The speed at which technology is advancing is astounding. The way consumers engage with companies and their marketing is changing just as fast. The ability for a consumer to block your efforts to reach them is increasing on most traditional platforms, like television and radio. Now most businesses are turning to digital solutions to make up for the loss and are finding great results at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing efforts. I've laid out seven tools you should consider incorporating into your business development and marketing to help you grow in 2017.
Traditional marketing platforms have very high costs and limited targeting ability. With social ad platforms, you can now target audiences with dozens, if not hundreds, of criteria, behavior, and interest categories. With direct mail, television, radio, and other traditional marketing platforms you are reaching a very general audience. The approach is like a shotgun and sprays an area but most of the time your target is not hit. With social targeted ads, you are taking a sniper approach. If you want to reach mothers of toddlers that live in your zip code, you can. Here is more information about social targeting.
Wouldn't you like to be able to market to the anonymous visitors that have been on your website after they left? Google, Facebook, and many other platforms allow you to get your ads in front of those anonymous visitors. The ads can be set up so you are not annoying your former web visitors. You can adjust the timeline and frequency of when the ads appear, so you can set up ads to be seen only once, or as many times as possible over two months, for example.
Retargeting connects you with anonymous website visitors. Prospecting tools are great for B2B's because they allow you to see what companies have been on your website, what they are looking at, how often they have visited, and for how long. Businesses with a direct sales team love prospecting tools because this helps them find potentially warmer leads because it is clear that someone at ABC Company has been on their website. Prospecting tools can also be used to see if your competitors are looking at your website and may give you insight into their activity.
Another tool I recommend is smart content. It is the Amazon approach. When you look at a few products on Amazon the next time you return to the site you will see content related to your last visit. If you have many products and services, you can implement the same strategy Amazon does and offer up a quick path to the products your previous web visitors are interested in.
If your website is creating leads through downloads and offers, you should be nurturing those leads with email workflows. An email workflow is a series of emails you create to help nurture leads to a decision or sale. Workflows are automated and can be set up to be delivered when there is a trigger, like a download or they can be date driven. The bottom line is they are automated and help you stay connected to your leads and save you a ton of time.
IP and Mobile targeting is different than targeted social marketing. These campaigns are driven by separate analytics databases of demographics tied to the IP address or mobile ID of millions of consumers. This can be a high dollar ad spend but can yield great results for businesses with a high customer lifetime value or high product price like jewelry, cruises, and higher education tuition.
I love the campaign tool HubSpot created to track campaigns. It allows you to group all of your digital assets into a single analytics dashboard. This is campaign central and has become one of the most powerful tools I use to tie all of my activities together. Being able to see how every asset is working for you is incredibly helpful to measure what is working and where the most leads or best leads for a particular campaign are being generated. You can tie specific activities or content to resulting customers, not just leads. I cannot live without this tool.
There may be a single tool that you find brings the best results but you will not find out until you try. My recommendation would be to start with a marketing automation tool. Be conservative in your spend in discovering what works then begin increasing your budget where you have proof. There are no shortcuts but these tools will likely help you grow. Create some realistic goals and jump in- start with one of these tools. Get a free one-hour consultation here.
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