The importance of marketing continues to grow. Saturated markets and enormous competition force enterprises to undertake wide-ranging activities related to promoting their business and striving to stand out among other similar companies. Their effective operation requires knowledge, commitment and critical analysis. The work is improved by numerous tools for the marketer. What are they for and how do they work?
What is effective marketing?
Marketing includes a number of activities based on the company’s communication with the client. Its goals are primarily to increase sales, but also, for example, to improve recognition or image. Achieving business goals requires, first of all, formulating them and then creating a strategy for their implementation. It should include, inter alia, defining the target group and its needs, as well as analyzing the company’s situation and its business environment. Only on this basis, it is possible to design specific actions within the short- and long-term marketing strategy, along with their schedule or budget. When the strategy is developed, you can proceed to its implementation, constantly monitoring the effects and analyzing the obtained results based on previously developed indicators.
If the above description sounds complicated, it’s because that’s the job of a marketer. A good specialist should not forget about any of the above aspects – only then can he count on obtaining the expected results. Therefore, in his work, he uses many tools that perform various functions and facilitate work in specific areas.
Internet Marketing – Analysis Tools
Analytics is a very important part of a marketer’s job. The actions taken should result from the conducted research and conclusions drawn from it. The analysis should be carried out at the beginning – assessing the company’s situation before implementing the assumptions of the marketing strategy – and then constantly monitor changes in indicators (the so-called KPI). This is the only effective way to assess which of the adopted assumptions prove to be correct and which actions bring the most profits.
There are many analytical tools. Each of them has slightly different functions and is suitable for slightly different tasks. Importantly, some of them are completely free!
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an indispensable tool for anyone who runs a website. The marketer can use it to obtain important data that is helpful both in planning and in measuring the effectiveness of implemented activities. An example may be data on recipients containing information on the demographics of internet users visiting the website. In addition, you can see what devices users are using, what they are interested in and how they spend their time on our website.
From the marketing point of view, very important data are also those concerning the sources of traffic. They tell you how users come to your website. The information in this section is really detailed, so you can check the results of your campaigns and analyze each keyword. You can also check how effectively the traffic generated from a given source translates into conversion. As a result, actions that do not bring the expected results can be eliminated, and the resources freed in this way can be allocated to the intensification of more effective methods. It is also worth checking multi-channel paths for this purpose. There you will find data on how the different traffic-gaining channels support each other and which paths convert best.
Google Analytics is a free tool for the marketer that offers a wide range of possibilities. It’s worth taking the time to get to know them inside out because they provide a lot of valuable information.
Tools for the marketer – content marketing and SEO
SEO and content marketing are currently the main areas of interest for most marketers. Actions taken to increase the visibility, value and credibility of the website bring long-lasting results. Therefore, they are the main pillar of the long-term strategy of any company that is serious about marketing. Effective SEO or content marketing, however, requires tracking trends and careful content development. Fortunately, there is no shortage of tools that facilitate work in this area.
Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner
These two tools for the marketer, SEO expert or content creator are absolutely essential. Google Trends is about trends – you can use it to see which phrases are currently typed most often in the search engine window. The application also allows you to check historical data on searching for specific phrases. Therefore, you can see if a specific keyword is gaining or losing. It’s a great tool for finding publication ideas.
Google Keyword Planner is related to the Google Ads platform. It allows you to plan keywords necessary for SEO or SEM campaigns. Its functions enable, among others creating a database of keywords related to the industry in which the company operates, as well as checking their popularity. What’s more, you can check the competitiveness of your phrases and average advertising rates
Senuto
Senuto is also a tool supporting both SEO and SEM activities as well as content marketing. It is quite an advanced application that allows you to analyze the visibility of any page on the Internet. The data presented by it concern, among others the distribution of positions in the search engine and their changes in terms of decreases and increases. They also allow you to check the history of SERPs for a given keyword and indicate tabs exposed to cannibalization of phrases. Thanks to the program, it is also possible to perform a fairly advanced analysis of the phrases themselves – not only in terms of the average number of searches, but also their difficulty or relationship.
Senuto can be used both when planning content marketing activities and checking their effectiveness. It also allows you to optimize SEO, eliminate errors and increase effectiveness in this area. In addition, it offers an analysis of the results of competing websites.
BuzzSumo
How to check if your publications are popular? Just use BuzzSumo. This is a kind of tool for the marketer that allows you to primarily monitor content sharing on social media. Based on this, you can easily draw conclusions about which publications attract the most interest and take steps to maximize their potential. In addition, BuzzSumo allows you to check the amount of content published on the website in a selected period and their total number of views. It also provides slightly more advanced analyzes – it helps, for example, to check how long the content is most popular or on which day of the week it is most often shared. The built-in alert system facilitates work and saves time, which is certainly an additional advantage.
