One of the greatest things about online marketing right now is the fact that there's an abundance of tools that can help you with your business.
However, you can really get carried away with your options.
You really want to focus on what's important to make sure you're using the right tools. To give you some clarity, here are seven tips for making sure you're investing in the right tools.
Automation is one of the most important aspects of running an online business. Without proper automation, you'll find yourself losing yourself with monotonous tasks that really don't move your business forward. This can be anything from answering basic customer inquiries, sending orders to your suppliers, to submitting your content to the right platforms.
While most people thinking about automation focus on the administrative tasks of your business, you want to apply automation to your marketing as well.
For example, having an automated sales process will allow you to scale up your marketing campaigns. And when you do need a sales team to close on important leads, you can use things like automated lead scoring and action triggers to ensure your sales team focuses on the best prospects. Here are some other automation ideas from experts.
Tip #2: The Best Tools Help You Increase Sales
If you're wondering which tools will prove to be the most valuable for your business, it is almost always the tools that will help you increase your sales. You want to be utilizing tools that help increase your lead and sales conversion rates. There are many ways you can go about increasing your sales. It really comes down to what aspect of your sales and marketing you're working on.
One great example is to go with a tool that can help increase the conversion for your sales pages. There are tools that help you identify problems of your sales page, test multiple variables for your sales pages, use scarcity triggers to boost sales, and more. Another great example are analytics platforms, especially ones that focus on attribution. This allows you to understand what touch points have the most influence on the sale.
Tip #3: Utilize Tools that Lead to Audience Growth
A big part of growing your business is working on building an audience. Your audience can be grown on many different channels from your blog, email newsletter, social media platforms, community sites, and even on third party sites. Evaluate your digital marketing campaigns to see what channels you're focusing on the most as well as what channels are generating the best results.
From there, you want to look for tools that can enhance your audience growth. For instance, let's say Pinterest is working very well for you right now. If that's the case, you may want to check out a tool called Tailwind. It allows you to schedule posts, monitor your campaigns and analyze results on Pinterest and Instagram.
Tip #4: Move on to Tools that Help You Maximize Profits
New businesses may focus on trying to generate as many new customers as possible. But eventually, it all comes down to how much profit you're generating. How you go about maximizing your profits really comes down to where you are with your marketing. If you're advertising on Google Adwords, you want to be using tools that help you find great keyword opportunities, help optimize your landing pages, and manage your bidding.
If you're focusing on a macro level customer strategy, you'll benefit most from going with an advanced CRM (customer relationship management) platform. A CRM can help you study your customer behavior so that you can send the right offers and content. This will help you increase the value of each customer and even increase the average order size.
Tip #5: Use Tools that Simplify Design
Design will always be a part of online marketing. You'll find yourself designing for new content, landing pages, marketing campaigns, ad creatives, and more. If you're working with a small budget, it doesn't make sense for you to turn to a graphic and web designer every time you need to start a new project. Fortunately, there are many tools that simplify the design process and allow just about anyone to create beautiful designs.
Canva is a perfect example of this. It's a tool that is a drag and drop design platform. They have a large image database, allowing you to create social media campaigns, Facebook ads, infographics, and more. There are many other design tools that help the average person do a variety of things. This list of design tools should help give you a better idea of what's available.
Tip #6: Make Sure the Tools You Use Provide a ROI
At our Adelaide SEO firm, we often encounter clients that use a multitude of SEO research tools that do similar things. While the idea is to get the best research data available, only one or two of them ends up being used. The clients are often wasting money on these expensive SEO tool subscriptions when they don't really need them.
The lesson here is that you want to make sure the tools you're using offer some kind of ROI. It's easy to get carried away and spend your hard earned money on everything that may add value to what you're doing. However, it's better to spend time researching which tools may offer the best value for your money and stick to the ones that you feel good using.
Tip #7: Utilize Tools that Save You Time
One of the major reasons you want to use the right online marketing tools for your business is to save time. Time is one of the most limited resources you have, so you want to make sure it's being spent on the most important activities. There is always some kind of tool that will save you time with whatever you're doing.
Social media platforms like Hootsuite serve as perfect examples of time savers. They allow you to post to all your social media accounts from one platform, keep up with your activities, schedule posts ahead of time, and give you a quick overview of your social media campaigns. You'll want to keep your eyes peeled for solutions that help you save time for many different things like project management, SEO, paid ad campaigns, content creation, and more.
Hopefully, these seven tips should have given you more clarity on how to choose the right online tools for your business. Don't waste your money, energy or time on tools that really don't serve a major purpose. You want to be using online tools that add real value to your business otherwise they're just distractions.
About the Author: Sujain Thomas
Sujain is an experienced blogger who has written articles for several renowned blogs and websites about various uses of social media to engineer more business traffic on business websites.
