Essential Marketing Tools to Boost Your Sales and Business Growth
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?
Key Takeaways
- Online Dominance: Online marketing is now the leading strategy for driving leads and revenue.
- Traditional Marketing’s Role: Traditional marketing still holds value but needs to be integrated with digital strategies.
- Importance of Tools: The right marketing tools are crucial for executing effective strategies.
- Customer Engagement: Engaging content is key to building a loyal customer base.
- Cross-Channel Success: Success in one marketing channel often depends on the support of others.
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.
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.
| Aspect | B2B Marketing | B2C Marketing |
|---|---|---|
| Target Audience | Businesses | Consumers |
| Marketing Approach | Strategic and goal-focused | Emotional and broad |
| Features Needed | Advanced analytics, lead generation | Engagement tools, brand awareness |
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.”
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.
| Profession | Goal |
|---|---|
| Blogger | Build an audience via blog |
| Author | Get on the bestseller list |
Does that make sense?
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
Moz confirmed that using Sentence Case in headlines convert 64 % while ALL CAPS convert at 21%.
| Headline Style | Conversion Rate |
|---|---|
| Sentence Case | 64% |
| ALL CAPS | 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.
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.
| Aspect | Mr A’s Strategy | Your Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing Ideas | Effective | May not be effective |
| Integration | Smooth | Potentially challenging |
To eliminate guesswork from your web marketing campaigns, you should split test.
Several studies have shown that it takes more resources to acquire a new lead than to retain an already existing one.
| Aspect | Acquiring New Leads | Retaining Existing Leads |
|---|---|---|
| Resource Requirement | Higher | Lower |
That being said, you need to get serious with email list building. Start today.