To be the best marketer you can be, sometimes you need a little help from tools and apps. From automation to Influencer marketing, there are lots of trends this year that marketers are embracing and there are plenty of tools out there to help you do this. We’ve rounded up our seven favourite apps and tools to help you push your marketing to whole new levels.
1. Automation Tool – Hubspot
Why do I need it? Marketing automation is set to get even bigger as the need for hyper-personalisation deepens, therefore, a surge of automation tools have come on the market. Allowing marketers to run their loyalty, lead generation and account based-marketing programmes with intelligence, speed and precision.
Which tool should I get? There are plenty of marketing automation tools to choose from, but Hubspot tends to come out on top. The inbound software aids lead generation thanks to its tight alignment with content marketing and ability to lead score, send emails and social media campaigns so you can manage (and automate) all aspects of your marketing from one place.
What do users say? “Hubspot provides a great interface that makes lead management and marketing automation easier for our small marketing team. From one place, we create landing pages, forms, email workflows, and reports.” Marketing Analyst at nChannel Incorporated*
2. Influencer Marketing – Zoomph
Why do I need it? Influencer marketing is exploding as more people turn to social media and their favourite bloggers and vloggers for recommendations. A recent survey by Inc.com revealed that 84% of marketers plan on executing at least one influencer marketing campaign during the next 12 months.
While it is considered more of a B2C trend, it should not be overlooked: it increases the reach of brand content and adds a more reliable voice to the marketing. For example, if you are being marketed a laptop, the content marketing would say, “It has a Dual Core processor with 8GB of RAM for high-speed processing.” Whereas if you were being recommended it by an influencer, they might say, “The laptop runs really quickly; I can use loads of programmes at the same time and it doesn’t slow down.” It’s more relatable and helps you see the product advantages from a similar point of view as your own.
Which tool should I get? Influencer Engagement Platform Zoomph helps you identify who is talking about your brand on social media. As well as tracking, it also helps you amplify your social media links. It visualises how your brand is being discussed across social media so you can identify influencers and provides analytics so you can break results down by volume and commonly used hashtags.
What do users say? “We are making social media more visual for our sales team. By projecting social media mentions at our events through Zoomph it encourages more people to engage.” – Integrated Marketing Specialist at Henry Shcein
3. Account Based Marketing – Terminus
Why do I need it? ABM is continuing its dominance as a technique for marketers to engage high-value customers. Using a software tailored to Account-Based Marketing can really help to get campaigns set up and see how each target account is performing. It can also help to identify accounts that may not have been on your radar by using data and predictive analytics.
Less than 1% of leads turn into revenue-generating customers, according to Forrester Research, so having software that can help manage your leads and turn them into opportunities is vital. ABM can help to increase engagement with target accounts and better align sales and marketing departments. Software can help you to incorporate hyper-personalisation into your campaigns and better track the buyer journey so that you can present with the right content and information at the right time.
Which tool should I get? Terminus is not only well-priced but is also easy to use. It’s great if you’re targeting a niche market and integrates with Salesforce so you can target key accounts based on criteria. It helps to drive awareness, increase response rates and increase pipeline close rates.
What do users say? “The ease of use is really great. The team at Terminus boiled down a potentially complicated technology to the easiest it can be. Uploading creative and setting daily budgets is very simple. The support is great. When I reach out I get a fast response and they take the time to dig into our account when needed… Most importantly the product is showing some early signs of providing ROI.” Director of Marketing Operations at WP Engine
4. Video – GoAnimiate
Why do I need it? 96% of B2B organisations use video in some capacity in their marketing campaigns, of which 73% report positive results to their ROI, according to a survey conducted by ReelSEO. But professional videos can be expensive to create, especially if you have to outsource. Thankfully there are now easy-to-use video tools that you don’t have to be a design whizz to use to create your own videos to communicate your offering in an engaging way.
