Understanding marketing tools and techniques is an integral part of modern business. A company’s ability to create an identity in the marketplace which speaks to its customers is paramount in surviving in a competitive business world.
Marketing Tools are products used to sell products. What Are Marketing Tools includes the steps, strategies, techniques, and platform to help you beat your competitors. Marketing tools will be taught through this course in a step-by-step manner to ensure that you fully understand how to apply it in business.
Internet marketing refers to marketing that only occurs online. Search engine optimization (SEO) and online advertising are examples of Internet marketing. There are several ways to increase your SEO. One of the first steps is to secure a reliable and simple domain name that is relevant to your site, industry, or keywords you want to match for.
Search engine optimization refers to techniques to increase one’s website’s appearance on search engines.
Surveys
Surveys are useful for determining which products to create and also for improving or upgrading existing goods. The word ‘goods‘ in this context means ‘products.’
Surveys are also useful if you want to rate your and your rivals’ products. A survey can ask a representative sample of consumers what they like about your and your competitors’ products.
You can carry out a survey face-to-face, on the telephone, by normal post, or online.
Most marketing professionals will mention surveys when you ask them to list their most important marketing tools.
Google Analytics
If you have an online business or your company has a website, Google Analytics is extremely useful. It gives you an overview of where your visitors are coming from. It also tells you what type of people are visiting, and which content on your website performs best.
You can also use Google Analytics to work out visitor conversions. This data will help you set up conversion goals.
Organic CTR (organic click-through rate) is a way you can utilize Google Analytics to improve your website traffic. You can optimize page titles and descriptions and see how they perform by implementing A/B testing.
Direct mail
Direct mail or direct mail marketing specifically targets potential customers. Traditionally, we have referred to the letters as ‘mailshots.’ Ever since the advent of the Internet and emails, we also have ’emailshots.’
Regarding emailshots, MediaTraining.Ltd.uk says:
“Designing an emailshot differs from creating a webpage or designing for print as you have to consider the specific needs of your target audience and the technical requirements of different email applications.”
This brings us to modern-day email marketing tools which many marketers still consider to be more effective than other types of digital marketing.
Media monitoring tools
These marketing tools scan the web and inform you of conversations that are relevant to your company, product, or brand. These tools scan, for example, social media sites, forums, blogs, and videos.
“Media monitoring lets you discover what people are saying about you online so you can jump in and respond or react to conversations, decrease the spread of negative PR, and even help increase awareness of your product, service, or organization.”
Customer loyalty programs
Customer loyalty refers to the likelihood that existing customers keep coming back. In other words, how frequently customers come back for more again and again. It differs from brand loyalty.
Among marketing tools that many small businesses overlook, customer loyalty programs are one of the most common. This is a pity.
It is much cheaper and requires less time to get an existing customer to buy your products than new ones. Some studies suggest that it costs seven times more to get a new customer to buy from you than an existing one.
Automation
Automation tools are marketing tools that save a lot of time. Marketers can save time wasted doing those daily tasks like saving files and emails to spreadsheets.
Some tools allow you to create chains of applets. In other words, simple conditional statements or ‘if this then that’ statements. IFTTT (IF This Then That) is one of those services. It works with Facebook, Twitter, Fitbit, Google Drive, and Gmail.
Traditional Marketing Media
Traditional media – such as billboards, banners, newspapers, magazines, television, radio and telephone directories – involve marketing tools such as paid print advertisements, commercials and news releases. This approach focuses on a one-way sales push and relies on reaching high numbers of people to ensure success. Advertising with publications and networks is a costly marketing tool which makes analyzing the return on your investment extremely important.
Digital Marketing Media
Computer software technology can reach potential customers with targeted, measurable communications. Specific digital media marketing tools include search engine optimization, mobile marketing, interactive online advertisements, opt-in email and online partnerships such as affiliate marketing and sponsorships.
A key component of digital marketing tools is web analytics, which provide information on an internet user’s online activities, IP address and search keywords. This information can then be used to craft a targeted advertising campaign to reach your business’s core audience. To get started in digital media marketing, you may want to hire a digital media marketing agency skilled at bringing a brand to the web’s ad networks.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a subset of digital media marketing. However, the goal of social media marketing tools is to develop an interactive, online relationship with the customer rather than to mine covertly for customer data. Specific examples of social media marketing tools include blogging, tweeting, posting, sharing, networking, pinning, bookmarking, media sharing and commenting on social media websites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit and YouTube. Social media marketing level the playing field for small companies and individual entrepreneurs by offering low-cost tools with potentially high returns.
What Are Marketing Tools?
Marketing tools designed to automate repetitive processes, tasks, minimize human errors, manage complexity, build strong customer relationship, maximize effort, and brings your brand to spotlight.
