales Price

According to a Zillow study earlier this year, the word “luxurious” added 8.2% to the sales price of lower-tier homes for sale. Among higher-tier homes, the word “captivating” added 6.5%. They go to identify 15 words that added value to home listings, from “impeccable” to “landscaped” to “pergola”.

Be sure to remind prospects of the expected benefits for a certain neighborhood, but also be sure to point out better-than-expected features of this particular home. People shopping in a trendy urban neighborhood expect to be able to walk to many amenities, so remind them the home is “a five-minute walk from Whole Foods”, but also point out the home has surprisingly spacious bedrooms for this popular urban neighborhood.

Perfect Presentability

Unless the home needs repairs and is being sold as-is, it should be perfectly clean inside and out, with flawlessly groomed landscaping and floors you can eat off of.. The name of the game is first impressions, and nothing turns prospective buyers or renters off more than other people’s dirt and grime (especially in kitchens or bathrooms). If there isn’t much landscaping to speak of, you can still find ways to spruce up the front of the house and boost curb appeal, by adding bright-colored potted plants. The nice thing about potted plants is you can reuse the same ones over and over, and move them from listing to listing as you make sales (just make sure the contract excludes the plants).

Lastly, be sure to include lots of photos of your perfectly presentable home with the listing.

 

#13. Deidre Woollard – Lion & Orb PR

@lionandorb

Write For Humans And Bots

Listing descriptions should appeal to both human readers and search engine spiders. Both have short attention spans so put the most important features of the property as close to the top as possible. On your personal website use a slightly different property description so that bots don’t see it as duplicate content.

Curate Your Photos

It’s tempting when you pay for 50-100 photos from a professional photographer to put them all in the listing description. This however can decrease the likelihood of showings if the potential buyer sees something they don’t like. You don’t need to show every room of the house and every detail, concentrate on the most visually appealing photos and also make sure you have a few single images that will work for social sharing. You can use different photos in different configurations, perhaps a smaller set for the MLS and a more expanded set on a property or brokerage website.

Use Video To Tell The Story

Most clients wants a video but not all agents provide them. A video can do more than just show off the house, it can also showcase the neighborhood and local features. Now with Facebook live and Snapchat video there are additional ways to create an in-the-moment experience of the home and the neighborhood. By 2017, video will be nearly 3/4 of internet traffic and video is increasingly a part of the real estate discovery experience.

#14. Jason Parks – The Media Captain

@themediacaptain

 

Invest In A Professional Photo/Video Shoot

Hire a local photographer that can also shoot/edit video. Have him/her take professional pictures at your office and on location at a home. Make sure you also arrange for some of your top clients to come to your office to get photographed and record video testimonials.

This entire photo and video shoot can be accomplished in 90-minutes. It will provide you with hundreds of pictures and great video content. This can be applied to your website, social media channels, online advertisements, direct mail and much more.

The key to obtaining successful content is to make sure you plan out the entire shoot based on location, who you’ll interview and what key points you want to get across. If you prepare, you will obtain amazing assets for your marketing channels.

 

#15. Tania Matthews – Keller Williams Classic Realty

@taniasmatthews

 

Timing is Everything

If at all possible, list on a Thursday and host an open house on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday directly following the listing. You can door knock and circle call around the area informing neighbors about the upcoming open house and to “choose their neighbors.” It’s also a good idea to list well before the open house on the MLS, Zillow, Realtor.com, and Facebook.

Snail Mail Still Works

Just listed postcards to the neighbors and sphere. You can have this automated using Prospect Plus. Mailing renters in the area and letting them know they could own the house for $XXX/month for less than they’re paying for rent. We’ve also seen success with mailing local area investors (if applicable to the property) and your database talking about the ROI.

Blogs & Videos

If you have a strong online following, creating a blog post on the property can help capture interest, especially if it’s a unique listing. What we love to do is also create a teaser video using our DJI drone of a new property coming to the market.

 

#16. Chase Michels – Brush Hill Realtors

@PattisellsDG

Stay Social

Social media accounts including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google +, Pinterest, etc.. Link all of your social media profiles together by using www.ifttt.com.

This site will allow you to tie together your accounts so if you post on one application it will be applied to all, this is a great way to save time and keep all accounts updated.

Social Advertising

Run Facebook, Twitter and Instagram ads. These companies allow highly-targeted ads to run to the exact demographic that a potential buyer may come from.

We do this by initially creating a YouTube video. YouTube is important because it ranks very high on google searches so your videos will be easy to find when searching your name or the property address. We then load the videos to the appropriate social media and “boost” or promote the video to whatever demographic we may be targeting.

If you are hosting an Open House in a few days you can boost that video to a 2-mile radius of the home, people aged 35-65+, household income of $100K+. The demographic data these companies offer is pretty accurate so it allows for cost effective advertising.

Create A Facebook Business Page

Promote your services on there and try to grow a following. Once a client “likes” your page they will begin to see your posted content on their timeline. Share your posts to the wall of the clients’ home you are advertising. This shows your client the types of marketing you are doing, but it also promotes that post to all of the clients connections as well.

Retargeting

Install pixels on these ads to allow for re-targeting to these potential clients. Re-targeting remains to be a cost effective way of marketing to a client who has shown interest.

Reviews

Get reviews on sites such as Zillow, Trulia, Yelp, Realtor.com. Profiles with just 5-10 reviews get 50% more traffic than profiles with 0 reviews.

Go Professional

Provide a professional photographer to capture the property at its best. According to a Redfin study, homes that are professionally photographed sell for at least $934 and as much as $18,819 more than homes photographed by an amateur. The study also shows that homes photographed by a professional garner 61 percent more online views. We understand that web appeal of our listings is a huge selling point, this is why we hire a professional photographer for every home.83% of home buyers believe the most valuable feature of a website is the photos. This is why it is imperative for our listings to have the best possible photos online.

Single Property Websites

Provide a unique single-property website solely for the purpose of marketing the home to potential buyers. Buyers can use this site to view information and photos of your home while also scheduling a showing with just a click.

Go Offline

Print marketing of the home including newspaper ads, brochures, flyers and postcards. 79% of households say they read direct-mail, sending out 5,000 postcards allows over 3,900 potential buyers in the neighborhood to see the ad.

Blogging & SEO

Create great blog content consistently. This is extremely important and helps SEO rankings immensely.

