20 Apr The Simple and Essential Marketing Technologies all Businesses Need
Since the dawn of the age of the internet, marketing has crossed an inflection point whereby the performance of almost everything distributed is traceable and quantifiable. Anyone in digital marketing is dealing with some form of technology. It is integral to any business, whether it be a SBO or leading organisation that these key technologies are integrated into every strategy to achieve essential goals and objectives.
With an abundance of tools available, it is not surprising that many small business and mid-market companies are adopting new technologies at a low rate, as it can at times feel overwhelming.
The great thing about many of these technologies is that they enable you to target a particular audience, at a particular time and offer them a particular product. Often making the experience for the consumer feel more meaningful, inspiring a higher conversion rate.
Below is a list of programs proven to increase revenue, generate leads/sales and guarantee a great ROI.
Analytics:
Using an analytics program such as Google Analytics enables businesses to make data-driven decisions to automate and optimise their procession. By using data and the insights it harnesses businesses are given a competitive advantage as they can reflect upon the statistical and quantitive analysis to make better decisions and forecast future results.
Conversion rate optimisation:
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the practice of getting people to visit your website, converting them from browsers to customers, and take any desired action on your webpage. Many sites suggest filling out some sort of form on their landing page so that at least an email address is obtained. A great tool is Wordstream’s free landing page grader.
Email:
Electronic Direct Mail (EDM’s) for most consumers can seem like an absolute nightmare. A small growth hacking trick is to ask people for permission to email them particular information. Whether it be notifying them of sales, blog content or when new products have arrived. By tailoring content to the person’s interests and sending them material they want, this will keep you top of mind. Constant Contact and MailChimp are great EDM tools that offer a range of aesthetically pleasing templates you can tweak to suit your brand.
Search engine marketing and Optimisation:
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a way of driving qualified traffic to a page of your preference by purchasing ads and ensuring your website is ranked highly (near the top) on a page. As well as Search engine optimisation (SEO), to get high organic listings from your websites content. The key differences between SEM and SEO is that SEM produces immediate results and has an instant ROI. Whereas SEO is making sure you have the essential ‘ingredients’; words, titles, links, words in links and engaging content. SEO involves both technical enhancements but values regularly created, high quality content. This ensures the search engine ‘scans’ for the most relevant ‘topics’ in all pages to produce the best result for the searcher. Google Adwords, Bing, Yahoo and WordStream are good places to start.
Re-marketing:
Re-marketing is when you go to a website, leave the website for another, and their ads pop up on the new sites your visiting. Its a great tool as you’re targeting advertisements to people who have already expressed interest in your business. Another fantastic feature is that it allows you to customise the ads to show particular services and products the site-visitor had already looked at. A lot of leading tools have a CPM payment basis.Google AdWords remarketing and AdRoll are two leading tools worth considering.
Mobile and Responsive design:
It is predicted that soon, half of all internet searches will be executed on smartphones. It is integral that your website that it has mobile-ready responsive design. Responsive design can best be described as when you resize your desktop browser to a smaller or larger size and seeing if the website reconfigures itself. Fortunately, a lot of website building tools such as Wix and Squarespace automate this process. Depending on the size of your business and your amount of spend, another approach is to create a seperate mobile site.
Social media:
Social media is a great tool for direct engagement across C2B and B2B. It is a particularly good tool for small businesses for its cost-effectiveness, ability to reach targeted audiences, and produce leads/sales. It is easy to maintain consistency in branding and tone. Most importantly social media has proven to be incredibly effective in customer service as it allows businesses to communicate quickly and in real-time. If you are unsure of where to start, start with the big five: Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter.
Social Listening Tools:
Social Media in marketing can be considered the worlds largest and most accessible focus group. Gain valuable cultural, consumer and industry insight via social conversations and tapping into social data to perform quality analysis of keywords, topics and hashtags. By monitoring and tracking your mentions, you can use these findings to inform and refine your campaigns, content and overall customer experience. Social Mention and Sprout Social are accessible platforms with easy to use interfaces.
Content should always be applied to the tech:
Content is intrinsic to marketing and digital marketing and can take many forms. You need to ensure that what is being generated, implemented and executed is of high-quality and creative.
Although these technologies have been outlined separately, they are best used synergistically. To achieve the best results for your business you need to understand that most of these leading tools are symbiotic. You will need to have a holistic and broad approach to your online marketing strategy and the tools available if you want your business to thrive.
We hope you have enjoyed the subject of this article. Stay tuned for more.
Kindly,
The Blink Republic team.
Interactive Experiences using the latest marketing technology to engage consumers
www.blinkrepublic.com
