Archive for the ‘Social Marketing’ Category

20 Must-Have Digital Marketing Tools to … – Sprout Social

Companies today depend on digital marketing tools to survive.

Sounds dramatic, right?

But consider that a strong tech stack encourages growth and ensures that you arent spending your valuable time on tedious tasks.

And on the flip side, failing to take advantage of modern marketing tools means that your business might lag behind your competition.

The good news? Theres no shortage of software out there to do the heavy lifting for your marketing must-dos.

Weve put together a comprehensive list of digital marketing tools that can help you regardless of your goals, including a few free and freemium tools for those on a tight budget.

Whether its managing customer relationships, winning over leads or uncovering new marketing opportunities, this list can serve as the foundation of a powerful marketing stack.

Check out the categories below to get started:

Weve seen firsthand how social media has evolved into a priority marketing channel for businesses today.

A prime place to nurture leads and build business relationships, social is ideal for gathering valuable data when it comes to what your customers want.

Managing all of the moving pieces of social media by hand is a recipe for burnout. Instead, consider how dedicated software allows you to publish more meaningful content and use social media to meet your big-picture business goals.

Hey, you cant blame us for putting ourselves on the top of the list!

Thats because Sprout Social is the ultimate control center for any business looking to translate its social presence into actual results.

As a social media management platform, Sprout helps businesses organize their content calendar and assets in one place. This allows you to publish and schedule your content across multiple platforms, all timed to perfection based on when your followers are most active.

Beyond social media management features, Sprout makes it easy to collaborate with colleagues and customers alike. Our Smart Inbox gives you a birds-eye view of all of your social messages so you can respond thoughtfully and in a timely manner.

Oh, and dont forget about Sprouts full suite of social analytics.

Optimizing your contents performance doesnt have to be a guessing game as Sprout identifies your top-performing posts and the success of your social campaigns. Coupled with robust social listening features, you can uncover trends, hashtags and opportunities to engage with new customers.

Loomlys self-described brand success platform is a tool thats ideal for smaller social teams looking to organize and collaborate on content.

Built-in calendars, deadlines and workflows make both scheduling and brainstorming content a breeze. As an added bonus, Loomly actually curates fresh content ideas for users based on trending topics and Twitter conversations.

The clean, no-frills interface is easy to navigate and friendly to users who might not be the most tech-savvy. The affordability of the platform is enticing for solo businesses and smaller agencies looking to wrangle their social presence.

Weve talked time and time again about the importance of social listening for identifying trends and potential customers.

Tools like Audiense take listening to the next level by helping companies both identify and segment their social media audiences. Doing so makes it easier to run laser-targeted ad campaigns and likewise dive deeper into your customer personas. Digging into demographics, personality straights and beyond, youd be surprised at what you can learn from social alone.

Audienses platform focuses primarily on Twitter, making it great for B2B brands interested in prospecting and B2C companies looking to understand more about their target audience.

Email represents arguably the most tried-and-tested, scalable marketing channel available to modern companies. As such, email solutions are a staple of Internet marketing software for businesses big and small.

From list-building and improving deliverability to coming up with awesome offer campaigns, lets look at some tools that can break down your customer data and put a good chunk of your marketing efforts on autopilot.

SendGrid offers a full suite of email marketing services, many of which are totally friendly to novices and email veterans alike.

For example, the platform offers flexible design options via visual, drag-and-drop editing, coding or a combination of both. In-depth deliverability and performance analytics are also built into SendGrid, cluing marketers in on which messages are performing and what needs work.

We know: there are more email marketing solutions out there than we can count. That said, a big upside of SendGrid is the forever-free plan for up-and-coming businesses as well as scalable pricing that matches your needs as you grow your list.

lemlist is unique among our email marketing tools because the platform is primarily focused on deliverability. Emphasizing the best times to send your messages (and how often) for the sake of more opens and clicks, lemlist is awesome for optimizing your existing campaigns.

Rather than second-guessing your marketing pushes, lemlist can be an eye-opener in terms of how to warm up your list.

Additional features include personalization tools to make your outreach emails sound less spammy and follow-up email sequences to encourage more replies from cold prospects.

Moosend is among the most user-friendly and affordable of our digital marketing tools, representing a surprisingly robust email solution for those just beginning to build their list.

Codeless campaigns, simple automations and easy-to-read reporting are all built into the platform. Paid users can also take advantage of landing page features, including mobile popups and countdown timers.

Fact: over half of all website traffic comes from search queries.

As the digital landscape becomes increasingly competitive, anything companies can do to increase their search presence is a plus. Although SEO might be daunting, especially to up-and-coming businesses, there are plenty of online marketing tools to help you uncover search opportunities and optimize your existing search engine efforts.