Go Local

Sponsor local charities or events. This is a great way to give back to your community while also marketing yourself.

Stay In Touch

Email drip campaign your farm area or database.   Make sure content is local and thought provoking, if not clients will not engage.

Use Video

Start using video for listings. It allows potential buyers to get a better idea of the actual space. Also, 3D cameras and drones are extremely important when marketing a home online.

#17. Dave Kohl – First In Promotions

@DaveKohlOnline

Look To Buy What You Want to Sell

The first thing to do is to look to buy the same home you are looking to sell. Do a search on real estate specific web sites for the same number of bedrooms and baths, and for as many of the features it allows which are similar and within the same general vicinity.

When the results come up, select to review from lowest price to highest price. Carefully review every similar property which comes up no matter what the price. If there is a photo spread, look at every photo. Keep a list of the best selling points from each ad, as well as which elements of the photo(s) which best catch your attention.

Do an honest comparison of the best selling points and photos you find from all of these ads. For your next step, go back online and search for recently sold homes in your community and note prices on recently sold similar homes.

Next, expand your geographic parameters. Search for a similar home for sale in a different city/state with a similar climate and size, using the same criteria. Make separate notes about what you like and don’t like about each ad. Doing this can lead to more selling points than other local agents are currently using.

Go back and review the highest priced properties within your search parameters. What do they have that yours doesn’t? Is it something you could easily add? If not, are there ways to show the value of yours?

For example, suppose a similar home to yours has a built-in swimming pool and yours doesn’t. Your selling points could include “Close to city park & pool”. Without saying it, make someone researching area think “I could save $10,000 by walking to a pool someone else maintains!”.

Ideally, by comparing the home you wish to sell against others for sale, you will come up with both unique features and specific selling points. Your best result is to be able to list the home with something along the lines of “largest bedrooms and closest to train station of any 3 bedroom home in (community)!”.

Many agents fail to update their information and selling points regularly. Take notice of how long the properties you are looking at have been on the market. You might find ads which haven’t changed in six months, thus taking away any urgency to pursue that property. Your property should always be advertised with “fresh” information and be updated frequently whether the price changes or not.

Continue to monitor the advertising of those similar local properties and watch for others coming on the market. You need to make sure that your selling points are still current along with looking out for newer ones.

 

#18. Jeff Knox – Knox & Associates Real Estate Brokerage

@dfwknoxre

Identify Your Probable Buyers

For instance, if you are listing a larger home in a neighborhood known for its great schools, identify your probable buyers and leverage your online marketing to target those buyers. For the house in this example, your most likely buyers will be a family with children needing good schools and a larger home.

Reverse Prospect on MLS

Most MLS systems now allow Realtors to reverse prospect to find agents who have clients looking for a home in the area of your new listing. Contact these agents and let them know about your new listing.

Contact All Realtors Who Have Sold A Home In The Neighborhood

Contact all agents who have sold a home in the neighborhood within the past year. Most likely, they have some “sideline buyers” who are just waiting for the right house to hit the market. Sideline buyers do not search daily so they may not see your new listing. Be proactive and reach out to these other agents.

 

#19. Greg Chaplain – The Real Estate Group LLC

@TREGtweets

Price It Right

The best marketing strategy ever invented is called “price it right.” The thought of pricing it high and expecting a buyer to “make an offer” is a myth. Pricing it high is a barrier to the prospective buyer seeing the property at all.

Set Up The Property Appropriately

Furnish rooms for their intended use. In other words, a dining room should showcase dining room furniture. Not a weight bench or pool table. These items should be removed and placed in storage off-site. An empty room is better than one not set for its designed function.

Be Prepared

Whether there is a showing appointment scheduled for that day or not, whenever leaving the house be sure that it is in show ready condition. (Especially if your schedule doesn’t allow you to shoot home on a moment’s notice to prepare the house for a showing)

 

Think something is missing? Comment below and let us know your best real estate marketing ideas!

This year promises to be another fast-paced ride for marketers trying to keep up with trends and best practices in the world of online marketing. It’s no surprise that emerging trends—especially in the mobile sphere—are changing the way we consume content and communicate with one another.

Successful marketers today understand these evolutions and have their fingers firmly on the pulse of the modern consumer. Online marketing is fortunate to have a wealth of true gurus, individuals with a broad scope of knowledge and fine-tuned intuition, who influence the way digital marketing is done. They are the trendsetters, the experts who’ve racked up success after success and rank at the top of the field.

Want to know who to watch for wisdom in online marketing in 2016? Check out our list of 15 thought leaders and influencers who are shaping digital marketing this year.

 

1. Rand Fishkin

da

Image courtesy of Moz.com

If you’re in marketing, you know Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz and founder of the company, stands head and shoulders above the competition when it comes to SEO—and most things related to inbound marketing and entrepreneurship. He’s an author of marketing bibles such as SEO: Insights from the Moz Blog, and Inbound Marketing, as well as the co-founder of Inbound.org.

You can follow him and get access to his marketing wisdom here:

Follow Rand on Twitter

Read Rand’s personal blog

Check out Rand’s presentations on SlideShare

 

2. Joe Pulizzi

Image courtesy of JoePulizzi.com

Joe is the founder of the influential Content Marketing Institute and a respected author and keynote speaker. He literally wrote the book on content marketing (Get Content Get Customers) and is one of the top influencers in the world of content marketing. His fourth book, Epic Content Marketing, was listed as a must-read business book by Fortune Magazine. He’s a prolific author, columnist, and podcaster (check out This Old Marketing  and Content, Inc.).

Access Joe’s amazing online marketing insight here:

Joe Pulizzi on LinkedIn

Joe Pulizzi on Twitter

Joe Pulizzi’s blog at the Content Marketing Institute

3. Jay Baer

Image courtesy of JayBaer.com

Author of five books, advisor to over 700 brands (including over 30 in the Fortune 500), and founder of Convince & Convert, a leading strategy consulting firm, Jay Baer also runs the world’s top content marketing blog, according to the Content Marketing Institute. Jay is recognized as an expert and thought leader in all aspects of digital marketing, including social media, content marketing, and customer relationship management.

Don’t miss Jay’s insights—he’s the top most retweeted person by digital marketers all over the world.

