Marketing is an integral part of every business, regardless of size, and it’s never easy doing it from scratch. That’s why so many businesses strive to find the best tools to make their lives easier.
Whether you’re a small business owner trying to gain credibility or authority, or a Fortune 500 company preparing for a global marketing push, here’s a rundown of the best marketing tools for each major discipline.
Email Marketing
While social media has taken over the marketing world in recent years, email still reigns as the primary way to reach consumers. That being said, email marketing is far more than just sending out promotional emails to past customers. To truly understand email marketing, you must be using it as a tool to acquire new customers, grow your audience, and retain existing customers.
SEM
Search engine marketing, or SEM, is the practice of getting traffic to a website or landing page via search engines such as Google. The better your quality, targeted content, and the more you put in, the better the results you will see in terms of traffic and conversions. To succeed in SEM, you must be using proven, white hat SEO techniques, and you must be putting in the work to ensure that your content is consistently appearing on the first page of search results.
Social Media Marketing
When we use social media, we’re often not thinking about marketing. After all, we’re using these platforms to connect with friends, family, and other people we know. But, all of these social media platforms have been designed to be used for marketing purposes, which makes them ideal for boosting your brand, attracting new customers, and engaging with existing customers.
Whether you use YouTube to post videos about your product or use Twitter to engage with your followers, the platforms’ algorithms determine what content appears in your followers’ feeds. This means you can use these platforms to your advantage by tailoring your content to match what your followers are interested in.
PPC (Pay Per Click)
Pay per click, or PPC, is another popular term for the practice of paying for each person who clicks on an ad or buys a product that’s promoted on a banner ad.
These ads usually appear at the top or side of search engine results pages (SERPs) when potential customers are searching for a product or service. When someone clicks on an ad, they are taken to a landing page where they can learn more about the product or service. So, while a click-through may not seem like a sale, when you consider that you may have generated a lead or new customer, it’s a very attractive option to businesses of all sizes.
Conversion Tracking and Analysis
In every industry, not every business is a winner. Some businesses may perform better than expected, while others may underperform. Regardless, you need to set a benchmark for yourself and track your results, so you can adjust your strategy as needed. For that matter, you also want to analyze the results of your marketing efforts to see what’s working and what needs to be changed.
Analytics
With the explosion of social media in the last few years, it’s become extremely important to keep track of not only our marketing performance but also our audience’s performance. To that end, many companies have developed comprehensive analytics platforms, making it easier for marketers to track, report, and analyze every aspect of their marketing campaign and determine the effectiveness of each move and strategy used.
These platforms, which can be found in every major city, make it easy to keep track of our web traffic and the conversion of that traffic into paying customers. They allow us to examine our ads and landing pages to see what’s working and what needs to be changed to improve conversions.
Robust Reporting
One of the main reasons that many businesses avoid marketing is that it’s difficult to report on the success of a marketing campaign. You can’t put a dollar figure on the value of a new customer, but you can certainly measure the success of your marketing efforts in terms of web traffic and conversion.
However, the better your strategy, the easier it will be to report on the results. The fact is that you’ll have to report on the results of your strategy to determine whether or not it’s been effective. In other words, you’ll have to measure the results of your marketing efforts to know whether or not you’ve been successful.
When it comes to marketing, it’s all about results. If you want to be able to report on the success of your strategy, then you must be using the proper tools to track the results of your efforts. To that end, make sure you have a clear understanding of the terms search engine optimization, content creation, and digital marketing, and how these three disciplines fit into one overall strategy.