Ahrefs is the gold standard when it comes to brainstorming keyword ideas and opportunities to rank.

The platforms site explorer lets you check any URLs top organic keywords, while also estimating how much traffic a competitor receives for any given search term. You can also identify a sites top-performing content and sources of backlinks.

In short, Ahrefs is a fantastic tool not only for competitive analysis but also for making sure that your existing content is up to snuff for search.

Now, lets say youre interested in capitalizing on keyword opportunities and optimizing your existing content. Thats where Clearscope comes in.

Particularly useful for content writing, the platform provides a detailed editor to recommend keywords, headers and readability to help you write (or rewrite) high-ranking, well-balanced blog posts.

Whether youre creating a content strategy from scratch or refreshing your existing blogs, Clearscope covers every nook and cranny of search optimization.

Another staple SEO tool, SEMrush allows you to track the position of your priority keywords and likewise explore new terms to rank for.

The tools breakdown of keyword ideas, difficulty and variations are great for brainstorming content ideas and identifying search intent, too.

The smallest changes can make the biggest difference when it comes to getting people to convert on-site.

Just changing the color of your call-to-action button can spell the difference between scoring a free trial sign-up and someone bouncing. Among the digital marketing tools in your toolbox, conversion optimization software can clue you in on low-hanging opportunities to increase your revenue.

Unbounce is an amazing tool for quickly building, tweaking and publishing new landing pages to test. Built-in A/B testing and variant analytics can answer directly which creatives, calls-to-action and additional page elements are working (and which arent).

Even if youre not much of a designer, you can use Unbounces proven landing page templates as a jumping-off point and then modify them to fit your style. The platforms analytics spell out clearly which landing page variants are your top performers.

Emphasizing landing page experiments, Optimizely combines tools for visual creation and audience targeting to quickly run tests on different segments of your audience.

A no-code platform that allows you to test both major and minor edits to your pages, fine-tuning your site for performance doesnt have to be a huge undertaking.

Hotjars platform provides a real-time visual record of your visitors actions and behaviors on-site.

Through heatmaps that clue you in on where people are (or arent) clicking. Synced to actual video recordings of your visitors journey, you can quite literally see what needs to be tweaked at a glance.

Its well-documented that the majority of website visitors fail to provide enough data after leaving your site.

Thankfully, there are business intelligence tools out there to help you better understand your leads and highlight key information to reach out to them once theyve shown interest. Particularly powerful for B2B marketing, lead enrichment tools supercharge your prospecting and outbound marketing pushes by giving you a more holistic view of your traffic.

Using 100+ sources, including Salesforce and additional marketing platform data, Clearbit creates an up-to-date profile of your leads to make your outreach efforts go more smoothly. The details gathered include company, role and company size, just to name a few.

Rather than dig for details or rely on outdated information, the platform regularly updates itself every 30 days to ensure that your data stays fresh. This allows you to prospect with confidence and save serious time in the process.

Similar to Clearbit, Datanyze also uncovers crucial contact information about your on-site leads to fill out your digital rolodex. The platform also works brilliantly for prospecting on LinkedIn by pulling social data on decision-makers, too.

As our attention spans shrink, making a conscious effort to reel in visitors once they land on-site is crucial. Marketing platforms focused on lead capture ensure that your traffic doesnt go to waste and visitors are more likely to take action. When done right, the end result is more leads and conversions.

OptiMonks platform allows businesses to grab the attention of customers and prevent them from bouncing through personalized pop-ups.

With an emphasis on lead capture and exit intent messages, the platforms behavior-based targeting means that your pop-ups dont have to be disruptive.

For example, OptiMonk encourages users to segment their marketing messages and serve them only when they make sense. From returning buyers to first-time window shoppers, the platform empowers you to create campaigns that speak to all of your customers rather than treat them as one-size-fits-all.

The upside of OptiMonk is that its known for its ease of use. Boasting a ton of templates with established average click-through rates, brands can customize their messages based on pop-ups that are proven to be effective.

Typeform is a sleek tool for marketers looking to create attractive, minimalist forms.

Unlike more traditional pop-ups, Typeforms intake forms are seriously stylish and dont feel like ads at all. The platforms simple editor and easy embeds are a nice added bonus, as is the ability to create quizzes and interactive forms.

A hybrid email marketing and landing page tool focused on list-building, MailMunch offers several engaging form types and emails to send to leads once theyve opted-in.

The platform lets you segment your audience based on factors such as how often they buy and customer demographics. Additionally, their goal-based form-builder is straightforward and lets you work from a variety of templates.