Jay Baer on Twitter

Jay Baer’s blog and podcasts

Jay Baer on the Social Pros podcast

4. Ann Handley

Image courtesy of AnnHandley.com

Ann Handley is the chief content officer at Marketing Profs, one of the most trusted training resources for marketing pros, and the author of a Wall Street Journal bestseller, Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide for Creating Ridiculously Good Content. She writes widely read columns for Entrepreneur, the Huffington Post, the American Express OPEN Forum, and Mashable. Ann is considered a pioneer in the field of digital marketing and co-founded ClickZ.com, one of the first sources for news and commentary for digital marketers.

You’ll want to follow Ann and keep up with her insights at:

Ann’s Twitter page

Ann’s LinkedIn Influencer page

Ann Handley on SlideShare

5. Neil Patel

Image courtesy of NeilPatel.com

Kissmetrics, Crazy Egg, Quick Sprout—if you’re a marketer, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the excellent blogs of these three companies founded by Neil Patel and look to them often for marketing advice. Entrepreneur called Patel the number one marketer in the world and household name brands like Google, GM, and eBay are among his clients. Colleges and universities teach Neil Patel’s marketing strategies. If you want to know what’s hot in marketing, you’ll want to follow Neil.

Here’s where you can find him:

Follow Neil on Twitter

Read Neil’s blog

Read Neil’s articles on Entrepreneur.com

6. Jeff Bullas

Image courtesy of Twitter

There’s not much about content marketing and social media marketing Jeff Bullas doesn’t know. He’s been called the number one content marketing influencer by Onalytica and ranked as the eighth best social media marketing talent in the world by Forbes. Jeff is also a best-selling author, keynote speaker, and marketing consultant; his blog consistently ranks as one of the best social media marketing blogs by Social Media Examiner.

If you want to know how to make social media work for you, or stay on top of trends in social media marketing, you should follow Jeff’s insights and opinions here:

Jeff Bullas on Twitter

Read Jeff’s blog

See Jeff’s presentations on SlideShare

7. Dan Zarrella

Image courtesy of DanZarrella.com

If you are all about the data and the science behind marketing, if numbers and statistics are more fascinating to you than simple words, you want to follow Dan Zarrella. Dan got his start as one of the first marketers at Hubspot, but now he’s got his own following as the science guy behind online marketing. In fact, he holds the Guinness World Record for the largest webinar ever and his “Science of…” webinars draw tens of thousands of registrants (watch the Science of Social Media for free here). Zarrella has also written four books on Internet marketing, including The Science of Marketing and Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness. 

If you want to follow Dan’s data-driven insights and marketing wisdom:

Follow Dan on Twitter

Read Dan’s posts on the Hubspot blog

8. Larry Kim

Image courtesy of MobileMonkey.com

There’s not much about the world of PPC advertising that Larry Kim doesn’t know (or didn’t come up with himself). As the founder of Wordstream, Kim’s a master of online ads, and he knows SEO like the back of his hand. Kim has written four books and is a featured blogger for some of the premier business and marketing websites in the world (Forbes, Inc. Magazine, Moz blog, Search Engine Journal among others). He also wrote the most socially shared article on PPC, according to SEO.com.

Catch Larry at one of his many speaking events, or follow his work at:

Larry Kim on Twitter

Larry Kim’s LinkedIn page

Read Larry Kim’s posts on the MobileMonkey blog

9. Rohit Bhargava

Image courtesy of RohitBhargava.com

Rohit is the CEO of Influential Marketing Group and one of the foremost experts on corporate storytelling and branding. A former Ogilvy exec, Rohit’s new consultancy brings deep insight into marketing strategy and helping brands and brand leaders become more influential. He’s also the author of five best-selling business books (check out Non Obvious, a number one Amazon book and Wall Street Journal bestseller). As a teacher of marketing at Georgetown University and a frequent keynote speaker, Rohit is shaping and influence the next generation of marketing strategists.

Keep up with Rohit’s marketing and branding advice here:

Follow Rohit on Twitter

Read Rohit’s blog

Watch some awesome videos on Rohit’s YouTube channel

10. Shama Hyder

Image courtesy of ShamaHyder.com

Entrepreneur Magazine calls Shama the “Zen Master of Marketing,” which is highly appropriate for the CEO of Marketing Zen Group, a global online marketing and PR organization with Fortune 500 clients. Hyder is the bestselling author of The Zen of Social Media Marketing  and was named one of the “Top 30 Under 30” entrepreneurs in the country by Inc. Magazine. She’s also one of LinkedIn’s “Top Voices” in Social and Marketing. Even President Obama has honored her entrepreneurial zeal.

Look for Shama’s insights in the following places:

Shama Hyder on Twitter

Shama’s LinkedIn page

Read Shama’s blog

Reserve a copy of her new book Momentum, coming May 2016

11. Justine Jordan

Image courtesy of LinkedIn

Justine is Vice President of Marketing at Litmus and an “email evangelist,” a master of the channel and winner of the 2015 eec Email Marketing Thought Leader of the Year award. She was doing email and content marketing before content marketing was really even born. She’s a frequent blogger on all things email and organizer of the Litmus Email Design Conference. Justine is one of the country’s leading experts in email design and analytics—all things email.

If you want to know what’s going on in the world of email marketing, follow Justine at:

Justine on Twitter

Justine’s LinkedIn page

Justine’s posts on the Litmus blog

12. Adam Singolda

Image courtesy of LinkedIn

So…what’s the logical next step for an alumnus of the Israeli Defense Forces’ elite mathematical unit and the Israeli National Security Agency with a heavy background in analytics and computer science? If you’re Adam Singolda, it’s developing a mathematical predictive engine and launching a new company, Taboola. Taboola is the world’s foremost content discovery platform, dishing out some 300 billion (yes, billion with a B) recommendations every month to over 750 million web users. Taboola is the go-to platform for major web publishers such as USA Today, the Weather Channel and NBC. If you want to know how to drive traffic and monetize content, you’ll want to know what Adam Singolda is doing.

Keep up with Adam’s thoughts and insights:

Follow Adam on Twitter

Adam Singolda’s LinkedIn page

13. Scott Yates

Image courtesy of LinkedIn

Pretty much every business has one, but not that many are living up to their promise. No, we’re not talking about Hayley, the summer marketing intern…we’re talking about the company blog, that most fundamental and basic of your content marketing channels. Scott Yates is an award-winning writer and founder of BlogMutt, one of the most successful and innovative content companies with a laser-like focus on blogs.

