How to Choose the Best Marketing Tools for your Business
Every business needs a strong and robust marketing strategy in order to achieve milestones and set goals.
Technology has transformed industries at such breakneck speed that it can be difficult to keep track of the latest trends and innovations, which is why it’s important for businesses to adapt their strategies in order to keep up.
The emergence of marketing tools and software has proved to be a huge help to companies, as it offers a faster and more efficient way to map out strategies and implement them.
However, there are lots of marketing software on the market, so you’ll have to make sure you choose one that best fits your company’s needs.
Here’s what you need to know about choosing the best marketing tools and software:
The Definition of Marketing Software
First, it’s important to know what exactly marketing software is. It refers to online tools, platforms, and programs that help businesses meet their marketing goals.
These often offer features that allow them to efficiently plan, execute, measure, and analyze their marketing efforts to evaluate their success.
In fact, marketing software is so essential to a business’s marketing efforts that a significant portion of the marketing budget is funneled towards software and automation.
This is because of the wide variety of benefits it brings to a business, such as increased efficiency, the return of investment, improvement of marketing accountability and customer experience, and increased customer lifetime value.
The Different Types of Marketing Tools and Software
There are several different types of marketing technology out there that companies have even combined tools and software to create a “marketing technology stack”, which has mushroomed over the last decade.
Nicknamed MarTech, it is composed of tools that complement each other to create a comprehensive system that optimizes a company’s marketing efforts.
Here are a few of the most common marketing tools and software:
Customer Relationship Management
Customer relationship management (CRM) is one of the most important marketing tools a company can use.
This platform spans multiple departments and can be used by any team of a company; in fact, this tool is so essential that it is often called the company’s heartbeat.
It contains all customer data, including demographic, information, and transactions, which are essential details needed to implement marketing campaigns.
Some companies opt to keep it simple in the form of a spreadsheet, although this is vulnerable to data loss and compromises. As CRM holds one of the most important data, you’ll want to make sure it’s on a secure platform that’s easy to access and manage.
It should be comprehensive enough to become the all-in-one resource that contains critical marketing information.
Once you choose your CRM platform, make sure it’s a platform you foresee yourself permanently using. Otherwise, you’ll have to deal with migrating customer and marketing information from platform to platform, which can be extremely tedious and time-consuming.
SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is another important part of every business’s marketing efforts, as it’s the main component that drives website traffic and leads to company discovery.
There are plenty of SEO softwares that consolidates tools to offer a more complete and comprehensive resource for implementing your marketing strategies.
SEO software lets you monitor inbound links of important SEO metrics, like inbound links of blog posts or links to website content, landing PageRank, and domain authority.
Some software, like Google Alerts, allows small companies to track mentions in media, which can be utilized in strategy crafting.
Software that allows companies to measure and track their SEO efforts is crucial to their marketing strategies, as it allows them to determine neglected keywords, platforms, and other aspects that could benefit them.
It also lets companies assess whether their current strategies to increase website traffic are effective.
Content Marketing Tools
Creating high-quality content is also extremely important in a company’s marketing efforts. In fact, it birthed the maxim that content is king, which is an accurate notion, as the content is what encourages people to engage with a company if they find it interesting enough.
Planning the content is a great way to offer valuable information to your customers while spreading it out over a period of time to make sure they keep coming back to your website.
Content tools are especially helpful when it comes to creating and managing content. They can assist with curating content marketing, managing workflow, and handling guest blogging.
It also has the capabilities to determine what your readers prefer to read and the ways they prefer to consume it, whether it’s short-form microblogging or through videos.
Content tools provide you with important insight that is critical in finding marketing success, as they contain information that will help you refine your content to make it perform well and deliver results.
Website and Mobile Analytics
The fast-paced evolution of technology has paved the way for consumer behavior to turn towards mobile. Nowadays, people frequently browse the Internet on their mobile devices, which has become an important metric in marketing.
Websites now have to be optimized for smaller, mobile screens in order to rank well on search engines, for example. Some companies have revised their content to fit people’s mobile device habits in order to find the most success.
Website and mobile analytics platforms are incredibly helpful when examining user behavior on websites and mobile apps.
These tools support companies in gathering important information surrounding the instances people access certain pages.
You’ll want to know what kind of content people consume when they’re on their phone or their mobile Internet habits in order to optimize your marketing strategies.
Conclusion
Knowing the different kinds of marketing tools and software is key to optimizing marketing processes for your company.
These tools are designed to reduce the time spent gathering and analyzing information, which is valuable time saved for your company to do work that can’t be automated.
It offers valuable data in just a few clicks, which you’ll be able to factor into your marketing plans. With the right software, you’ll pull off your marketing campaigns with finesse.
If you’re looking for a marketing collaboration tool, get in touch with us at MarketPlan! We are an all-in-one marketing platform that allows your company to plan, execute, project, and optimize your entire marketing strategy all from one powerful place.
That platform is built for your success and features more than ten built-for-marketing mini-apps. Sign up for MarketPlan for free today!