Businesses have a plethora of marketing tools to choose from. However, as technology advances, requirements change. Similarly, businesses have shifted from basic marketing to advanced marketing which relies on interaction with customers.
Marketing tools have become a necessity these days for businesses that need to expand themselves. If you want growth, you need to experiment and step outside the box. 10% of businesses are facing a digital transformation to adapt themselves according to the change in the marketing industry.
Source: HubSpot Blog
While many businesses and companies are shifting to digital and content marketing, there is a growing need for pushing them to perform better. Tools provide the perfect opportunity for such businesses and help them perform better.
Marketing is a tricky concept and any business needs to consider many aspects before entering into it. Many new businesses do not end up surviving simply because they cannot cope with the tough marketing competition.
What are Marketing Tools?
This is not a new concept for businesses. These are tools and techniques used by a business to develop their promotional services.
The basic marketing strategies include email marketing, text message marketing, social media marketing, and now search engine optimization. While using these marketing techniques, there are certain tools that can be used to drive sales for a business.
A business does not need all the tools at the same time but needs to play it smart and choose which one suits it best. You will obviously need to carry out research and focus on your audience to see which marketing strategy will provide the best results.
Source: Market Business News
As you can see, there is a range of tools for marketing that support businesses to increase sales and retain customers. However, certain marketing strategies mentioned above require separate tools to make them work efficiently.
A business can hire the services of such tools to help it promote itself effectively. Some of them might cost more but there are cheaper options available for those businesses that cannot afford costly tools.
How Can Tools for Marketing Help Businesses?
You must be wondering how these tools are linked to business performance and sales. This link is, in fact, the one that matters most.
Tools for Marketing are the reason that businesses can create a position in the industry and make a name for themselves. While many might think that marketing tools are useless, they are mistaken.
32% of businesses claim that ratings for their marketing content creation are poor or fair. Now obviously, you wouldn’t want your marketing strategies to face such ratings. This is exactly where these tools can step in to help you and make your business a success rather than a failure.
Source: All Business
Businesses have a preference for choosing their tools for marketing and the image above shows tools that are most popular amongst businesses. Email marketing is the most used tool with 54% of businesses using it to promote their products and services.
To remind customers about the products of a business, marketing business tools play an important role. With competition in the business industry, you need to stand out from your competitors.
Using tools for marketing and coming up with creative content will really set your business apart from others. Launching marketing campaigns and initiating sales through these tools will raise brand awareness and attract clients towards the business.
Email Marketing
On average, 205 billion emails are sent each day making email a popular option amongst businesses. Even though many people think that emails have become an outdated form of communication, statistics show otherwise.
Businesses can easily send a bunch of emails to customers and promote themselves. Most importantly, small businesses are concerned with the price tag. With emails, they do not need to worry about the costs since it is one of the cheapest tools available.
When opting for this marketing technique, a business also needs the support of an email marketing tool. Constant Contact is one such service that can really help a business to use email to its best level. This tool has gained much popularity, especially in small and new businesses that have a limited budget for marketing.
This method of marketing allows a business to manage email accounts, create templates, manage contacts, automation of emails and much more. It depends on the company to choose the necessary tools to improve its marketing performance. Hence, the budget does not remain a worry for them.
If you are unsure about using email marketing for your business, you can opt for a 60-day free trial after which you can then start from their monthly package which begins from a low rate of $20 per month.
Constant Contact is the fastest growing email marketing service for emails and has been rated as the top one by most businesses. However, there are many other email marketing services like Drip, SendinBlue, and ConvertKit which provide some of the best services to businesses.
Source: OptinMonster
The image above shows the benefit of using email marketing. A 13% increase in revenues is a strong sign for businesses to start using email and automation.
Text Message Marketing
With an exponential growth rate for text messages, it is calculated that by the year 2020 48.7 million people will prefer to receive business text messages. This gives businesses a large platform to market themselves with the help of such a marketing technique.
Being one of the cheapest marketing methods, it is highly preferred by companies regardless of their size. Moreover, its effectiveness also makes it a reliable option for businesses to choose from.