If you want to know what’s new in the world of blogging, just ask Scott Yates.

Scott’s LinkedIn page

Follow Scott on Twitter

Read the BlogMutt blog

14. Oli Gardner

Image courtesy of LinkedIn

As the co-founder of Unbounce, Oli Gardner has seen more landing pages than anyone on the planet (or at least that’s what he says). He’s also the author of a pretty successful eBook, The 23 Principles of Attention Driven Design. So if there’s anything you want to know about landing pages, A/B testing, and conversion optimization (or the time he almost got trampled by a bison), you’ll want to keep tabs on Oli Gardner. He’s also a keynote speaker at marketing events all over the globe and contributes to highly respected sites such as Moz.

Here’s where to find Oli Gardner:

Follow Oli Gardner on Twitter

Oli Gardner’s LinkedIn page

Read Oli on the Unbounce blog

15. Mari Smith

Image courtesy of MariSmith.com

Mari Smith (Mari like Ferrari, as she likes to say) is a thought leader and influencer in Facebook marketing and an expert in all things related to small business marketing. Fast Company called Mari “a veritable engine of personal branding, a relationship marketing whiz and the Pied Piper of the Online World,” and Forbes named her a Top Ten Social Media Power Influencer. Look for her live training events held each year at cities all over the US, catch her at Social Media Marketing World, or register for one of her highly respected webinars.

If you’re in small business marketing, or want to boost your Facebook and social media marketing efforts, see what Mari has to say:

Follow Mari Smith on Twitter

Watch Mari’s videos on her YouTube channel

Read Mari’s blog

Check out Mari’s posts on Business.com

There are a lot of experts and influencers in online marketing who can give you great advice, but if you want to know what’s trending now, or what’s on the horizon for digital marketing, you can’t go wrong following these 15 marketing giants and thought leaders and using their insight to improve your online marketing plans.

Did we skip any of your favorite marketing influencers or thought leaders? Is there someone you’d like to add to our list? Tell us in the comments below and let us know why you follow him or her. 

Running an event can be tricky. Whether it’s a graduation, wedding or a work function, there are so many factors to consider when running any event. While you’re wading through endless checklists, last minute mishaps can often occur. These mishaps make it difficult to keep you and your event on track. When you’re working in a team, coordination can be difficult. Over the past year, there were over 230 billion app downloads from the Android and IOS app stores – there are thousands of apps that can ease any problem you may have.

The only problem is that we may find ourselves short on time to peruse our plentiful app options. Luckily for us, Team BAWE created this lovely infographic that is our guide to best apps on the market. These handy apps will help with everything from communicating with team members to collecting event images. Let’s check it out!

Have you used any of these apps? Let us know below!

 

 

Social media – the undisputed king in the marketing domain… And then there’s email. Think of it as a grandparent to social media marketing. Don’t be fooled, it’s still reliable if used the right way. Today’s marketers may not be as email savvy, nor do they consider it to be a “cool” way of contacting clients, however, it has stood the test of time and proven itself to be an effective method of communication.

As long as you’re using it right, email is still one of the most valuable and targeted channels for reaching your audience. It’s also a great way to make money.

You can use your email marketing strategy to promote your app. You can also communicate with clients about your white label services or anything else that adds value to their needs.

Here are some of the best email marketing tools to ensure you hit the mark every time.

HubSpot Email Marketing

HubSpot offers a reliable and feature-packed email marketing tool that’s suited for growing businesses — for free. You can create professional marketing emails that engage and grow your audience with the easy drag-and-drop email builder. With the drag-and-drop email builder, you don’t need to wait on IT or designers for help. On top of the free email tool, you can use the HubSpot CRM for free to create tailored touch-points for your customers. HubSpot Email is automatically connected with the HubSpot CRM, so you can tailor relevant emails based on any details you have — such as form submissions and website activity. Using the CRM, you can include personalized content in your emails, like first name and company name, to ensure your contacts feel like they are being personally addressed, all while tracking
email activity in the CRM.

The HubSpot email tool is free for up to 2,000 email sends per month, with upgrade solutions starting at $50 with Marketing Hub Starter.
Pricing:
FREE

MailGenius

MailGenius is a free tool that inspects your emails and finds possible triggers that might get your message sent to the spam folder. You can run a deliverability test to ensure your email actually reaches your recipient’s inbox. Otherwise, it won’t be opened.

The tool lays out all the things you can do to avoid landing in the spam folder along with actionable advice and explanations on how to fix any issues you may have.

Even the best email copy and subject line can only go so far if your message lands in spam. Deliverability problems can severely impact your email marketing campaigns, so it’s important to be proactive and run a test to ensure you’re following best practices.

Pricing:
FREE

Litmus

Litmus is a highly versatile tool through which you can use to test and track email. You can test your emails in traditional web-clients and also popular mobile devices like Android, Apple and Windows.

Use Litmus for render testing and make sure your creative is optimized for any given device. You can test more than 40 clients and devices and with a mere click, Litmus can generate a test email to an address so you can send it to your ESP. Within minutes you’re going to see desired browsers, ISPs and devices.

Want your link testing stream-lined? Put the email through a landing page test and within minutes, you’re going to get an overlay of that email with complete results for every link. The ESP tracking report inserts a tracking pixel in your email and you get subscriber data such as how and where the email was opened, how much time the user spent time reading it, and if it was organically forwarded or printed.

Pricing:
Litmus comes with a free 7-day trial, while the premium version can be had for $399 a month, $149 for the Plus version, and $79 for the basic version.

Mail Chimp

Don’t let Mail Chimp’s links to funny YouTube clips or humorous messages throw you off. It’s all business when it comes to collecting statistics, sending emails and improving performance.

You can even send out surveys. This is a great opportunity for subscribers to vote on the best icon for your app.

The dashboard lays it all out clearly: import lists, create and send campaigns, and proceed to build your audience.

As the import happens in the background, you can work on building your campaign. You have the option to choose if everyone in your list gets the email or a specific segment only – the process is very customizable.

Creating a segment is simple, use filters to build contacts subsets, use previously created segments or cut/paste from a recipient email address list. The tracking options let you know who has opened the email messages and which campaign links receives the most clicks.

