Over the years, there have been drastic and rapid changes in marketing technologies. In fact, advances in the technology behind online marketing take place so frequently it’s a challenge to keep up with everything. Marketing professionals also have to carefully examine how any new marketing technologies will work with new and existing marketing initiatives.
With all of the marketing tools and solutions available to help with marketing automation, customer relationship management, social media, analytics, email, and project management, it’s easy to lose focus. Here are 10 must-have digital marketing technologies marketers and business owners need to know about so they can market more effectively.
Marketing Automation
There are countless tools available to help you replace time-consuming, repetitive, high-touch, manual processes with automated solutions. Decide on what you want to automate and then select the appropriate tool. By automating the appropriate tasks, you can focus your energy on other aspects of your structured sales process. It’s important to approach this strategically to make certain it’s helping your business.
Landing Pages and Microsites
Even if you have a business website, your job isn’t done. You can effectively use dynamic landing pages and microsites for specific campaigns and offers. They can also help boost the reach and overall effectiveness of your offline marketing efforts. Some great uses for landing pages and microsites include:
- Launching customer surveys, user communities, and loyalty-program sign-ups.
- Attracting attention and moving the sales process forward by offering your customer something of interest or value. This could be anything—a white paper, a product demo, webinar, e-newsletter, contest or sweepstakes entry, a survey or poll, email updates, etc.
- And giving the specific details and features on selected products, reinforcing your customer’s reasons for buying.
Mobile Marketing and Analytics
We’ve past the point where business owners can choose to ignore mobile. All data points to mobile being a bigger and bigger part of reaching customers. For example, more than two-thirds of Facebook and Twitter traffic comes from mobile devices. Your marketing must be accessible from any device and you have to know what’s working and what isn’t.
Any effective marketing strategy must be “mobile-friendly” and it must be measured. This is especially true since 71% of mobile consumers do research on their smartphones after viewing a television or mobile ad and more than 59% of B2B purchase decision makers use their smartphones for information when they’re purchasing products or services.
Social Media Management
As social media grows more and more popular, the number of networks to update and monitor continues to grow as well. Some of the tools help you maintain multiple accounts on one site while others provide insights and analytics. There are tools to help with keyword research, scheduling of social media posts, and maintaining a well-managed social media presence.
Search Engine Optimization
There is absolutely no point in creating useful content for your audience if no one ever sees it. One of the best ways to drive traffic and boost your business is an integrated and strategic approach to search engine optimization (SEO). Monitor your search standings. Do keyword research and incorporate targeted keywords in your titles, content, URLs, title tags, page headers, and image tags. Link back to other relevant content within your own digital properties. Regularly update your content. And create a site map to make it easier for your website to get indexed by search engines.
Web Content Management
If you truly want to stay on top of all of your marketing activities, you absolutely need to have some sort of system in place to manage all of your web content. Even a simple Content Management System (CMS) should allow you to easily create and publish content and integrate components like e-commerce, multiple users, or a company blog.
Video Management and Delivery
Similarly to mobile, video is a trend that is shaping the future of online marketing. Quality video content enables optimal SEO. If you regularly produce video content it will help you move towards the top of organic search results. Video has also been proven to drive sales. Video product demos can boost sales by 20%-40%. With more than 800 million unique viewers watching a total of four billion hours of video on YouTube each month it’s clear that web users are into video. That means your business needs marketing tools in place to take full advantage of channels such as YouTube, Vine, and Vimeo. Some marketers are even developing and hosting their own internet shows making great use of video as a marketing tool.
Email marketing
Email marketing is one of the best ways to cultivate customer relationships. It’s especially useful for prospects that are closer to the top of the sales funnel than the bottom. A well-designed email marketing campaign can deliver the right information to the right people at the right time. This includes everything from welcome series autoresponders for new signups to reactivation emails for dormant prospects.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
If you want to see any success with internet marketing you’ll need to build and manage one or more lists of prospects and customers. You need an effective method of managing your leads. A good customer relationship management system (CRM) will allow you to segment your lists and easily keep track of all of your contact information with insight and analytics.
Analytics
It’s critical to keep track of important metrics related to when people are visiting your website, what they are clicking on and how long they stay there. Website traffic isn’t the only important analytic. You should also measure other aspects of your marketing such as cost-per-lead, cost-per-customer, cost-per-follower, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), lifetime value of a customer (LTV), and return on investment (ROI).
I’m sure that we’ll continue to see more advances in marketing technologies. Smart marketers will evaluate these technologies to see how they can help achieve overall business objectives. If you use the 10 must-have digital marketing technologies above you’ll have the basics covered.
Are you currently using any of these marketing technologies? Do you plan to use some of them in the near future? Leave your question or a comment below and share what new online marketing technologies your business has adopted lately.
[et_social_share]
Douglas, i think you missed one more important technology, Blogging! I use all the above technologies, and i think this is a very fruitful post…thanks for sharing 🙂
I believe Blogging is part of social media management and web content management. Correct me if I’m wrong Douglas.
That’s a great observation @alialmoosawi:disqus, however, as @anismoussa:disqus rightly pointed out, I grouped and treated blogging briefly under Content Management Systems. The importance of dynamic and fresh content cannot be overemphasized in the Attention Economy; blogging plays a very important role in the success of modern marketing campaigns.
I think both of you are right, but in opinion…blogging should not be under any group, it should be under a group of its own..
hello,this post is really
wonderful….it’s really very intersting and informative….keep sharing….
promotional mugs
ya thats great
good