Source: Aviaro
The statistics show that even consumers prefer this method of marketing because of the convenience that it comes with. Regardless of where you are, you can send and receive text messages without relying on the internet.
To make sure that this marketing method becomes successful for the business, you can use an SMS marketing service or software that can boost the performance of the marketing technique.
Express Text is one tool for marketing that focuses on text message marketing for businesses to help them grow. SMS marketing is a preferred option since it costs less and works effectively when compared to other marketing methods.
The features are the real deal maker or breaker for businesses when looking at an SMS marketing service, software or tool. Express Text offers unlimited groups, scheduled messages, birthday reminders, text to join, short links, drip campaigns, 2-way text messaging, one per person and detailed analytics along with many other features.
If you do not wish to pay a monthly fee, you can choose the pay and go option where you simply pay for the text messages you send. The starter package starts from a small amount of $49 per month and offers a range of features to businesses.
Using such tools can really add a new dimension to your business, making sure that you can see it grow.
Social Media Marketing
People end up spending 30% of their time online using social media making it an alluring platform for businesses to market their products and services. Social media marketing is a technique that uses pages like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to advertise businesses.
According to a study conducted in the United States, 70% of the U.S population is always online on social media. Such statistics make social media marketing perfect for businesses to interact with customers.
The best part about social media is that companies can use it to post unique and different content which can be seen by people scrolling online. Social media does not restrict businesses to post similar content but they can post blogs, videos and even pop up advertisements to get the right kind of attention from their audience.
However, for a business it can be difficult to focus on the marketing side while handling other prospects hence using a social media tool for marketing sounds suitable. Hootsuite is one such option that can manage marketing for a business.
It can be very tough to manage various social media pages so Hootsuite provides the solution of managing it all for you. This tool allows businesses to schedule their online posts while organizing all content, updating it on the cloud and keeping all information secure.
Hootsuite comes with a free trial of 30 days which lets you decide whether you want to use it as a tool or not.
Source: Oberlo
The image shows that social media marketing is an effective strategy where 73% of marketers claim that it has been effective for their businesses. Businesses can make it better with the support of tools such as Hootsuite depending on their budget.
Search Engine Optimization Marketing
SEO marketing is relatively new in the industry but has received much attention from both consumers and businesses. In 2019 alone, businesses spent $41,305 on paid search marketing.
Businesses have now adapted to a digital world where the internet has a huge role to play including that of SEO marketing. All that a business needs to do is choose keywords that define the services and pay the search engine to make sure that it shows up in the top search options.
Source: Nine Stats
Since SEO is a newer concept in the marketing industry, not many businesses know how to manage their marketing content through it. Using an SEO marketing tool can be a fair option for those businesses that seek to gain more attention through the platform.
Smart Insights is one tool that provides solutions to businesses that are new to this technique. This service provides experienced insights from experts in SEO so your business does not face difficulty.
Moreover, it teaches businesses about search engine optimization giving a step by step review of how SEO is done. A checklist is provided so a business can check itself accordingly to improve performance. Other features include a free membership, success factors of SEO marketing and a benchmark chart to reach your goals.
The highlight of this tool is that it provides services for both a business and an individual depending on the business. It also offers free membership as a part of its toolkit and has various other options to choose from.
If your business is on a tight budget you can choose from the toolkits accordingly and only receive the services you require while learning from the marketing tool.
Conclusion
Marketing tools and techniques play an integral part in pushing business towards its success and regardless of which method you choose, you need to use it smartly.
Not all businesses have the budget to opt for expensive marketing methods which is why there are platforms that are not only cheap but much more effective than the expensive ones. Text message marketing is one such method that has a higher response rate when compared to other marketing techniques.
When a business opts for a marketing method, it should also use the support of a tool to make sure that the strategy used pays off. After all, if you are spending money on something, you expect to gain something out of it.
Similarly, businesses that invest in marketing strategies should also use tools for marketing that can ease the pressure of the business and make sure that it goes in the right direction.