The enhanced tracking option links to your website through Salesforce or Google Analytics.  To use “auto-responders”, you must have a paid account – you can automatically trigger specific responses or segment users based on actions they take. After sending out your emails, MailChimp allows you to integrate your social channels to post regular updates on Twitter and Facebook.

Pricing:

MailChimp offers free subscription for 2000 subscribers or 12,000 emails per month.  For unlimited account, the pricing starts from $10.

Reach Mail

Use Reach Mail’s Message Testing feature to see a direct performance metrics comparison of as many as five individual email campaigns. This feature also takes into account different subject lines or content within each email, so you can optimize the subject line wording or determine how any given email performs in contrast to others.

Through this feature, you can also decide on the percentage of your subscriber list that should be used to test the message. Once the ‘test campaign’ has finished, the system will generate a snapshot report highlighting open and click rates for each version. All you need to do is select the best-performing one and schedule the rest of your emails.

Reach Mail also gives you the option to choose from  several hundred email templates or let one of their designers custom-design it for you.

Advanced tracking lets you see who clicked on your links, how many users forwarded your message or who opted out. From there on, you can send a follow-up email campaign to the users how clicked on specific links.

Pricing:

Reach Mail starts from $10 per month to $70/month.

Target Hero

Target Hero has a prominent WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, image hosting, HTML as well as plain text emails, and a host of features you’d want to have in email marketing software.

This tool is ideal for businesses that require a wide spectrum of features to run their campaigns, but often lack the large subscriber lists.

Target Hero requires account verification, to do this, you’ll have to sign up, then follow the SMS authentication process.

Pricing:

Their free plan gives you 1,000 contacts with unlimited emails. For up to 3,000 contacts, you need to get the $9.90/month Mini Hero plan. The Hero plan gives you as many as 5,000 contacts at $19.90. And, the Super Hero plan can be had for $39.90 for up to 10,000 contacts.

Drip

Drip is a versatile email marketing platform which encompasses a number of useful features, including message personalization, integration with e-commerce platforms including Shopify, comprehensive data analytics and much more.

It supports a pair of distinct tools for building emails; one visual, the other text-based. This helps create impactful image-driven marketing, alongside follow-up messages that are more targeted and personal to individual users.

Customising content is straightforward, so emails will always feel relevant to those that receive them. There’s even a bespoke conversion tracking feature that puts businesses in control of how the performance and effectiveness of an email marketing campaign is assessed.

Pricing:

The Drip starter package is free to use, accommodating up to 100 subscribers without costing a penny. The Basic package starts at $41 for up to 2500 subscribers, the Pro costs $83 monthly for 5000 subscribers, and the Enterprise package has a variable cost according to the number of subscribers over this limit.

Mad Mimi

Create professional-grade emails with Mad Mimi’s straightforward WYSIWG editor. Choose from 39 social networking buttons like share, like, pin and retweet and easily customize your emails to add links.

Aside from creating fresh email marketing campaigns, you can copy campaigns using the clone tool – adjust the original document without making changes to prior versions of your work. For the accident-prone among us, there’s no need to worry about deleting your email campaigns as you can always undo the deletion. Phew!

The detailed reporting features allow you to see how many emails were opened, number of embedded links, how many shares there were on social media and a lot more. You can also find out about the links any particular user clicks on.

Mad Mimi integrates with Google Analytics to provide in-depth statistics and click tracking. Get “forward to friend” reports and export them to Excel if you wish. View real-time responses on your social networking activity with regard to email campaigns.

Pricing:

Mad Mimi pricing starts from $10 per month basic account for 500 contacts and the pro package costs $42 for 10,000 contacts.

Cake Mail

CakeMail’s tools have your email campaign covered. One great feature is split A/B testing for example, to help determine the most ideal mailing list or Spam Assassin to make sure your emails don’t end up in spam. There’s Google Integration as well to let you view detailed stats on how each campaign is faring.

Sending out emails is a seamless process. Just give your campaign a title, set your recipients, design your email and choose the time to send. Pick from twenty default templates with fully customizable options or upload your own. HTML-savvy users are going to be pleased with the advanced editing option. The editor also lets you add, delete, and rearrange sections of your email like text boxes, images, QR codes, social media elements, and Google Maps.

The Campaign Analysis Tools use Google Analytics to give detailed reports on open, click, bounce and unsubscribe rates for your contacts. Use this information to group contacts into lists depending on email patterns and user interests.

Pricing:

The free Starter plan allows 500 contacts along with 500 emails. The basic package starts from $8 per month.

Mailjet

Use Mailjet to conveniently combine template-based marketing and transactional email sending in one online app. Add to that a consultation service to boot, and you’re all set.

The SMTP server and RESTful API integrate smoothly with the rest of your apps. Libraries let you add Mailjet support to your app in several languages, including Python, Ruby and PHP, and integrations with Magento, WordPress and much more. You never have to worry about getting stuck either, as there’s a 24-hour support line.

Take advantage of the email template designer or upload your own. There are also tools to segments lists and personalize emails with all your contact data. The A/X testing feature allows you to test up to ten different versions of your email before you decide which one stands out as the best. A campaign comparison tool pits your previous campaigns against the current one to give a complete picture.

Manage email lists, stats and templates all inside Mailjet’s interface, but eventually, you get to decide how you want them sent. For example, you can use the app’s UUI to create a campaign or you could use the API integration and use a few lines of code to launch a formatted email campaign to your contacts.

Pricing:

The free plan bags you 100,000 contacts and you get to send 6,000 emails a month. The bronze package costs you around $7.49/month.

Flashissue

Flashissue is one of the best tools for emailing newsletters. A simple interface combines email marketing with content curation. Sign in through Google or Facebook and have newsletters emailed to your contacts in just five minutes.

No matter what the focus of your newsletter is, you can pull down content from blog posts or search the web to pull content from a variety of sources – Flashissue automatically summarizes this content for you. After populating the editor with a certain number of story summaries, you can change the headline and article descriptions in order to better personalize it for your readers. This allows a more tailored emailer, rather than just generic news.

After this, you need to upload a banner and decide on the best way of delivering it. Even the free version boasts plenty of functionality – you can send your newsletter either through Flashissue itself or Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and a variety of other platforms as well.

Get a premium account which ranges between $20 and $50, and Flashissue integrates with Constant Contact and MailChimp to unlock a host of extra features.

