By Doug MacMillan
When it comes to digital marketing for your business, you need a variety of tools to effectively communicate with your audience, including email marketing, social media, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM) and reputation management. While some platforms claim to “do it all,” I’ll vouch for using the best available platform for each intended purpose. Our agency’s digital marketing team has compiled the following list of apps and tools you should consider using to market your business. If you are new to this type of tool don’t be intimidated by the options. Free video tutorials and chat functionality will help you along your way.
#1 Canva
Canva is an online design and publishing tool that can be used by designers of any skill level. The app includes ready-made templates or the ability to start from scratch. With hundreds of thousands of design elements, text options and graphic features, the creation of social media content, videos, presentations and marketing materials is relatively fast and simple. The basic platform is free and paid subscriptions offer additional functionality. Users can also pay for physical products such as brochures and posters.
#2 Google – Analytics, Reviews, Forms
In this case it’s the devil you know. Google is omnipresent and an all-encompassing way to manage your business’s reputation. Those little yellow review stars speak volumes and drum up business. Google makes customer-facing business management a lot easier. You can manage your reviews, operating hours, company updates, bookings, and lead generation (to name a few). Google Analytics is a website analytics service that provides statistics and tools for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing purposes, and it’s free to anyone with a Google account. Google Analytics is used to track website performance and collect visitor insights. It can determine top sources of user traffic, measure the success of marketing activities, discover trends in user engagement, and obtain visitor demographic information. You can collect and analyze various customer behaviour metrics, which can be used to improve marketing campaigns, drive website traffic, and better interact with potential customers.
#3 Mailchimp
This popular marketing automation platform and email marketing service helps build, drive and grow your business. It is easy to use and robust. It allows users to schedule and share newsletters, updates, and promotions through email and on various social networks while tracking customer engagements. The interactive drag-and-drop interface allows users to create and share personalized, targeted email campaigns, run Facebook ad campaigns, automate follow-ups and monitor campaign progress. Built-in analytics and reporting allow you to monitor how customers are interacting with your correspondence and then use that information to tailor future campaigns. It’ll provide insight into what does and doesn’t work, tell you who your most engaged audiences are and help you direct your marketing dollars efficiently.
#4 Mention
Sometimes the best way to learn is to listen, and Mention takes the work out of it by showing you every occurrence of your brand in one central place. Mention’s ‘social listening’ capabilities can help businesses improve their communications and marketing strategies by allowing users to monitor what’s being said online. The app allows brands and businesses to leverage digital and social media monitoring to increase brand awareness, identify and address user comments, and implement what they’ve learned into their business model. By tracking a brand, a competitor, an industry topic – you name it – the platform allows customers to compare and analyze online conversations, as well as create content based on important social and web insights.
#5 Sprout Social
Nearly 90 per cent of marketers agree that their social media strategy positively influences their bottom line. Sprout Social is a social media management and intelligence tool for brands and businesses to manage their social media position by maintaining a cohesive and active presence online. The platform allows users to plan, organize, and deliver content and campaigns across all platforms at once using cross-network scheduling. Once your content is out on the web, it provides insights to enhance the customer experience by telling you how your content is performing, and evidently, giving them more of what they like.