Which tool should I get? GoAnimate is a great video creation tool for novices that still produces slick, professional-looking videos. It comes with a rich set of templates as well as allowing you to import your own images to which you can add a camera zoom, customize transition and adjust the timeline. You can add audio and voiceovers and even create animated characters to help communicate your message
What do users say? ” Great for creating engaging videos. Also great if you have vocals and no time to do live camera work or if working with a group that wants to stay off-camera. We use it a lot for videos that will be delivered in multiple languages because it’s easy to swap out audio and re-render the video in new language quickly; easy to change the looks of characters pretty quickly, too.” Developer, Verilogue Inc.
5. Social Scheduling – Shedugr.am
Why do I need it? You’re probably already using a social management tool like Hootsuite to pre-schedule your tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn posts. But what about Instagram? Instagram is used by 33% of B2B marketers but is also the fastest growing social platform in B2B, so you should be thinking about your Insta-strategy and planning ahead, that also means scheduling ahead.
Which tool should I get? With Schedugr.am you can schedule images and ahead of time. It also saves your content so it’s ready to re-share: handy for your ‘Monday Motivation’ plaques! You can manage multiple accounts from one login and different members of the team can access different accounts so you can see who has posted what and when.
What do users say? “I love that you can upload drafts and keep them handy until you’re ready to schedule them! That’s not available in other competitors I’ve tried and makes a huge difference to my workflow.” Assistant at Kristin Ungerecht
6. Audience Insight – Google Analytics
Why do I need it? If you’re not already using GA, then why not?! Google Analytics gives you great insight into what is successful on your website: you can identify which posts get the most views, what prompts a spike in traffic, identify your traffic sources and segment your traffic to find out more about your audience. This, in turn, can help you develop future content that you know will get clicks and enhance your sales funnel by optimizing your SEO and content.
Which tool should I get? Google Analytics is the best way to get audience insight and get to know your website visitors. It can be a bit confusing for beginners, but only because it’s got so many features: once you know how to use it, there are so many things you can do with it. There are plenty of blogs, tutorials and webinars available to help you get the most out of the software.
What do users say? “ Google Analytics has A LOT of excellent features, it’s hard to pick a favourite! It really depends on what position (in a company) you are in to determine a best feature. For me, it has to be the ability to tag inbound links (i.e. from advertising banners, link exchange etc) with campaign and source tags – allowing you to easily compare this metric with others.” – Director at Ecommerce HQ
7. Content and Ad Planning – Google Keyword Planner
Why do I need it? As well as indicating which words are influential when it comes to SEO, a good keyword planner can help you determine which keywords and combinations of words you should use for your display ads, search ads and video ads as well for your content. Keywords can direct you on what your headlines should be, as well as the topics. When planning your content, use the keyword planner to determine that topics drive the most traffic.
Which tool should I get? Google Keyword Planner is King here. It gives you a good idea of cost per click for your ad planning and indicates volume of searches and click through rate, which is good for topic planning. The indication of cost is also excellent for advert campaign planning keeping within a budget.
What do users say? “There were many scenarios I had to keep up the campaign and achieved the target as per the media plan accurately only because of this tool, as this tool gives you the keyword bid estimate, volume for a particular region, and keyword competency etc. It helped me to commit for the target or goals.” Technology Lea, Infosys
8. SEO – Yoast
Why do I need it? Being top of Google = being top of your game. SEO optimisation is more important than ever. Search Engines are most people’s first port of call, so if you’re not on the first page of Google, you probably won’t get a search engine-generated click. It’s not as simple as adding keywords into the metadata of your website HTML anymore – you need a tool or app to help you.
Which tool should I get? If you use a Wordpress site, Yoast is the go-to SEO plugin. It’s easy to use as you enter keywords that will drive traffic (you should use your Keyword Planner for this) and has a traffic light system that shows how effective your keywords are.
What do users say? “Undoubtedly, Yoast is one of the best SEO plugins without any further logic. Yoast not only gives me insights about SEO rankings, meta descriptions, keyword optimization but their overall web and social functions are more than average. Yoast also provides you with the ability to send sitemaps, robotext and gives complete control over search engine optimization functionality.” CEO at InsuranceQuotesMaster
For tips on other essential marketing tools you should be using, check out our whitepaper – 13 Marketing Tools Under £40 – http://digitalradish.info/#marketing-tools
*All quotes are sourced from G2 Crowd product reviews