Answered: How To Increase Sales With The Best Digital Marketing Tools
Author: Gene Marks
It’s been a tough year for many businesses.
However, now that most regions around the world have been re-opening, my best clients and colleagues are doing their best to refocus on recovery and growth.
Much of this depends on marketing. So, what are the best marketing moves to get back on track this year? Here are three.
1. Focus On Your Existing Customers
We all heard in freshman year economics that the cost of getting a new customer significantly exceeds the cost of selling to an existing customer. It’s been many years since I graduated from college but I can attest that this is very true.
If you have an existing business with a good customer base than you should be paying priority attention to those customers because they will be the ones to help you emerge from the downturn.
- Clean up your database.
- Invest in a customer relationship management system.
- Reach out to anyone you’ve done work with before. See how they’re doing.
- Re-establish relationships.
Most business owners are struggling to get their feet back on the ground and for many starting new relationships is more of a headache than going back to existing ones. That’s an opportunity for you.
Even for customers that you may have lost in the past, here’s a chance to re-connect. Marketing is not just about new sales. It’s about making your oldest customers happy first.
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2. Give Stuff Away For Free
I’ve been doing a lot of this recently. My company sells business software and we have a pretty good-sized customer base. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reaching out to many of them and offering free time to “review” their existing systems and “make recommendations.”
Sure this comes at a cost. But a great many have responded to my offer. This is a door opening. Now we can re-engage with them, look at what they’re doing with the applications we sold them and make recommendations.
We’re going into these calls with a checklist of potential features, functions, and capabilities that the client should be considering from the software we sell – all which could use our help to setup.
For me, it’s worth gambling an hour of free time with dozens of clients in the hopes that those hours will turn into many more hours of chargeable work.
The people in my company are talented, so I have faith that when our clients hear their recommendations they’ll want our help to do things better. But I wouldn’t have this marketing opportunity unless I gave this stuff away for free.
You should do the same. Offer a free product or service in return for some of your time to further help your customers. This will open doors and create more opportunities for you.
3. Re-Visit And Upgrade Your Online Assets
The fact is that the workplace model has significantly changed and will probably remain changed for the foreseeable future. People are simply working more from home.
When people work from home they’re online and, being human, they browse. eCommerce sales have rocketed and views to Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter have all been on the rise.
This is why you need to make sure your online assets – your website and social pages – are as up to date as possible. What more can you be doing to attract more eyeballs? Blogs? Ads? Events?
- Do you have as many calls to action as possible on your site to gather lead information?
- Does your site flow well?
- Are there dead links, mis-spellings, or out of date data?
- Are your assets showing your most current brandings and information about your company?
- Does your website look like a 21st-century place or something out of the 1990s?
- Are you analyzing traffic, visitors, views, and activity?
All of this is important.
List Of 50 Best Digital Marketing Tools
Almost all marketing efforts executed over the Internet fall under the category of digital marketing. It basically encompasses all marketing strategies that use any electronic device or the Internet such as search engines, email, social media, or other sites to connect with current and potential customers.
With digital marketing, brands are exposed to endless possibilities such as email, social media, video, or website-based marketing opportunities.
However, to get the best out of your digital marketing strategy you will need a combination of some of the best digital marketing tools.
Even though there is a huge pool of best digital marketing tools that you can use, we have curated a list of the best digital marketing tools that are there.
These 50 best digital marketing tools can be segregated into different categories depending on their functions:
Best SEO Tools
These tools can help you optimize your blog and website for SEO purposes:
1. SEMrush – SEMrush offers solutions for content, PPC, search results, social media, and of course, SEO. You can also understand your digital marketing analytics and online visibility with this helpful tool.
2. Moz – Moz’s amazing collection of software and other tools can help you strengthen your SERPs, in driving traffic, and creating customers using features like Keyword Research and Site Audits.
3. KWFinder – Marketers from all around the globe have been able to increase their marketing stats and online visibility with the help of KWFinder’s amazing SEO features like PPC, search results analytics, SEO, and even social media.
4. Ahrefs – This site audit tool, Ahrefs provides great SEO analysis and helps companies in understanding and monitoring SEO health and SEO results over time by using keyword mentions, alerts, and more.
5. Serpstat – Serpstat is a great tool for rank tracking, backlink analysis, competitor analysis, text analytics, site audits, and keyword research.
6. Varvy – Originally called Feed the Bot, Varvy is another very talked-about SEO tool that provides free SEO services and even SEO-centric analyzed data for all kinds and sizes of businesses.
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Best Social Media Scheduling Tools
Social Media is one of the biggest platforms for digital marketing, and you would need some of the best digital marketing tools to help you with your social media scheduling.
7. Hootsuite – Very easy to use and a highly productive social media scheduler tool, Hootsuite helps you with all major social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, WordPress, so on.
8. Zoho Social – One of the best digital marketing tools out there, Zoho Social can help you schedule unlimited posts, monitor all the ongoing campaigns, create custom stats reports, and more in just a few clicks.
9. Hiplay – Hiplay can help you do a lot of things like creating posts from the dashboard, categorizing posts, adding posts to the library buffer, ensuring consistent posting, etc.
10. Sprout Social – Sprout Social is another great user management program for collaborating with editorial calendars and content creation features and overall social media management.
Best Email Automation Tools
Email is one of the most direct forms of communication in the business world, and you will need to optimize it as much as possible with the help of effective email automation tools.
11. Active Campaign – Active Campaign helps marketers with CRM, sales, and messaging by providing personalized emails, sales data, trigger automation, and more.
12. Mailchimp – Mailchimp provides email marketing, landing pages, ads, and CRM tools to help businesses grow with a clean format of drag-and-drop features.