SurferSEO
To be successful in marketing, you don’t always need to be original. Often a better solution is to use someone else’s experience and duplicate the best-working patterns. SurferSEO facilitates analytics in this area. It is a program that analyzes the current results of the top 50 in the Google search engine in terms of potential ranking factors for the query phrase. It gives a wide range of analysis of the competition and the position of a specific website among similar websites. It has the option of a quick SEO audit that clearly presents data related to the most important ranking factors and allows you to identify areas where your site deviates from the competition. The Content Editor function is also interesting, as it allows you to automatically create a brief for a copywriter. The guidelines are based on the given keyword. However, they can be adjusted according to your preferences.
Canva
Content-based marketing requires presenting it in an appropriate form. With Canva, no help from a graphic designer is needed to create engaging content. It is a very intuitive program that allows you to instantly create aesthetic graphics, ideal for example as binding for posts in social media. The biggest advantage of this tool for the marketer is its simplicity – it includes an infinite number of ready-made templates for any occasion.
Internet Marketing – Management and Organization Tools
Proper organization of work and task delegation is not easy, especially in marketing, which is such a dynamic and multifaceted field. That is why it is worth using applications that help to control the chaos of information and the precise separation of responsibilities.
Asana
Managing collaborative projects can be a headache. However, it is much easier when you use the Asana. It is a project management application that is very functional and intuitive. It works great both when acting alone and when working with a team. It allows you to create projects and tasks and then delegate them. It allows you to check progress, set deadlines, exchange files, as well as communicate between project participants. All this is presented in a clear and convenient form.
Slack
Slack is a kind of marketing tool that will work in almost every industry. It is a business messenger that facilitates collaboration. It enables public, closed-group and one-on-one discussion, so it can be used by the entire company.
Marketo
Marketo is a slightly different way of organizing work, or actually its automation. It is a comprehensive platform characterized by wide availability of functions. It enables the automation of various marketing activities, incl. content marketing, e-mail marketing, website analysis and internet advertising. It has extensive analytical functions, thanks to which it provides a lot of valuable information – e.g. information on the effectiveness of specific channels and marketing campaigns in terms of increasing revenues. The tool is integrated with the most popular CRMs. It is great for deep analysis of the customer’s purchasing path. It allows you to draw conclusions leading to better resource management and optimization of campaign costs.
Internet Marketing – Mailing Tools
Newsletters and mailing campaigns are an important element of a marketer’s work. Their coordination requires assistance in the form of dedicated software. The available tools make it possible not only to coordinate the dispatch and manage address databases, but also to prepare attractive messages.
MailChimp
MailChimp is one of the most popular newsletter management tools. It includes a number of options for managing shipping and recipient lists, as well as creating a sequence of messages. In addition, it allows you to create pop-ups and landing pages encouraging you to subscribe to the newsletter. An interesting feature is also reports that allow you to check the results of individual campaigns and compare them with the results of the competition. It is not without reason that so many specialists use this application.
OptinMonster
OptinMonster is primarily used to create effective pop-ups that are designed to encourage subscribers to the newsletter. The tool is easy to integrate with almost any email marketing program. It includes a number of useful options. Thanks to it, you will create an attractive and inviting pop-up and specify the rules for its display. It also allows you to conduct A / B tests. They consist in checking which of the two versions of the prepared material is more effective. You don’t want to use pop-ups? With OptinMonster you can also prepare other types of messages promoting the newsletter.
Klaviyo
An e-mail marketing platform that supports business development by delivering recipients precisely selected e-mail messages at the right time? This is Klaviyo. It is a tool designed mainly for e-commerce that allows you to manage and automate e-mail communication. The program can be easily integrated with pop-ups or other similar elements on the website to obtain e-mail addresses for the database. Plus, it provides tons of options, including sending message sequences to people who have abandoned their cart or viewed a product but didn’t put it in their cart, creating second purchase campaigns, creating reactivation campaigns targeting inactive subscribers, and more. The great advantage of the tool is the possibility of very precise segmentation of users. Klaviyo also allows you to create attractive messages, conduct A / B tests for almost every element and analyze the effectiveness of activities.
Woodpecker
Woodpecker is the perfect tool to automate cold mailing. It allows you to prepare messages addressed to a completed database, which do not look like offers, but rather like traditional e-mails. It enables full personalization of the content and connects to the user’s e-mail box, so replies are sent to the selected address. Advanced settings allow you to adjust the mailing parameters to your preferences in such a way that the correspondence looks natural. This also applies to subsequent messages sent when certain criteria are met. This makes the tool also suitable for communication with a group of clients. It is easy to use and intuitive.