Pricing:

The free Solo plan gives you 25 contacts a month with unlimited emails and group plan starts from $5 per month with 250 contacts.

Constant Contact

Scroll through several hundred design templates or custom design your own. Insert a wide assortment of extra features if you wish – documents, images, polls, links to surveys, videos etc.

Images and text can also be imported directly into the WYSIWYG editor. Create comprehensive reports on your email campaigns to show number of opt-outs, complaints, bounces, forwards and click-throughs. The social-share toolbar and social media buttons – Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook – will work wonders to boost traffic to your web page.

Pricing:

They offer two plans; the email plan starts at $20 per month and the email plus plan starts at $45 per month.

AWeber

AWeber’s autoresponder tool is a great way to engage your customers. You get access to over 150 email templates to make the email design process hiccup-free.

Improve various business functions by integrating your email marketing account with other online services. If you happen to be using a service like Salesforce, you can customize your account to automatically display which customers are subscribed to AWeber emails, and the emails they’ve gotten from you.

Your AWeber account can also integrate with the most well-known shopping cart tools, letting you add new customers each time they make a purchase on your website. If you want to take your marketing efforts to the next level, you can visit AWeber Labs to build your own apps and time-saving tools through the AWeber API. With this kind of flexibility at your fingertips, you can really take advantage of customer data in order to better optimize marketing strategies.

Pricing:

AWeber’s monthly plan goes for $19 and provides 500 subscribers, unlimited emails and a 30-day money back guarantee.

iContact

iContact’s package is simple yet intuititve – it comes complete with HTML coding options and marketing templates, depending on how deep you want to get into your campaign.

An easy-to-navigate interface greets you and the tabs at the top half of the screen let you create email campaigns and see how they’re performing. After choosing a tab, leave it up to the setup wizard to guide you through the rest of the process.

Once you have a list of contacts, iContact helps you add a sign-up form to your website so you can convert visitors to solidified subscribers. Got a list of subscribers saved in a CSV or Excel file? Import them into your iContact subscriber list.

Create aliases and send out emails according to specific filters to define your target market. iContact also embraces social media and integrates Twitter as well as Facebook-friendly features.

The autoresponder feature sends automatic messages at preset intervals which are triggered by certain events. For instance, if a newsletter is signed up for, the autoresponder sends that person a short welcome message. Or, when a customer’s birthday is coming up, you could send them email coupons.

Pricing:

iContact has special packages for Small businesses starts from $14 to $117 monthly.

GetResponse

Effectively maintain your contacts list and create professional-grade marketing campaigns.

The contacts section lets you add custom fields to contact lists and allows you to copy contacts as well as conduct searches.

GetResponse will track how many subscribers view your emails, complain, unsubscribe or click on links. You will also know how many emails failed to arrive at their destination due to any given reason. You can also find out why people unsubscribed.

Clearly labeled data is displayed in pie charts and bar graphs. You can view a summary of results after sending out surveys.

Help and support comes in the form of FAQS, webinars, PDFs, video tutorials, a glossary and learning center articles. There’s email and chat support.

Pricing:

They offer various packages depends on the number of subscribers, the basic starts from $15 per month with 1,000 subscribers.

Zoho

Zoho’s campaign process is divided into three sections: Basic Details where you select the campaign’s name and email details, Content and, The Audience. The last two are self-explanatory.

Your campaign can be completed once you select your recipients and other campaign-specific details. In the Content section, you’ll find an incredibly useful WYSIWYG editor used for HTML content. Add images, drag and drop items, format text and copy/paste any text you want in your email. Want this layout and format to be used by default for every campaign? Save to Library and you’re covered.

Take advantage of user-defined tags by creating user-defined fields. Once you create a new field, you can create more powerful custom tags. The kind of custom fields and tags you create is governed by the type of products and servicing you’re offering.

Pricing:

The free test plan unlocks 2,000 subscribers/12,000 emails a month. Pricing starts with $5/month.

ToutApp

When it comes to functionality and features, ToutApp has found its place as the Swiss Army Knife of email marketing tools.

The need for your sales team to be equipped with templates is always there – in this department, ToutApp excels. You also need visibility into what emails got delivered, which ones were opened or forwarded, in addition to links clicked, attachments opened and attached PDF pages that were opened.

Mobile access allows all features to be easily accessed from your smartphone. Use scheduling to determine which batch of emails go out when.

ToutApp includes CRM integration and analytics. This gives you full transparency to know exactly how your emails are doing at any given stage of the process.

The desktop alert and notification lets you know who opened and forwarded emails, and to top it all off, there’s an email chat feature that lets you contact support right through the email you send them. Simply cool.

Pricing:

They offers a free 14 day trial account and the basic package starts at $30/month.

LeadPages

You can create superb landing pages with ease using LeadPages, and the best part is you don’t need to get into your tech-nerd shoes just to make the most of it.

Create a variety of landing pages for your site – pages that ar necessary for having a prominent online presence without having to use an advanced code.

The editing template offers plenty of flexibility to customize landing pages whenever needed – 50 templates to be exact. Loading time on the site is a breeze, courtesy of easily readable code.

There’s seamless integration with the best email marketing providers. You’re only a few clicks away from integrating your landing page with the desired marketing platform.

Pricing:

They have multiple monthly and annual plans; the basic package starts from $25/month.

BenchMark

This tool provides multiple templates for almost every purpose, including; newsletter, greetings, promotion templates, giveaways, etc. With the intuitive visual editor tool, you can add your own HTML and CSS to give more personalized look. With the built in spam filter, you can cross check your template and make sure it doesn’t contain any objectionable material.

They have a brilliant community system that encourages your own personalized designs and vote your idea. If your design receives most votes, their development team look into it and add it in the next update. It just shows how seriously they value the feedback of their customers.

Pricing:
The basic package starts with 600 emails at $9.95/month to 2500 emails in $19.95 per month.

Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft can be expensive to acquire, but you’re going to be amazed by the ROI.

The average ROI of email marketing in the US is 44%. Case studies indicate people have reported more than 300% increase in profit and growing revenue nearly eight times while using Infusionsoft.

Simply go through the purchase and setup process, followed by the Kickstarter session and finally, setting up your automated marketing campaigns.

The flowchart-style campaign will win you over in a heartbeat. Building email campaigns is pure fun and it is indeed a satisfying feeling to know that at any time, all your customers are being given attention and interacted with in a highly personalized way, while you focus on other priorities.