An effective marketing tool should help you achieve either or all of these:
Charlie App
Charlie is an attractive marketing tool that helps you create a positive impression when meeting people (especially for the first time).
A positive first impression is critical to winning over that customer, or closing a deal.
In a recent article on Harvard Business Review, by Dorie Clark…
“People may have built up a certain, inaccurate impression of you – you can’t expect to overturn that thinking with subtle gestures, you need a bolder strategy to force them to re-evaluate what they thought they knew about you.”
Truly, you need to work hard to overcome a bad first impression.
If you’re a social person or your job involves meeting with customers and clients, whether online or physically, Charlie App will help you establish a stronger relationship between with customers.
You should know that relationship with your customers is almost everything in business. It can make or mar your strategy.
Charlie scours through 100s of credible sources and automatically emails you a one‐pager on every potential customer/client you’re going to meet with, before you see them. Isn’t it powerful?
This marketing tool (let’s call it app) does this by capturing customer’s bio data, email address, phone numbers for follow up and getting them acquainted with your brand.
Charlie has gone far to introduce personalization in its marketing campaign. This is a campaign where attention are given to customers on-one-one instead of group.
It’s a simple but effective way to answer people’s questions and comments quickly. In fact, 53% of customers want response to their tweet within 1hr.
Don’t make your customers or social media fans perceive you as an unserious marketer, who doesn’t care about them. Use personalization to drive user engagement on social media and during meetups.
Oktopost
We’ve all been there – accidentally wishing to make more impact through social media. Yes, we know how powerful social media is, but it seems as though we’re lost.
If you can relate with this, you’re not alone. Oktopost is that social marketing tool you should give a shot.
Oktopost is great for B2B marketers. If you choose a social media tool that’s designed for B2C marketing, your results will be mediocre. Trust me, the plan, approach and features you need are different.
Lee Odden, founder of Top Rank Blog shows the distinction when he said that, “B2B marketers who are goals focused, strategic in planning and action are more effective.”
Oktopost is a B2B social media marketing tool designed to help you power your social campaigns and drive hungry buyers. It enables you to schedule your best posts to multiple social profiles, from a single dashboard.
Stay informed about social media, study the detailed reports on clicks, conversions, and other engagements for each of your posts.
You can also use Oktopost to determine quality contents to share with your audience – and keep them engaged all the time. As you already know, magical things happen when customers derive value for your content and get their questions answered.
An earlier case study by Gallup revealed to us that customer engagement boost sales and average revenue per user.
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Truly, it’s difficult to manually determine which type of content your audience prefers you post on social media. But with Oktopost it’s simple. The tool finds relevant conversations and leads you into it naturally.
WordPress
If WordPress sounds strange to you, then you’re probably new to blogging, digital marketing, or you’ve been hiding under the Old Harry Rocks in England.
WordPress is a simple and powerful content management system (CMS).
It’s actually a publishing software used mostly by bloggers, authors, digital companies, and content marketers to create and publish content, and build robust website.
These days, starting a business is damn simple. Because you don’t need to have programming skills or hire a professional programmer to build a website for you.
With this free and helpful WordPress software, you can design a website within 20 minutes. There are tens of thousands of free themes and plugins to make your website as professional and dynamic as you want.
The beauty of WordPress is that most authority news channels lives on it. For example, Mashable, CNN, Techcrunch, and more than 60 million other sites started out on WordPress – and I don’t see them switching to Joomla or Typepad anytime soon.
WordPress themes are popular too. Infact, 51% of marketers are now using WordPress themes to power their blogs.
No matter what you’re looking for in a website, I can assure you that WordPress is powerful enough to support it.
Even if you operate a brick-and-mortar business, you can always build a website and use it to attract motivated customers on the web.
Crowdfire App
Launched February 2010, Crowdfire is a social media engagement app for Twitter and Instagram. It’s great for managing user accounts. It’s built to generate automated answers to questions often asked by your fans, especially on Twitter.
If you get Crowdfire, you’ll never be intimidated by your Twitter and Instagram accounts irrespective of the numbers of followers.
Email Monday confirmed that getting 70% conversion rate is as a result of using marketing automation tool like Crowdfire.
You can collect useful data and insights about inactive users and those about to unsubscribe. You can clean up those that ain’t converting and ignite fire inside the inactive ones.
Conclusion
Marketing tools and techniques help increase your sales by targeting your marketing efforts to the right prospects. A good marketing plan consists of a combination of marketing tools and techniques, such as customer relationship management systems, social media management services, email list segmentation, keyword research services, website optimisation services, and affiliate program management solutions. With a dedicated marketing professional working with you to determine the right mix of these marketing tools and techniques for your business, you’ll be able to reach your target audience more effectively.