Did you know Google processes more than 40,000 search queries every second? That’s more than 3.5 billion searches every day! Your job as a digital marketer is to make sure your company’s name not only shows up in those searches but shows up high enough to drive business.
It’s a challenge, but the good news is, hundreds of digital tools are available for marketers who want to get their company in front of as many potential customers as possible. Here are the top 10:
Website
Sounds obvious, but this is the first tool in the marketer’s toolbox. Having a website isn’t just about selling products anymore. It’s the tool you use to provide content to visitors (potential customers). This is the hub of any business. It’s where visitors learn about products and services and, if you’re doing this marketing thing well, where they learn more about a topic of interest to them.
Website Testing and Analytics
These are tools you can use to determine if your website is functioning well. Are the pages loading quickly? Are any pages displaying error messages? You can also track visitors to your site to find out more about what they’re looking for and how long they stay on your site.
There are dozens of website testing tools. Unbounce and Optimizely can help you build and publish new landing pages to test with targeted users.
Google also offers advanced analytics that can help you understand who your visitors are, how they progress through the sales funnel and how they use your website.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Effective SEO optimizes all of the content on your website, including your blog to make sure it can be found easily by search engines like Google. Basically, that’s a fancy way of saying SEO finds the keywords potential customers are using when searching for a product and uses those keywords in the content.
There are a number of tools to help marketers research keywords and also follow the competition. With BuzzSumo, marketers can find out what’s being shared the most on social media and then find authorities on those topics. SEMrush allows users to enter a domain name and see how well the site ranks for specific keywords.
Google Keyword Planner is a free tool that allows users to search for keywords and also predict how a list of keywords might perform. Again, the idea is to determine which words are being used the most, so you can include them in your content.
Social Media
2.23 billion people log in to Facebook every month, worldwide. 68% of Americans use the platform. 78% of American consumers have discovered products that way. So, it’s fair to say a business needs a Facebook page to reach customers.
The stats are just as impressive for Twitter and Instagram. 321 million people use Twitter every month. And one billion people log on to Instagram every month.
Social media allows businesses to have direct contact with customers if they’re using the platforms effectively. Businesses can advertise on social media for a fraction of they might spend on TV and radio ads.
Content Marketing Creation
The Content Marketing Institute defines contact marketing as
“The strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
70% of consumers preferred to learn about a company from an article rather than an advertisement. Articles, podcasts, infographics, videos and blogs are all examples of content that can be used to market a business.
The biggest challenge for most marketers is coming up with fresh contact on a regular basis. Content creation tools can help you find fresh content. For example, Feedly allows you to create interest groups where content is gathered and funneled into a feed for you to monitor. Canva is a design site where you can create graphics for just about any use, from blogs to social media to newsletters.
Content Marketing Automation
You could post all your content manually to your blog and your social media channels. You could also spend all day doing that and nothing else. Or you could use digital scheduling tools that will do it for you.
You create a piece of content, a blog post for example. You can then post the content to your blog and all your social media channels with one click. You can also schedule content to post automatically. Buffer and Hootsuite are among the best-known, and both offer free plans.
If you prefer to work within each social media channel, you can schedule posts through Facebook Publishing and Twitter’s Tweetdeck.
Email Marketing
Email has been widely used since about 1996, and sometimes we forget about it as an effective tool for marketers. However, it remains a successful channel for businesses to reach their customers directly.
After seeing a marketing email, almost half of consumers (47%) say they have purchased from websites, while 45% say they have made an in-store purchase and 38% have purchased on a smartphone.
Services like Constant Contact and MailChimp allow you to automate and schedule emails to the customer at every stage of the sales cycle.
Digital Tools for Video Marketing
80% of online content is video in 2019. Marketers are using video in dozens of ways to promote their client’s business. You can use video for interviews with company leaders, product demonstrations, customer reviews and testimonials.
80% of consumers believe having demonstration videos are helpful when making purchases. Marketers can post videos on company websites, blogs and social media channels. Some companies choose to use video hosting platforms like Vimeo.
Online Listings
Markets need to make sure a company’s information is appearing correctly in online directories. The biggies are Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yelp. Make sure to monitor online reviews carefully and consistently, because you don’t want negative information to linger online without a response.
Graphics and Presentations
We talked about tools like Canva earlier, but there are dozens of free and paid sites available to help marketers create promotional materials for use both on and offline. You can easily create a brand toolkit for a company without having to hire an expensive designer.
Something else to consider is marketing proposal software tools. These will take you far, far above your standard slide show. Modern software will allow you to embed video and social media posts in the presentation.
Final Thoughts
If you would like to read more about digital tools for content marketing, specifically writing and selling blogs and ebooks, please visit us for more information.
