To be successful at marketing it’s important to have the right tools in place to support your efforts. These tools can keep you organized and help you from wasting valuable time. Every day we use a number of tools to improve our customers’ online presence as well as our own.
Here are 5 marketing tools that you should be using for your business.
1. The Right Social Media Channels
It’s not just important to be on social media, but important to be on the right social media channels. Focus on promoting your business on the channels that your potential customers are interacting with. This isn’t to say you can’t reserve your name on social channels for future use. It’s just not necessary to promote these channels or post to them.
Our target audience is most active on Twitter and LinkedIn so these are the channels that we focus a majority of our energy on. We still post to Facebook and most recently started using YouTube, but find we have a greater engagement rate on other platforms.
2. Social Media Management Tool
A social media management tool can help save you tons of time down the road. Instead of posting directly to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ etc. this tool allows you to schedule multiple postings on different platforms in advance. Gone are the days that you have to post to each of your social channels directly. We recommend putting aside 1-2 hours once or twice a week to schedule your social media for the coming week. This allows time for posting your own content, sharing third party content and creating custom images for postings.
Our social media management tool of choice is HootSuite. This particular tool is free for up to 3 social media profiles.
3. Email Marketing Tool
An email newsletter is another way to collect lead information, provide useful information and stay top-of-mind amongst potential clients. Facilitating content for an email newsletter doesn’t need to be difficult. We recommend using a combination of your content and third-party content that already exists. This can include and is not limited to blog posts, event listings and white papers.
We use MailChimp to send out monthly newsletters to our subscribers as well as our client’s newsletters.
4. CRM
A good CRM is something that every business should be utilizing. It is a way for all team members to keep tabs on businesses and people that have been interacted with. CRMs allow you to create profiles for businesses and individuals as well as keep track of tasks and activities. Without a CRM leads could easily fall through the cracks.
We primarily use Salesforce, but if you are a startup with a smaller budget the HubSpot CRM is also great option.
5. Website Analytics Tool
It’s important to track your website successes as well as areas that need improvement. This allows you to focus your energy on improving how your website performs. For example, if the majority of your traffic is coming to your website via mobile and your site isn’t mobile-friendly, chances are you could see a higher bounce rate. This information indicates that you should focus your energy on ensuring your website is mobile-friendly.
Our tool of choice is Google Analytics because it is free, provides the information we are looking for and integrates easily into websites.
If you are new to inbound marketing or are looking for a refresher, download our white paper, An Introduction to Inbound Marketing.