The CRM’s lead scoring feature is a real standout, though nothing extraordinary, but still generally better and more adept than most CRM platforms.

Pricing:

The basis package starts from $199/month with 2,500 contacts and up to 12,500 emails.

Campaign Monitor

The Template Builder tool ensures that all emails can be easily read on a mobile device in order to curb the possibility of missed opportunities due to emails displaying improperly.

Campaign Monitor generates actual screens of your email design in popular email clients like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and many more. This allows you to get your campaigns displaying properly in all email clients.

Import your own HTML templates by using Campaign Monitor’s tags to make sure you’re able to use its integrated template editor to edit and personalize content in future. A variety of formats can be uploaded including Excel, tab delimited and CSV, you can also copy/paste content directly.

Setting autoresponders is fairly easy and you can use data segmentation to make sure only the intended users receive them.

One of Campaign Monitor’s key strengths is the interface. It’s absolutely clutter-free and straight-forward.

Pricing:

They have two packages; basic one starts from $9 per month and the unlimited costs $29/month.

Crystal

Crystal is a communication tool that enhances your emails by telling you anyone’s personality. Using Personality AI, a new technology that employs machine learning and artificial intelligence to predict personality based on someone’s online footprint, Crystal can help you better understand your audience, increase your open and response rates, and see higher conversion.

Using Crystal’s AI email guidance, you can see the most effective writing style, subject line, greeting and call to action to make each message most impactful for the recipient. The best part is you can predict personalities in bulk so you can send hyper-personalized emails en masse, giving your recipients the information they need in the style they want, which will benefit engagement rates, in return. It’s like having a coach for every campaign.

Pricing:

Crystal pricing plans start at $29/mo for their premium tools.

Omnisend

Omnisend is the tool you go for when you want to go further than basic email marketing. This platform allows you to create sophisticated automation workflows in minutes using pre-built customizable templates.

But what really sets Omnisend apart from the others is that you can add several channels to the same workflow. Supporting channels such as email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, push notifications, WhatsApp and more, you can reach your perfect customer at the perfect time on the perfect channel.

Omnisend also offers smart segmentation that allows you to layer targeting rules so you can really personalize the message you send to your customers. This means that you can go further than using their first name as personalization, and actually define what kind of message they’ll get at each moment of their customer journey.

Pricing:

Omnisend offers a free plan for basic email marketing which includes up to 2000 emails per day. For automation and more advanced features, the Standard plan starts at just $16 per month.

YesWare

Similar to ToutApp, YesWare is focused at sales teams who need to send mass personalized messages to people while also keeping track of follow ups and behavior (opens, clicks, etc).

YesWare excels at campaign and messaging tests on a smaller level than ToutApp. If your sales team needs to run a 20 – 50 person campaign with personalization and wants to save time, YesWare is a great fit. It will give them visibility into what happened after they pressed the send buttons.

Through YesWare’s dashboard you’ll be able to see who opened, clicked, forwarded or replied to the emails sent out. In addition YesWare offers template-based analytics to understand what is working and what isn’t.

Similar to ToutApp, YesWare integrates to most popular CRM solutions in order to give you transparency into what your sales team is doing without having to go into YesWare at all.

They also offer desktop notifications with a built-in dialer for those times when an immediate call after open is necessary to close the deal.

Pricing:

They offer a 30 day Enterprise trial, after which they start at $12/user/month and go up to $55/user/month.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign has been called one of the key InfusionSoft alternatives. For those who want the robust sales and marketing automation power of InfusionSoft, but easier to use and setup, there’s ActiveCampaign.

Despite the lower cost and ease of use compared to InfusionSoft, you aren’t losing a lot in terms of functionality. ActiveCampaign still allows you to run very behaviorally driven marketing and sales campaigns, but with a setup that most somewhat tech-savvy business owners can actually understand.

The full-blown version of ActiveCampaign offers an all-in-one solution for a business to house it’s CRM, email marketing, deal flow, sales automation and more. With the offer of one-on-one training and onboarding, without the 4-figure fee that InfusionSoft requires, it’s a great alternative if you want to automate the way you keep in touch with your customers both new and old.

Pricing:

ActiveCampaign starts at $7.65/month if paid annually and goes up to $149/month for the full blown package.

Voila Norbert:

Just about every company you talk to or read about has embraced the power of social media, particularly in recent years. Business owners and entrepreneurs have acknowledged that social media is the next big thing of the future and are quick to cash in.

In essence, social media is not just about sharing content with your followers but rather discovering new and diverse opportunities to serve customers instantly, grow followership, build the brand, and much more. If we talk numbers, it is no surprise that almost half of the global population is living and breathing social media. As Vala Afshar points out:

World population:

1 @facebook
2 China
3 India
4 Tencent
5 @WhatsApp
6 United States
7 @google+
8 @LinkedIn
9 @instagram
10 @twitter

— Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) March 10, 2015

Here we list more than a couple of super-awesome tools which not only let you manage your social accounts but also help you grow and monitor your social presence whilst outpacing your competitors.

Buffer

Buffer has become the ultimate choice for most social media marketers. This superb tools allows you to schedule updates according to different time zones, in addition to providing a complete analytics overview of your updates, in terms of “most popular” and “least popular”. It also lets you monitor the number of clicks your updates receive, and many other interesting features. Buffer also offers integration with Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus.

See how it works:

Price: Basic Package – Free, Business Package – $10/month

Cyfe

Imagine a complete dashboard that gives an overview of brand mentions, demographics metrics, engagement opportunities, real-time reports, interesting widgets and tons of other great features. Say hello to Cyfe.

If you need to track the different aspects of a campaign on a daily basis, this tool will be your trustworthy advocate.

Price: Basic Package – Free, Premium Package – $19/month

Oktopost

This tool is designed for managing B2B social media marketing. You can schedule your content; create different campaigns, track performance of each campaign, engagement rate & conversions.  The best feature of Oktopost is that you can integrate your Salesforce and Marketo CRMs so valuable leads-related data is just a click away.

Price: Free 30 days trial – Premium Package – $55/month

Mention

Brands are now very curious to know what people think or say about them on the social media and web sphere. To fulfil this need, Mention is your messiah. It is similar to Google alerts in some ways except it delivers instant results from all the major social networks including Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus.

