Today’s marketing is all about two things: juicy data and process automation. Those who don’t benefit from them fall behind. It’s that simple. The question is: how to start? First, get the tools that will make your marketer’s job easier. Here are our favourites – check them out. We’re living in the technologically advanced times. Everything you do can be done easier with help of the right software. As a digital marketer, you’ve got to wrap your head around tens of things. Social media, email campaigns, landing pages… Luckily for you, there’s a tool for every aspect of your job. There are countless apps and platforms out there that you can check out, including those which help you manage your work. But let’s narrow it down to the 8 most useful. To succeed as a digital marketer, you will need:
- something to manage your email campaigns
- something to manage your social media
- something to analyse your data
- something to create and spread awesome content
- something to manage your leads
So let’s break it down for you, shall we?
Getting your emails under control
When it comes to emailing your leads and subscribers, you can choose one of the two options. Send emails plain and simple, manually. Or send graphically advanced templates to tens of recipients at once. If you want to go with the latter, one of the basic tools to use is Mailchimp. They pride themselves on being the world’s largest marketing automation platform, and there’s seed of truth in it. Mailchimp allows you to build subscribers lists, manage your drip campaigns and create highly-customisable email templates for all your needs and wants. It gives you the open and click rate data. And most of all, it has a flexible pricing system. For a small business that have no more than 2000 subscribers and send up to 12 000 emails monthly, MailChimp is fully and forever free.
Aritic PinPoint is a full-stack marketing automation software platform with landing page, lead scoring, lead tracking, opt-in email campaigning features with a mobile-optimized interface, CRM, and Social integrations. A fantastic email marketing campaign is in fact the one that, besides transmitting accurate and timely updates about new products and services, also immediately serves the purpose of tracking the performance update of every email of your email marketing efforts in an easy and error-free manner and that’s Aritic Pinpoint for you.
Get accurate and important metrics and high performance analytic insights as you need for all types of email series or campaigns with specific in-depth analytical data like deliverability, open rates, download, and more that really matter.
Rocking your social media
Love it or hate it, social media is now an indispensable part of the digital marketing. This is where your target hangs out, and this is where you can create meaningful connections with them. But managing all your social media manually can get really tiresome. Scheduling messages in advance is a huge time saver, so definitely invest in a tool that will help you with it. Kontentino is one of them and it offers an automation process for several largest social media platforms. It’s reasonably priced and you can manage your activities for numerous pages on many popular social media platforms.
But remember – social media marketing isn’t only about putting your message out there. It’s also about finding what people find valuable and important and then passing it over. Discovering what’s currently trending can be a challenging task. Buzzsumo is a tool that will help you with it. It helps you find pieces of content related to your suggested keywords, as well as find influencers in your given niche. While it’s not the cheapest solution you’ll find out there, it’s one of the best ones if you want to stay in touch with what’s happening in your social media niche.
Embrace the data
Back in the day, it was quite the hassle to learn what’s working and what’s not. Today, marketers have it much easier to get their hands on the useful data and statistics. And that’s why they can steer their actions in the right direction.
This is something you should do, too, and these tools will help you with it.
Google Analytics is your first-to-go tool when it comes to analysing what’s happening on your site. Connect your webpage or blog to the GA profile and you’ll get access to a number of basic and advanced insights about your traffic and audience. Google Analytics is practically a must-have for anyone operating online, regardless of what they do. From the basic demographic data and monthly visitors to advanced goals and intelligent insights, this platforms tells you all about the audience and what they like most.
Kissmetrics is another analytics platform that gives you an in-depth insight which helps you understand your audience and steer your marketing actions. It’s an advanced tool (not the cheapest one, too) that helps you group your customers and engage with them basing on their behaviours. Moreover, Kissmetrics come with useful integrations that make engaging with your audience easier and faster.
Keep track of your leads
You can create lists in spreadsheets or you can let software manage your contacts, leads and prospects. Obviously, we recommend you go for the latter. Automation is the key to the dynamic interactions with your leads and luckily for you, there’s plenty of solutions available.
Hubspot is likely to be one of the most popular ones. This inbound marketing and sales software come with plenty of different options that will make your job easier. It’s pricing scales from the free version for small business owners to the expensive enterprise plan – it’s your choice which you’ll go with. Hubspot will help you with creating pop-ups, contact forms and live chat, it will give you an option to access all your customer statistics and tell you what’s working and what’s not. With the platform’s help, you’ll have it easier to communicate with your team and customers alike, and you’ll get access to Facebook and Instagram feed of your company from one place.
And that’s just some of the solutions offered by the free plan. Curious to learn more and try it out?
Make it visual
A picture says a thousand words, they say. According to Social Media Today, 80% of people remember mostly what they see. Written information isn’t as effective. People are more likely to forget the most of it. No wonder marketers depend heavily on creating engaging visual content.
And the trick is to create pretty things as quickly as it is possible.
Crello is an online design-creating platform that saves you so much work. Here, anyone with just a little bit of aesthetic sense can create beautiful visual messages. No more Photoshop skills needed. Crello has everything you need.
The platform allows you to create messages for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest. It has templates for banners, Facebook ads, blog banners and posters. What differs it from other graphic tools? In Crello, you can create animated posts!
It’s quite cheap and easy to use, which makes it your must-have tool for creating graphical designs for your social media, blog and websites.
Make it popular!
Your content should have every single opportunity to shine. How to do it right? Make sure that it reaches right people in right place and spread the word or two about your content. Use services like Linkhouse.co to buy sponsored articles or explore link building.
Bonus Tip: something to manage your team
Team cooperation is important and smooth workflow is what decides about your success. If you have to manage several people who are doing the marketing effort in your company, you might want to try out some of the free team management software that is available.
The benefits of using such software are multiple: better communication and deadline management, as well as having one place for managing all items. It’s easier, faster, smarter. But what tool to look for when there are so many choices?
One of the free available tools for managing all your projects is Taskeo. It comes with inbuilt productivity reports, time tracking and visual task management. It’s simple, intuitive and designed for remote workers and distributed teams.
Its flexible plans give you the freedom of using the free version for as long as you like.
How to use digital marketing tools effectively?
Each and every one of these platforms carries huge potential. The key to success is to make the most of them. Using them the right way is your way to benefit from everything that digital marketing software has to offer.
But to squeeze everything out of every single app, you need to master it first. There’s no getting around it. Whether it’s Canva or Hubspot, learn every trick you can in order to use the given solution properly. Read forums, check out their guides, watch videos. Learn all you can about every single platform. From the basic functions to the advanced hacks, there’s always something more to discover.
Take into consideration that while some of those tools are relatively simple – for example Crello or Kontentino, others demand a really serious approach. Google Analytics, Kissmetrics or Hubspot only will be of use when you dive deep and use them as a professional would.
Today, digital marketers do the work which used to be split between different specialists. From graphic designs to content writing and reaching out to a community, they’ve got to manage and organise several aspects of modern marketing. These are favourite tools we recommend you to try if you want to work better, faster and more productively.
Now tells us – what would you add to this list? Let us know in comments and share your ideas for others to see!
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The article comes to you thanks to Taskeo team who designs the productivity platform for distributed teams.
Check out more tips on their blog.
