When was the last time you looked up a phone number in a Rolodex? Or swiped a credit card with a flatbed imprinter (remember those carbon slips)?
The answer is probably never, thanks to digitization.
Of course, the digital revolution has made business operations much more efficient. But there’s another area where digitization has transformed business, and that’s marketing.
With the vast majority of the world’s population online, on social media, and on mobile, there are more opportunities than ever to reach customers, promote a product or service, and track consumer interest down to every click.
But this means that businesses must contend with almost constant customer interactions and masses of accumulated marketing data. Figuring out the best marketing approach and how to get the most from campaigns is far from simple. That’s where marketing tools and platforms can help — big time.
Every year, developers design new marketing tools to make your life as a business owner much easier. Fierce competition among developers means that these tools are becoming more sophisticated and affordable — which is good news for you.
Let’s look at some great marketing tools that you can use to supercharge your campaigns in 2021.
For marketers who already have a good grip on website analytics, Google Optimize helps take it to the next level with split testing. Otherwise known as A/B testing, split testing is a method of testing two different versions of web pages or elements on a page to determine which performs better. For example, you can test two versions of a web page heading to see which attracts more visitors or results in visitors spending a longer time on the page.
Google Optimize has two main components: the editor, where you can create and test different content and page designs, and the reporting section, which draws on website data from Google Analytics to examine the results of the split tests.
Google Optimize is a great tool for conversion rate optimization, enabling marketers to boost actual conversions and get a better return on investment (ROI) for their website.
Every month, individuals and organizations publish 70 million blog posts on WordPress! That’s not counting all the other millions of websites, blogging platforms, and social media networks out there. It adds up to an awful lot of digital content competing for attention.
Knowing what kind of content will have the biggest impact on their target audiences is a huge challenge for marketers. That’s exactly where BuzzSumo can help. This research and monitoring tool scans the web and helps marketers find trending topics, important keywords, high-performing content, and the hottest influencers in their niche.
With this powerful data at your fingertips, you can generate new ideas for content, identify worthwhile influencer partnerships, and monitor competitors to see what content and keywords are working for them.
BuzzSumo helps marketers make sense of the mass of online content with data-based insights in real time. No wonder it has been a popular marketing tool for nearly a decade.
93% of all online experiences begin with a web search. For a business to be visible among the millions of web pages and search results, it must have a solid SEO strategy.
Ahrefs is a top-rated SEO tool marketers worldwide use for website health audits, competitor analysis, keyword analysis, content analysis, and search rank tracking. Though Ahrefs has complex capabilities, it’s very easy to use, making it suitable both for business owners with little SEO expertise and those who are SEO pros. Plus, there’s a great range of help guides available and an active online support community, making Ahrefs more of a marketing experience than just a tool.
There are lots of social media tools on the market, but for businesses in the B2B environment, Oktopost can help turn social media interactions into solid leads. With Oktopost, marketers can schedule, share, and organize their social media posts and campaigns across all social platforms from one centralized place.
The software provides a big-picture analysis of all social media activity and social mentions in near real time, with sophisticated tracking and analysis capabilities that allow marketers to pinpoint the source of specific leads, whether from a particular tweet, Facebook post, or LinkedIn update.
That’s the kind of power that can transform social media posting into a structured strategy that generates a steady flow of leads.
Email remains a strong choice in the marketing toolbox for both small and large businesses. And with AdRoll, you can reach thousands of customers at once with automated email creation and distribution, no coding required.
AdRoll Email Marketing offers more than 200 email templates with an easy drag-and-drop interface, making it easy to design email campaigns for all kinds of purposes, such as promoting products and discount offers or sending customer newsletters and updates. The platform enables scheduling of finely-tuned email campaigns to retarget customers at just the right time, as well as robust tracking and reporting to see the impact of email campaigns in real time.
A huge advantage of AdRoll email marketing is that it integrates with AdRoll advertising campaigns. Email is a powerful tool on its own, but when customers are exposed to both AdRoll ads and emails, conversion rates can rise by X2 compared to customers exposed to ads alone.
What’s the most important part of successful marketing? Big ad budgets? Celebrity influencers? The answer is actually collaboration.
A digital marketing strategy has so many moving parts — each with its own tactics, deadlines, data, and budgets — and different teams and employees across a company need to handle those parts. Managing all of these in one centralized place is the difference between a marketing mess and a marketing success.
JotForm Tables is a hybrid spreadsheet-database tool that provides collaboration for all aspects of business, including marketing. You can upload existing marketing data or enter new data manually. And you can search, filter, analyze, apply formulas, process calculations, develop and assign data-related tasks, and much more in a collaborative cloud-based workspace that all team members can access.
JotForm Tables also integrates seamlessly with JotForm’s online forms. Create any type of marketing form, and submission data is automatically uploaded to the JotForm table, ready for processing and analysis.
We live in hyper-visual times, and in marketing, it shows. In a survey of 200 marketers, 74 percent said they were already using visual content.
The nature of digital media means that businesses promote visual content frequently on social media pages, video channels, and blogs. Marketers can’t afford to invest too much time or money producing graphics that are only going to be relevant for a few days — or even a few hours.
Canva is a free graphic design platform that offers thousands of attractive templates for all kinds of marketing materials, including social media posts, presentations, websites, infographics, and many more. The drag-and-drop interface enables anyone to turn out great looking graphic designs without design skills or a big budget.
This is a game-changer for busy marketers on tight budgets who want to upgrade their campaigns visually.
When the world turned digital, marketing changed forever. No business can create, run, and optimize digital campaigns without the help of marketing tools. And with the right tools, businesses can take their marketing to levels of success that would be otherwise impossible. Be sure to keep up with the top marketing tools and supercharge your campaigns in the year ahead.
Last updated on September 20th, 2023.