There are many benefits to running an online marketing agency, but perhaps the biggest benefit is the access to so many potential customers. Being able to target the right audience and engage them into taking action is incredibly powerful, which is why businesses with a web presence have come to depend on online marketing agencies to gain ground in a crowded marketplace.
What isn’t available to businesses that don’t have a web presence is the ability to target the right audience and engage them into taking action. While it’s important to gain brand awareness and make your target audience aware of your product or service, it’s nearly impossible to gauge how much someone is actually interested in learning about your company without exposing your product or service directly.
That’s why it’s so important to find the right tool for reaching your audience. It might not be the easiest task in the world, but without a solid online marketing strategy, your business could be at risk of falling into obscurity. Luckily, there are a number of different apps that can help provide the tools you need to gain and maintain traction in a competitive market.
What Is a Marketing Application?
To put it simply, a marketing application is a tool that can help businesses gain marketing traction by providing a steady stream of leads, engaging with potential customers, and converting them into paying customers.
That’s a pretty high bar to reach, but a number of different platforms have risen to meet it, from simple lead generation tools to complex full-blown marketing automation suites. Let’s take a quick look at the various platforms available and how they fit into the bigger picture of digital marketing and e-commerce marketing.
Simple Lead Generation Tools
The most basic form of online marketing is lead generation. You may be familiar with the practice from your everyday life, where you get phone calls from salespeople pitching you all sorts of products and services. Online, lead generation takes the form of organic search engine optimization (SEO) or paid search (PPC) campaigns, which push your business’ content into the search results for relevant keywords.
While these platforms can be extremely powerful when used correctly, they can also be incredibly time-consuming and require a lot of expertise to make sure your campaigns are working as intended. For that reason, some businesses choose to specialize in lead generation while others outsource it completely to a third-party marketing agency.
Commission-Based Platforms
If you’re looking for a simple tool that doesn’t require constant attention, you might want to try out a commission-based platform. These platforms allow you to integrate your eBay, Amazon, and Shopify stores in one place, so you can communicate with customers across all of them. Some platforms, like Shopify, also offer a standalone app that can be accessed through your mobile device. This makes it easy to engage with customers wherever they are—literally.
These platforms offer two key benefits. First, you don’t have to worry about creating a separate account for each store. Instead, all of your data is stored in one place. This makes it much easier to keep track of your orders and inventory. Second, because these platforms take a commission when you make a sale, they’re a little more generous with the credit than some of the others. This can make a huge difference when you’re starting out.
Content Creation Tools
Your business’ web content is what you make it. You have complete control over what is placed on your website and you can use a wide variety of tools to automate the process. Content creation tools can help businesses of all sizes and expertise levels produce content consistently and efficiently, which can translate into a higher conversion rate and a bigger audience.
This is an area where the difference in quality between one service and the next becomes truly apparent. Some tools provide a wealth of content with simple automation, while others offer very high-quality content with a lot of features that can take a skilled digital marketer a lot of time to learn and use effectively.
Analytics Tools
When you’re trying to determine the effectiveness of your online marketing, it’s important to look at the numbers. To that end, many platforms offer analytics tools that can help you track the performance of your campaign on different metrics, from how many people visited your website to how often they clicked on an affiliate link or filled out a form.
These tools can also be incredibly helpful in determining which content performs the best so that you can continue creating more of it. For example, maybe you find that product photos with young men and women perform the best with male consumers, so you create more picture-heavy content for the sake of generating more leads.
E-commerce Marketing Applications
If your business is looking to sell products online, you might want to try out a dedicated e-commerce marketing application. These tools can help streamline the process of taking orders, managing inventory, and distributing products to customers, all from the comforts of your office. They might also integrate with a payment solution such as PayPal or Stripe, so that customers can pay you directly from their cart.
E-commerce marketing applications are similar to content creation tools in that they provide a variety of high-quality content for you to choose from. The difference is that you typically have more control over the content that you create with an e-commerce marketing application. In addition, because these platforms are typically designed for businesses looking to sell products online, they can also integrate with affiliate networks and payment solutions, offering you even more flexibility when it comes to generating leads and converting them into paying customers online.
The Biggest Differentiator
If you’ve been paying attention to the news, you might have noticed a surge in interest in conversational interfaces and simplified voice recognition. The former enables speech input through a computer keyboard, while the latter allows the computer to understand and respond to the user with natural language.
When it comes to your business’ digital marketing strategy, it’s important to keep up with the times and the technology that can make your work easier. While many businesses choose to outsource their entire digital marketing operation to a third-party agency, it’s still possible to manage your own campaigns using the tools available today.