Businesses have always relied on well-defined marketing strategies to create awareness for their brands and reach their target audience. They invest in promotional material to generate scalable and actionable metrics that can lead to conversions. Ultimately a good marketing strategy can boost your Return on Investment (ROI) and propel business growth.
However, the digital era has come with; technological advances that pave the way for the evolution and shifts in customer needs. Today, there’s a visible difference between online and offline customers’ habits and behavior. It means that businesses need a marketing strategy overhaul to match changes in the market.
Fortunately, technology and tech providers have also reached numerous essential marketing tools to match these shifts.
Look at these seven critical marketing tools for a strategy overhaul to help your business remain relevant and competitive.
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Marketing Planning Tools
A considerable part of marketing involves planning. It’s the foundational strategy for other marketing strategies. It means you have to get it right for everything else to fall into place. Without the technology that is today, marketing planning can be a sticky point. What planning tools do help you with the digital organization of your tasks.
It helps you break down tasks into small manageable individual steps that you can assign to the various segments of the marketing department. It makes it easy to track progress as well as keep up with deadlines. A needed tool essential for overhauling your marketing strategy is Trello. Others include Asana and Jira.
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Social Media Marketing Tools
Social media has evolved to be among the best and priority marketing channels in today’s business world. It’s an excellent place to develop leads and business relationships and a place to gather valuable customer data. But manually managing the many pieces to be effective in social media marketing is laborious and time-consuming.
For purposes of running successful social media campaigns, you can consider automating it. Get a dedicated tool that allows hands-free and scheduled social media content publishing. It also helps you collect important customer data in the process to help you meet your ultimate marketing and business goals.
Social media marketing requires consistent posting on your brand, products, and services. However, it’s full of businesses also looking to be heard by the same audience as you. An excellent marketing tool should help you stand out with creative, visual, and informative posts.
It should be easy to navigate and provide actionable insights to help you advance your marketing effort. Examples of top social media marketing tools include Loomly, Sprout Social, and Audiense.
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools
According to research, more than half of web traffic is from search queries. For you to benefit from the search queries, your website must rank high on search engines. It is quite a competitive space in every business looking into the same audience to increase their market share. So, if there is anything your business can do to boost its visibility on search engines, that would be a plus.
One of the best ways to ensure that happens is through constantly and consistently curating content that solves user needs. It involves using the correct meta title and description, keywords, and phrases in the quantity that web searchers likely use. Because SEO can be daunting, there are tools to help your business optimize website and content for search engines. Some of the popular SEO tools include AHrefs, SEMrush, and Clearscope.
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Email Marketing Tools
While marketing channels and trends evolve with time, some seem to come and go while others stay longer. Among those that have stood the test of time is the email marketing channel. Email marketing continues to be a top content marketing channel for both Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Customer (B2C) businesses.
However, that’s not to say that it hasn’t had its fair share of challenges. The amount of time and labor in creating emails from scratch or each person on your emailing list is among them. If stuck to your old strategy, your competitors will leave you with time-consuming tasks that don’t produce many results. It lowers productivity and email campaign ROI.
That has made it a staple in digital marketing tools and software. A proper email marketing tool helps you become more efficient and productive without putting too much manual work into it. It improves list building and helps in creating excellent campaign offers that convert into sales. Some email marketing tools include Lemlist, Moosend, MailMunch, and SendGrid.
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Conversion Optimization Tools
Even the small changes can make a huge difference in converting visitors to customers on your website. These are simple things like changing the position or color of your call-to-action button or responding to customer queries instantly. They can mean the difference between a visitor signing up and or bouncing away to another site.
When planning a marketing strategy overhaul, conversion optimization tools are a must-have. They help you tap on promising leads that result in sales and an increase in revenue.
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Graphic Design Tools
Whatever name you want to give them; graphs, graphics, memes, infographics, and many others; the point is visual design has become the cornerstone in marketing and branding campaigns. Even when you have no budget for it, there are tools available such as Canva, to help you create creative and memorable visuals for your ads.
In your strategy overhaul, other graphic design tools you should consider ensuring your marketing strategy is robust include Creatopy (formerly Bannersnack), Venngage, and Visme.
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Landing Page and Lead Capture Tools
People’s attention span is short, and you need to find a way to lead your visitors into the sales funnel. Lead capture tools ensure that the traffic your website gets isn’t wasted and lead visitors on to take action. A good strategy, when done right, can result in better leads and conversions. You can use hybrid tools that incorporate other marketing features like MailMunch. Others include TypeForm and OptiMonk.
Final Thoughts
The above are essential marketing tools when overhauling your strategy. Ensure that your marketing plan is solid to ensure that others under it stand. However, with each of them, don’t forget to track progress and adjust to where necessary.
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Dale Hardy is a freelance digital marketing writer with over seven years of experience creating content to help businesses leverage the technology to remain competitive. He is a creative thinker and enjoys playing board games and puzzles in his free time.
Other Useful Resources:
Top 18 Marketing Communication Tools to Build your Business
Top 30 Video Marketing Tools & Software for Marketers in 2021