13. Campaign Monitor – Campaign Monitor offers professional and trending features like drag and drop email builder, amazing templates, creating personalized customer setup, tailored email list, etc. at reasonable prices.
14. Constant Contact – Constant Contact provides a simple editor, modern templates, and various list-building tools, along with tons of data and live support.
15. GetResponse – GetResponse is a complete package with features like contact analysis, high-converting landing pages, automating data journey, webinars increasing conversion rates, etc.
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Best Ad Campaign Tools
Managing ads is a tricky business, especially for newcomers. Here are some of the best digital marketing tools to help you with it.
16. AdHawk – AdHawk simplifies advertising by helping manage Google and Facebook Ads by managing and monitoring data.
17. 4c – 4c is a great tool for performance analysis, media execution, and audience discovery.
18. Celtra – Celtra helps creative and marketing teams in collaborating to design and deliver their digital campaigns in various ways.
19. Kenshoo – By exploring search results, checking eCommerce, dissecting shares, Kenshoo helps the company in integrating various ideas for automation and scalability.
20. Basis – Basis is an ad campaign tool that helps with digital media planning and buying, along with ad operations, finance, and reconciliation.
Best Analytical Tools
Here are a few great tools to help you analyze your performance and results.
21. Google Analytics – Being the largest analytics tool out there, Google Analytics is a must for every marketer.
22. Facebook Analytics – With features like multiple notification options, easy personalization, data segmentations, and customer-specific suggestions, Facebook Analytics is a simple yet effective tool.
23. Cyfe – Cyfe helps you in tracking data from various social media platforms, PPC channels, sales platforms, and so on.
24. Yandex Metrica – Yandex Metrica is best known for its free heatmap feature that allows you to track places where visitors have clicked the most.
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Best Designing Tools
Digital marketing requires a lot of designing to attract the audience, and you can use the below tools for that.
25. Canva – Canva can help you design for anything, be it your website, social media, ad banners, infographics, and in the best way possible.
26. Adobe Spark – Adobe spark is free and very user friendly with great template options.
27. Pablo – Pablo is another productive tool for all your designing needs.
28. Marvellapp – Packed with lots of cool features, Marvellapp also helps you in prototyping mock-up versions of apps and websites.
Best CRM Tools
CRM or Customer Relationship Management is important for any business, and here are the tools you can use for it.
29. HubSpot – With tools for social media marketing, SEO, content management, and web analytics, HubSpot is a complete platform for CRM.
30. Zoho – Being a web-based office suite, Zoho can help you with presentations, word processing, databases, spreadsheets, and a bit of everything else.
31. Streak – Streak allows users to share files, contacts, emails, etc. and provides CRM with a single click.
Best Research Tools
Here are some of the best digital marketing tools to help you with your research.
32. Google Trends – Google Trends is a simple yet powerful tool to analyze ongoing trends with features like YouTube research, country-specific trend research, campaign creation, and management, and more.
33. Buzzsumo – Buzzsumo allows you to analyze a particular topic, study social sharing related to a topic, research competitors, and so on.
34. Facebook Audience Insights – Facebook Audience Insights can help you with country based research, behavior analysis, device analysis, etc.
35. Similarweb – With Similarweb, you can get a source of traffic, estimate upcoming traffic, country-based traffic, and can be used as a Chrome extension as well.
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Best Project Management
You’ll need these tools to keep your team on track.
36. Asana – Asana helps you in organizing and planning workflows, crafting projects across employees, and keeping your team on schedule.
37. Confluence – A globally famous tool, Confluence makes organization and collaboration easy and effective.
38. Flock – Flock is also considered to be one of the best digital marketing tools for project management.
39. Evernote – Evernote is best known for making syncing easier than ever.
40. Trello – Trello has a very clean and productive interface for project management.
Best Content Planning Tools
A great content strategy requires a well-designed content plan.
41. Google Calendar – A highly effective content planning tool, Google Calendar can help you streamline your content for months to come.
Best Productivity Calendars
Even though Google Calendar can be used for this as well, here are a few other options.
42. You Can Book Me – You Can Book Me is like a personal secretary and helps you in organizing meetings efficiently.
43. Calendly – Calendly allows you and your team to schedule conference calls effectively.
Best Funnel Planning
Let’s look at a few tools for your funnel planning.
44. Funnelytics – Funnelytics allows you to build a visual map describing how clients can be moved from ads to a landing page, and from there to sale and even beyond.
45. Geru – Geru allows users to simulate traffic with downsells, upsells, etc.
46. Funnel Flows – Funnel Flows can help you find out if your funnel plan has stagnant zones for you to find a solution.
Best Font Tools
Depending on the nature of your business, you might need more than just standard fonts.
47. Ffonts – Ffonts has a collection of unique fonts that you can use for your logo or email templates.
Miscellaneous Tools
48. Linktree – Linktree is a famous and simple tool to help you manage your Instagram activity.
49. Github – Github is an acclaimed multipurpose tool for hosting, management tools, web-based graphical interface, and so on.
50. Namify – Namify is a great brand name generator is a great tool that can help you find the best name for your brand, product, website, app, etc. using algorithmic research.
In Conclusion
Marketing is like gambling. But this is not Vegas. It’s an educated, planned gamble. You’re not putting $10 on the roulette wheel and hoping for the best. You’re investing with the intention of getting a return. There are no guarantees, but you’ve got more control than when you’re in a casino.
The best place to leverage that control is to market to the people you know best: your customers. The next place is to control the information that potential prospects see about your company: your online assets.
So, revisit your customers. Give them stuff for free. Step up your online presence. Those three marketing moves will pay off in time.