A good marketer or business owner knows that a busines's marketing efforts will only be successful if they have a concrete marketing plan in place. Plans usually include a mix of various marketing functions such as social media, email, SEO, marketing automation/lead generation, website visitor tracking and identification, and website accessibility.
With today's technology, there's a plethora of useful online marketing tools available right at your fingertips. In fact, some tools are even free (a bonus for new to the industry or starting a new business and struggling with increasing budget). The added bonus of the free tools is that it allows you to test them out in case you want to upgrade or purchase.
Discovering the best and top useful tools for your business can significantly save time and in turn, increase leads and marketing efforts. We're listing our top six tools and tips that we have found to be the most useful in taking our clients' marketing to the next level.
1. 4cite - Website User Tracking & Identification
Did you know on average, email lists decline by around 22% every year? Year after year, subscribers contact information and preferences change, which results in your email list needing a refresh.
Why we love it: Traktek has a licensed solution from 4cite, which allows us to identify anonymous and recognized users on our clients' websites and capture their interests, as a result, we can send them triggered messages based on their website behavior.
2. Hubspot - Marketing Automation/ Lead Generation
For CRM software, we'd have to choose Hubspot, the world's leading inbound marketing and sales platform. HubSpot's inbound marketing software, has been ranked #1 in customer satisfaction by VentureBeat and G2Crowd, and includes social media publishing and monitoring, blogging, SEO, website content management, email marketing, marketing automation, and reporting and analytics, all in one integrated platform.
Why we love it: Not only do we use the marketing software to create, send out and report on client emails, but also to set up email workflows, which allows you to identify users and send them triggered emails based on actions they take on the website.
3. SiteImprove - Website Accessibility
SiteImprove is a great tool for website accessibility. It has a Digital Certainty index score which measure your site's success and also fixes in Quality Assurance, Accessibility and SEO.
Why we love it: With an easy to use interface, it takes the win in our book for a top website accessibility tool.
4. Buffer - Social Media Platform
With the increase of social media networks, managing multiple clients' social media accounts can get confusing, and not to mention time confusing. After all, there's no reason to sign in and out of multiple accounts and post when you can do it all in one place. For this reason, we use Buffer - which is an online social media platform which you are able to manage multiple accounts and schedule posts to social outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn. The beauty of Buffer is that you are able to schedule posts in advance, while if you were posting directly off the social media network it would post in real time.
Why we love it: You're also able to shorten URL's directly on the application, so there's no need to use another tool such as Bitly.
5. Screaming Frog - SEO
For those looking to increase their SEO efforts, Screaming Frog is our favorite tool because of its simplicity and user-friendly interface. The tool is an SEO spider solution that crawls your website and provides a host of data that can be used for search engine optimization. We love how it provides the type of SEO details that you will need such as 404s, meta tags, inlinks, outlinks and status codes for every page on a website.
Why we love it: Screaming Frog has helped us increase traffic to our client's websites by provide insight to allow us to make various SEO improvements. The free version provides enough functionality to be extremely useful.
6. Subject Line Tester - Email
There are so many different variables into what goes into the perfect subject line, so it becomes easy to forget what and what not to include. An easy way to overcome this barrier is to use a subject line tester. A great one to use is Subjectline.com.
Why we love it: Not only is it free, but it also provides you with a score out of 100 evaluating how effective your subject line will be. The tool also explains why you get deducted points (things such as mobile subject line too long, no sense of urgency) or added points (such as includes word you or your).
At Traktek Partners, we provide business and digital marketing strategies, creative design, website development, video production, SEM, SEO, and social media campaign management services to domestic and international clients seeking to build brand reputation, generate new revenue streams, and build customer loyalty. To learn how we can help you, please contact us.
