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The 10 Best Marketing Tools for Your Business
Marketing your business is essentially mastering the art of telling others that you and/or your services are available and purchasable. The more people who know about your company and products, the more opportunities to sell to them. You may already have a marketing strategy in place for the coming year. But what are the best marketing tools you can use? In this article, we’ll take a look at the 10 best marketing tools.
What is a Marketing Tool?
A marketing tool is something you can use to develop and promote your products and services. There are many you can choose from.
Most companies use a variety of different marketing tools to boost their sales. You may choose a mix of direct mail, advertising, and social media management to boost sales. Furthermore, using different marketing tools means you can focus on different elements. Hence, some tools are great for growing sales, others are great for gathering information about consumers.
Essentially, it’s important to think about which ones are the best ones for your business to use. What are the main objectives of your business?
The 10 Best Marketing Tools
With this in view, we’ll look at the 10 best marketing tools to use.
1. Website and website analytic tools
Your website is the digital window to your business. All your products, services, information, and contact details are in one place, your online shop. Your aim is to drive traffic to your website and turn potential leads into customers and sales.
A good marketing tool to track what’s happening when people visit your website is google analytics. This can be extremely useful as it gives you an overview of where your website visitors are coming from. Ultimately, it’s a list of very useful data gathered from your website traffic.
2. Social media management tools
With social media, you can build an interactive online relationship with potential customers. By creating content such as blogs, you are giving them useful information about your products or services. You could post about a new product to draw attention to it. You can share images that are relevant to your business, and respond to any comments and questions.
Your main aim here is to raise awareness of your business and build up your profile online. Potential customers will hopefully see, like, and share your content.
3. Search Engine Optimisation
An SEO tool such as Hootsuite can help you to schedule social media posts in advance, thus saving you lots of time and effort.
If you use different social media platforms, Hootsuite allows you to bring all your social media into one place. For example, you can respond to comments and mentions through the dashboard rather than via each individual social media platform.
4. Lead Generation
Lead generation is the process of attracting people who show interest in your company or product. Then, turning that prospect into a sale. They start as leads and hopefully turn into customers.
Just one example of generating leads is to put a standard form on your website landing page. Maybe you can offer a discount or a free gift for completing the form. As people respond, you can keep a database of the customer relationship as you go.
5. Video Marketing
People naturally watch a video over reading text. It means that video marketing can deliver a higher level of engagement. Keeping your audience engaged means you have a better chance of turning these people into leads. Probably the best marketing tool for this is YouTube. For example, you could create some ‘how to’ videos that will provide potential customers with engaging content.
6. Email Marketing
An email marketing tool helps you to create emails that will target the consumers you are looking for. An example of a good tool to use is Mailchimp. With Mailchimp, you can design and create an email that is on-brand with your business. It’s also helpful in collecting data about how many people have opened your email. You can see what content works well and what doesn’t.
7. Media Monitoring Tools
A media monitoring tool scans the web and tells you about any conversations that are relevant to your company, product or brand. For example, if there is a negative or positive comment, you can jump in and respond. This helps to build up awareness of your company as well as quashing any negative PR.
8. Customer loyalty scheme
Customer loyalty refers to the customers who keep coming back for more. Consider how you can reward them for this with a customer loyalty programme. Often, it’s much cheaper and requires less time to get an existing customer to buy from you than a new one. Giving back to them, via a discount code or even a quarterly prize is a good way to keep your customers happy.
9. PPC or Pay per Click
An online advertising model in which advertisers pay each time a user clicks on one of their online ads. A paid search ad appears when commercial searches occur on Google. For example, go to Google and search for local heating engineers. If any of them have utilised paid searches, you will see then appear higher up on the google ranking. Companies will then pay a fee for the advert if it’s clicked on by a customer. Hence the term pay per click.
10. Content Marketing
By creating valuable and useful content, you are offering potential customers something they may be interested in. The aim is to attract your audience with focused content. An engaging piece of content doesn’t need to be overly long or clever. Readers will be responding to honest opinions and informative research around issues they want to hear about. You can then adapt your content across several platforms.
Benefits of using a Marketing Tool
There are many benefits to using marketing tools. The main one being that it can save you a lot of time and effort. For example, by putting all your social media elements into one platform like Hootsuite, you are reducing the number of things you need to keep on top of.
By creating a very good piece of useful content, such as an article or blog, you can then use that same information across all your marketing.
Additionally, by spending a short bit of time setting up website analytics, you are capturing a lot of data. This will help you to find out more about your audience and how you can improve your strategy.
To Conclude: The 10 Best Marketing Tools for Your Business
In conclusion, the 10 best marketing tools are ones that can save you time and be useful across your entire marketing strategy.
If you are struggling to get your head around where to start, we have a lot of useful blogs on the Lead Genera website.
For more marketing tips and advice about marketing your business, visit our Knowledge Hub.