Ten Tools You Can Tailor to Any Marketing Strategy
By Inna Kraner/ A common expience when launching a company is the desire to track data. You might have started by tracking everything in Excel, making hundreds of calls every day, sending emails by the thousands, or making notes on every interaction in painful detail. In short, wasting too much time trying to keep your data organized.
Below is a list for the ten amazing products that can save you from deathly monotonous tasks and help your marketing team elevate data and help transform your company from just another wannabe start-up to a lean, mean, profit-earning machine.
1. MailChimp
Why you should use it: MailChimp is a cloud-based third-party email service provider. It is a must-have for building and managing your email list and avoiding the dreaded Spam filter.
What's to Love: Mailchimp gives you the ability to create beautiful email templates, segment out lists for better targeting and easily track the engagement of email subscribers.
2. MOZ
Why you should use it: Moz is the leading industry darling for SEO (search engine optimization). They provide tools and applications that analyze the quality and authority of websites and keyword rankings. They also offer free resources that are extremely helpful for those learning about SEO.
What's to Love: No other SEO tool is more influential in understanding the intricacies of organic traffic, keyword rankings, domain authority, link profiles, and competitor SEO tactics. This foundational understanding enables you to increase rankings on the major search engines and ultimately grow organic traffic to our site. If you are seeking to boost your website visibility, do your marketing team a solid and sign up for Moz.
3. SEM Rush
Why you should use it: SEM Rush offers amazing specialized tools for SEM (search engine marketing). They provide fantastic data on keyword research and competitor analysis in the PPC (pay-per-click) marketplace.
What's to Love: SEM Rush is constantly adapting to changing algorithms and SEO trends – their processes are always up-to-date. You can rely on their metrics to better understand keyword search volume, competitiveness, search trends, and market prices.
4. HootSuite
Why you should use it: Hootsuite is a social media management tool that links all of your social media accounts and allows for easy account management. Their tools and customizable reports also provide valuable data to understanding the effectiveness of social media strategies.
What's to Love: Hootsuite streamlines social media campaigns. Scheduling blog articles to be automatically posted to social media accounts has never been easier, and frees up time spent online during the day to do other work. You might even schedule messages and tweets when out of the office.
5. Google Analytics
Why you should use it: This free service powered by Google provides critical information about web traffic and visitor behavior, including where your traffic is coming from (thanks, Dad!), the content being viewed, and how visitors engage on your site.
What's to Love: Google Analytics can greatly impacts the direction of your business' digital marketing strategy. Analyze the effectiveness of a marketing campaigns and make statistically confident decisions by setting goals, tracking conversion funnels, and gathering demographic information, all using this free service.
6. Webflow
Why you should use it: Webflow offers an easy-to-use platform for web design. It is a must-have tool for quickly and easily publishing webpages that are automatically optimized to respond gracefully to different screen sizes.
What's to Love: Webflow can make website design dreams come true. I love the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) graphical interface in place of code and the fact that the layout is very similar to that of Adobe Photoshop. Your marketing team will have the tools to be completely self-sufficient, creating landing pages whenever needed.
7. Salesforce
Why you should use it: Salesforce is the ultimate service for cloud-based CRM (customer relationship management). It essentially streamlines every aspect of the sales funnel, from tracking customer interactions and sales opportunities to simplifying internal communications. Your sales team will stun you with efficiency.
What's to Love: Salesforce will keep your company organized and up-to-date. It assists sales teams in cataloging every customer acquisition and enables marketing teams to analyze which marketing channels are proving to be most effective at producing sales opportunities.
8. WordPress
Why you should use it: WordPress is more than just a blogging platform. It is a CMS (content management system) that is highly customizable with an endless array of plug-ins.
What's to Love: WordPress is extremely user-friendly. Marketing teams can easily create and edit blog posts without any help from our developers. Use an SEO plug-in to ensure proper on-page optimization for all of your blog posts. You might also try a nifty plug-in called Yoast, which helps to automatically generate relevant meta-descriptions for all blog posts. These are just a few of the plug-ins you may make use of every day that can allow you to enhance your marketing efforts.
9. Optimizely
Why you should use it: Optimizely provides website optimization software that enables you to easily run A/B testing to measure and track how visitors engage with your site.
What's to Love. Optimizely is unlike any other A/B testing tool. It is incredibly easy to use and doesn’t require any knowledge of HTML. Users can easily drag and drop elements directly on their screen – no coding required! You can use Optimizely to constantly run tests on landing pages and conversion funnels to ensure an enjoyable user experience.
10. Google Drive
Why you should use it: Google’s cloud-based file storage and synchronization service simplifies the process of creating, saving, editing, sharing, and collaborating on projects. Thanks to Google, all of your shared documents are always accessible!
What's to Love: Google Drive is incredibly versatile. It will simplified day-to-day efforts. Use it to create documents and spreadsheets, edit blog articles and case studies, and store photos and images. Its ability to access internal documents and data from a single Google account can be time-saving and easy to organize.
Inna Kraner is a Boston College Law School graduate licensed to practice law in New York. She is the Managing Editor for The Expert Institute, an innovative technology-driven company that connects attorneys with experts who are leaders and authorities in their field.To read more posts written by Inna, please visit The Expert Institute.