Marketing is a full-time job, and for anyone without a team around them to promote their business, it can be impossible to keep on top of. By choosing the right marketing tools, you can make things run smoothly, and get your time back to focus on what matters. I have listed some of my favourite tools, below, that we have used at SwiftCase, and hopefully, they will help you.
Hubspot
If you are into marketing, then you will have heard of Hubspot, the kings of inbound marketing. The amount of content on their blog about marketing is phenomenal, and as well as being prolific, they are also highly informative and easy to apply to your business.
The tools that they offer range from CRM systems to email marketing platforms. Hubspot integrates with pretty much anything you can think of and provides an excellent platform for managing other services, including Facebook Advertising.
Buffer
Social media marketing is one of the best ways to direct leads to your website. However, to gain a presence and not get lost in the noise, you need to be active on the different platforms. If you have a few different social media channels that you are trying to incorporate into your marketing plan, then you may find that you are spending far too long posting, tweeting and tagging content, especially if you are trying to spread it throughout the day.
Buffer allows you to manage all your social media in one place, and to schedule posts in advance, so, you may get on with other things while your social media runs itself. Using Buffer allows you to post and tweet at the best times not just when you are free to do it. You can also see analytics to get feedback on your campaigns.
If you are in the B2B world, then LinkedIn is the place to be. Even if you aren’t, there are still plenty of professionals who are also potential consumers (as long as the approach is professional). The key to a great marketing strategy with LinkedIn is to add content with value. Post articles that your connections will appreciate, and hopefully, share with their contacts.
Also, get involved with the content that others post. You can engage via comments on posts from your connections and the companies that you follow. If nothing else, your name will get around, and you may get a relationship and in future business from a simple comment.
Be careful about being spammy using LinkedIn messages. If you have never met someone before, then direct messaging can be seen as offputting. Build a rapport first through commenting, and then move to a direct message once a relationship is there.
Unbounce
Everyone who visits your website doesn’t have the same opinion. They won’t be interested in the same benefits. They won’t be moved to action by the same phrases. Also, how do you know if your website is even the best it can be at converting visitors into prospects?
The answer to all these questions is you need to experiment. You need to try different landing pages with alternative content, and see which options have the most success. Unbounce allows you to create variants of webpages, and then to show them to website visitors, including the opportunity to weight the variation’s likelihood of being displayed. You can then gather data through analytics to direct further changes.
You can also create multiple landing pages to link to pay per click ads to show content relevant to the wording of the ad, to drive conversion rates further still.
Google Analytics
What gets measured, gets improved, and Google Analytics helps you to measure everything about your website. From the length of time that a user stays on your website, to the journey that they have taken from getting to your site to finally leaving it.
You can find your best content by looking at the most popular landing pages. You can add goals to your site to allow you to track specific actions, like form submissions. There is not much that you can’t measure, and all inside an easy to use interface, which even lets you type in questions to extract data.
MailChimp
Once you have grown your mailing list from subscribers to your blog or from gated-content downloads, you need to keep in touch with them. MailChimp allows you to create beautiful email templates, that work across different mail clients, and are created through a simple drag and drop user interface. It is easy to add data tags from your user list to personalise your emails, with greetings and other dynamic content.
Once you have sent your emails, you can then track the number of opens and even clicks on links in the emails. You can build segments from your mailing lists to target different user groups, including those based on previous activity such as opening your last email.
ActiveCampaign
Sending emails to a list is a great way to keep people up to date with your latest blog articles or product releases, but sometimes email is more of a one-to-one process. You may want to send an email to new signups to your site or service. You may then want to send them a different email based on whether they come back to your site, or actively engaged with your service, or previous email.
ActiveCampaign allows you to create an email workflow, incorporating logic into the decisions over which emails to send and when. You can nurture your leads and keep your current clients happy with personalised updates, on a schedule related to their activity.
Google Drive
Finally, you need somewhere to keep everything that your team is working on together. Google Drive lets you share files and access them anywhere, including via your smartphone. You can keep marketing materials stored in a folder structure so that nothing is lost. You can share work in progress such as videos or podcasts to be edited. All your logos, brand guidelines, etc., can be kept where everyone can reach them to ensure all your marketing content is consistent.
In addition to the sharing of files, you can also get peace of mind that your content is backed up in the cloud, and you won’t have to go and record all those client testimonials again, making you look like an amateur.
SwiftCase helps thriving businesses, swamped by growing demand, automate and organise, to focus on what matters — loved by 1000s of users across Insurance, Finance, Legal, Service & Contractor sectors.