Every day, the world of online business becomes a little more competitive. Companies need to use every tool they have at their disposal to get an edge on the competition and put their products or services in front of customers. Having to learn a full array of digital tools can be an intimidating task, but it’s vital to building up your brand and maximizing your business.
Successful digital marketing is about far more than just having a web page and a social media presence. You need tools that can help you create, manage, and analyze your marketing campaigns — and do so efficiently, while still maintaining high levels of customer service. With that in mind, here are five essential tech tools to help you succeed in digital marketing.
1. Tools for Building Landing Pages
A landing page is so called because it’s a page that a customer “lands” on after making a search. (It’s worth noting that half of all web traffic comes directly from searches.) A good landing page should have a tight focus on a particular product or service and follow up on any promises your website has made about that product or service. Basically, it’s a tool to help your visitors to become customers. The function of a landing page is to capture leads, encourage visitors to opt in, and provide a call to action that will get your company more sales. In this day and age, there’s no reason to code your landing page by hand when there are some great tools out there to assist.
Examples: Unbounce, InstaPage
2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
As your business grows, maintaining contact with your existing customers becomes at least as important as finding new ones. That’s where customer relationship management (CRM) software comes in. CRM software is basically a tool for unifying all your customer data and keeping it organized. Data such as contact information, purchase records, and more. The goal of CRM software is to help your company stay connected to your customers, improve customer relationships, and provide valuable insight about their interests and purchase trends. A good CRM suite will track every interaction you have with your customer, whether it’s via phone, email, social media, or whatever else. Some CRM suites even feature AI tools that can help you better manage relationships.
Examples: SalesForce, HubSpot
3. Email Marketing Tools
Despite the claims that “email is dead,” email marketing remains one of the most powerful digital marketing tools in existence. Email marketing is a time-honored tactic for getting word out there about your brand. While poorly executed email marketing can turn customers off, there are a lot of major benefits to it. For example, you never have to worry about buying ad space, you can reach any number of devices (everyone has an email address these days), and you have a lot of flexibility in terms of tailoring content to your target audience. It may not be the hottest new technology, but email marketing is a powerful, flexible way to get in touch with both prospective and existing customers.
Examples: MailChimp, ActiveCampaign
4. Customer IT Service Desk Software
Customer support is one of the cornerstones of good business. Questions, issues and problems are going to arise; it’s all a matter of how quickly and efficiently you handle them. This is where a service desk system can be invaluable. The right service desk software can create tickets, auto-route them to the correct support agents, and track every step of the support process. Many service desk systems also feature self-service options such as knowledge bases, FAQs, and AI chatbots to ensure your customers can receive accurate support on a 24/7 basis. Resolving customer queries and issues in a timely, efficient fashion isn’t just good for your customers — it’s good for your business, because those customers will keep coming back.
Examples: Zendesk, Hiver
5. Analytics and Performance Tracking Tools
There are plenty of ways to bring in customer data — but very little of it will be useful to you without metrics, analytics, and performance tracking. Knowing how well your marketing campaign is doing is vital to improving future campaigns and keeping customers happy. When properly implemented, marketing analytics can give you information on conversion rates, return on investment (ROI), customer acquisition costs, customer behavior, and an overview of your campaign’s performance. There are a number of reasons why this is vital to your ongoing success. Understanding consumer behavior can help you spot trends, identify trouble spots, and personalize and tailor your marketing to specific customer segments. It also lets you analyze key metrics across social channels and see how you’re doing compared to your competitors — while also giving you the tools to get ahead of them.
Examples: Google Analytics, Ahrefs
Digital marketing isn’t easy — the landscape is constantly changing, and new ways to market are always emerging. But with the right tools in your arsenal, there’s no reason you need to fall behind.
