In my experience, there are three things that make up a successful digital marketing strategy: creativity, data and tools.
Ideally, you’ll want to combine the best of both worlds: creativity and data combined with insights from industry experts through analysis tools.
However, the question is: which tools are you going to choose?
A lot of planning goes into choosing the right set of tools for your specific needs. In this article, we’ll discuss the different types of tools available and which one is best suited to your needs.
Analytics Tools
If you think of analytics tools in terms of software, they can pretty much be split into two categories: platforms and standalone tools.
The first one is a bit like a calculator, easily usable and accessible. You can install it on your own website or use their hosted version. The second one is more like a specialized database where you can store all your website’s performance metrics and analyze them through charts and dashboards.
Performance & Conversion Optimization
This category is all about improving your site’s performance in terms of converting traffic into paying customers. You will find a variety of tools under this category, from analytics tools to email marketing tools to landing page tools.
The first step is to set up performance and conversion monitoring so you can accurately track the results of your website changes.
Content Creation & Growth
The last and possibly the most important category is content creation and growth. You’ll find a wide variety of tools to grow your business’ content base, from blogging tools to content curation tools to video creation tools.
Blogging tools help you start a blog and manage it. Content curation tools help you collect and organize content from various sources across the web.
Video creation tools help you create videos to either promote a product or service, explain a concept or teach someone something new.
In all these cases, content is king. The more content you have, the more you can engage with your audience. The more you can engage with your audience, the more you can grow your business.
Which One Is Best for You?
Now that you know the categories of tools, it’s time to ask yourself: which one is best suited for my needs?
Ideally, you’ll want to choose tools that can work together under the hood. For example, if you want to have a blog, you might want to use a CMS like Joomla or WordPress to build it. Or, if you want to keep a tab on your site’s performance and results, you might want to try out a performance monitoring tool like Google Analytics.
However, for someone new to the field, choosing all-in-one platforms might be overkill. In that case, you can check out simple blogging tools like Wix or GoDaddy’s own blogging platform, which are perfect for novices who want to experiment with blogging to gain experience.
Once you have established your blog, you can take advantage of its built-in analytics to track the results of your efforts. You can also use it to experiment with different types of content to see which one performs best.
So, which one is best suited for your needs? It really depends on your own situation. Are you a new business? Are you a seasoned professional who wants to try something new? Or, are you somewhere in between?