Mention provides metric-data of more than 42 languages and you can get instant notifications via email, even if someone casually mentions your brand on Twitter.

See how it works:

Price: Basic Plan – Free  – Premium Package – 29 € /mo

Sprout Social

If you’re a fan of a great design and interface equipped with high end functionality then Sprout Social is something you can’t afford to miss. Gorgeous graphical representation of data, real-time monitoring, loads of CRM & reporting tools, analytics, team collaboration, Android/ iPhone apps and various other benefits are offered.

The best thing about this tool is its simple design and the way they incorporate countless features; and better still, you won’t require a special tutorial to know how to use it.

See how it works:

Price: Free 30 Days Trial – Premium Package – $59/month

Nod3X

This tool completely transforms your social data into something that gives you a clear edge over your competitors. Nod3x also helps you identify influencers within your industry and gives suggestions on the basis of your data, like who you should connect with, what hashtags you should use, what are the best performing days etc. among other great features.

Price: Basic Plan – £75Per Month

BrandWatch

Brandwatch is a very powerful tool that gives detailed insights of ongoing communication about a brand on all social media channels. BrandWatch says their sentiment analysis feature can capture both positive and negative customer sentiments across all blogs, articles, news, forums & social media.

With support of 27 different languages, 70 million+ data sources and numerous features, this social media tool really is in a class of its own.

See how it works:

Price: Pro Package – £500/month

ShareTally

ShareTally is an instant tool that tells you who has socially shared any link. Imagine the scenario, when your plugin crashes and you have to present social numbers from scratch to your client or boss. Well, in this catastrophic situation, ShareTally has your back. Just put the URL in the Tally bar and see the magic happen within seconds.

Price: Free

HootSuite

This is another highly popular social media management tool for businesses and individuals alike to manage, collaborate, schedule & track campaigns. By connecting with over 35 different social networks,   HootSuite is the easiest web-based dashboard that gives instant data on the performance of social accounts while being integrated with Facebook Insights and Google Analytics.

See how it works:

Price: Basic Plan – Free , Pro Plan – $9.99/mo

Social Mention

Social mention is among the most favorite ‘listening’ tools for social media marketers. It analyzes data in a completely different and detailed format with four metrics: Strength, Sentiment, Passion and Reach.  You can also set email alerts, download results in real-time with top keywords, hashtags and sources.

Price: Free

Trackur

Trackur is another social media monitoring tool that gives you the freedom to explore your audience in a more sophisticated manner. Just point to what you want to monitor and it will search every blog, mainstream media, forum, videos and social media. It also reports on who’s talking about you and what their authority is, including their Klout score.

See how it works:

Price: Free 10 days trial , Pro Plan – $97/month

Tweet Binder

This is a great Twitter tool to keep an eye on your own hashtag performance. Just input your hashtag and it gives you a detailed report on conversations, images, tweets containing links, retweets and reach; you can also share these results with your followers. It’s a great tool for organizing Twitter chats and for a live Tweet Binder demo, participate in the weekly chat hosted by SEMRush, using the hashtag #SEMRushChat.

Price: Basic Package – Free , Pro Plan – $45/month

Radian6

Radian 6 is a product of exacttarget, the company more commonly known as Salesforce.
This monitoring tool shows real time conversations about your brand and automatically converts them into stunning visuals. It is not limited to social media but can also track over 150 million public sites (blogs, comments, forums, videos and photos) across the world and presents every minute detail about your brand.

If you want to build your own brand in a major way, this one is highly recommended.

See how it works:

Price: Basic Package – $600/month

Twazzup

Marketers call it the “Twitter Search Engine” because of its real-time search capabilities. Sign in with your Twitter account and enter the company name, keyword or hashtag you want to search.

Before you get a chance to blink, it displays information on top influencers, most active and latest users, popular tweets, top RTs links, related trends and photos. You can also directly get in touch with these users.

Price: Free

Beevolve

If you want to manage your marketing, and monitor activities under one dashboard then you ought to try out Beevolve.  This affordable tool gives a good overview of your social media marketing campaigns by showing post statistics, demographics & channel measurement.

For the monitoring, you can utilize their comprehensive dashboard with competitive intelligence capabilities, real-time conversations, channel sources and top follower reports.

Price: Starter Package $19.95 /month

HowSociable

This superb tool behaves like an examiner and judges your performance across all social channels. It gives you a magnitude score out of 10 based on the activity performed within a week, on over 36 social media sites.

It can be a great tool for competitive analysis as it identifies the channels your competitors are most active on, and where you need to catch up.

Price: Free limited account. Basic package $9/per 3 months

Lithium

It’s a powerful social media management tool for serving customers in a timely manner. Standout features include: role-based separate UI, content publishing, unified social inbox, knowledge base, CRM integration & clear ownership with pre-defined templates. It analyzes data across all social media channels, from blogs, comments, photos and videos, and provides it to you in a nice graphical format.

See how it works:

MentionMapp

Mentionmapp allows you to analyze Twitter connections in a unique visualization. The more you interact with people, the denser your nodes get. You can view which hashtags your most engaged followers are using and who they are talking to. This revolutionary tool can get you many targeted followers.

Price: Free

Twitonomy

It is rated as the best Twitter analytics and monitoring tool as it gives you full authority to search everything about your own Twitter account as well as others.

Once signed in, it gives you all the vital statistics on the first screen which includes: how many tweets you make per day, how many mentions you get, who retweets you the most, top hashtags you use, how many links you share, and many more.

Price: Basic Plan – Free , Premium Plan – $20

BuzzSumo

This has got to be one of my favorite online tools that I just can’t get enough of. There are many great features found within BuzzSumo, however, for monitoring your social presence, I strongly believe you just cannot go wrong with this one.

It gives you a detailed overview of what kind of content is popular and sought after in your industry and what the social numbers are. By navigating to the “influencers menu”, you can check the most influential people in any industry.

Price: Free trial available, Pro Package $99/month

Sendible

If you run multiple accounts and want to control them under one roof, Sendible should be in your arsenal. From monitoring brand mentions to critical data analysis; it does everything to make a social media manager’s life easy. And yes, they do have Android & iPhone apps.

Price: Free 30 days trial , Startup package – $59/month

The tools listed above are perfect for monitoring and developing the growth of your social presence. Is there a tool I’ve missed? I’m pretty sure I did so let me know in the comments section.