Infographics. Memes. Graphs and graphics. The list goes on and on.

Visuals are the cornerstone of social marketing and branding at-large. If you dont have the budget for a designer or are running a DIY business, digital marketing tools such as Canva have become the go-to for producing eye-catching visuals.

That said, there are a few other graphic creation tools you should consider so your creatives dont grow stale.

Creatopy is a graphic creation tool akin to Canva, but emphasizes quite a few features specific to marketers.

For example, the platforms design sets and brand kits allow you to seamlessly work with fellow marketers and keep your brand creatives organized. This is particularly useful for agencies managing multiple clients or social accounts.

Meanwhile, the ability to edit the same design within multiple formats (think: desktop banner versus mobile) in a single click is a huge time-saver.

Vismes platform is focused primarily on creating presentations and data visualization.

Because infographics and fresh data are among the most-shared types of content on social media, Visme is ideal for anyone frequently publishing research to platforms like Twitter or LinkedIn.

Beyond straight-up graphic creation, the platform lets you pull data from external sources (think: spreadsheets) to make presentation creation a snap.

Venngage is another graphic creator with an emphasis on infographics. With spreadsheet imports and hundreds of chart configurations, you can customize your infographics however you want. Customize any infographics based on your branding with tons of built-in graphics to choose from.

With the right tools at your disposal, you can streamline your marketing campaigns and automate a ton of tasks in the process.

Any combination of the tools above can serve as the foundation for a solid digital marketing stack. Dont be shy about test-driving and going through trials to find what works for your business and budget.

Once youve sorted out your digital marketing tools, you can move forward with your campaigns with a sense of confidence and likewise keep a better pulse on your marketing efforts.

And if you havent already, make sure you check out our variety of social media templates to help organize and measure your social marketing campaigns so they align with your business goals.

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20 Must-Have Digital Marketing Tools to ... - Sprout Social

Video: How Focus Brands’ former COO went from brand lead to social influencer – AdAge.com

Cole started her career as a server at Hooters before climbing the corporate ranks and joining Focus Brands, owner of Cinnabon, Auntie Anne's and other chains. At the end of 2020, she left Focus Brands, where she was chief operating officer,and is now focusing her efforts on sitting on corporate and nonprofit boards, like HumanCo SPAC,and helping to advise young entrepreneurs. Cole has found a following on social platforms like Clubhouse and LinkedIn, where she regularly hosts chats and classes on everything from leadership to tech innovation.

Read more about brands and NFTs:Everything brands need to know about NFT marketing How brands are used by marketersan updated list

These days Cole says what excites her is some of theemerging opportunities for brands to connect with consumers. Cole will discuss the future of NFTs, how brands can play in the metaverse and the evolution of influencer marketing.

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Video: How Focus Brands' former COO went from brand lead to social influencer - AdAge.com

7 Ways To Be More Efficient When Starting a Business – Small Business Trends

Operational efficiency doesnt guarantee success in business. Nothing does. As an entrepreneur, you already know this whether by direct experience or indirect observation.

Efficiency can tilt the odds in your favor though. Take two otherwise identical businesses with only one difference operational efficiency and you can predict far better than chance which will be in better shape five years out.

Efficiency is especially important in the earliest stages of your businesss life. When you have little or no revenue and you feel like youre doing everything yourself (or actually are doing everything yourself), you literally dont have a minute or dollar to spare.

These seven tactics work well for entrepreneurs like you. Each offers a clear efficiency-enhancing proposition, whether its enabling faster scaling through effective bulk purchasing or automating key tasks that dont by themselves generate any revenue. Implement them, stick with them, and chances are good youll find yourself in a better position than youd hoped.

Forging relationships with makers is time-consuming work. As soon as youre able, transition to a reliable wholesale platform that makes it easier to find and source from the brands you love.

Choose a provider that understands the needs of emerging retailers. Lets say you sell womens clothing online or in-store. Choosing a womens wholesale apparel platform with free returns ensures you can try out inventory before committing. Also, look for platforms with payment terms that work with your businesss cash flow.

If your team can do its job remotely just as well as it can (or better) in a central location, why bother with a permanent office space? Youll avoid the overhead costs associated with leasing and maintaining your own office, not to mention the competitive disadvantage of a long-term lease.

If you do need some physical space for your back-office teams, look to coworking or professional flex space to serve those needs without locking in a long-term lease. Otherwise, keep your storefront and warehouse posture lean, adding space only as necessary to sustain your growth.

The idea of using contractors for everything is appealing, but it comes at the potential cost of quality, on-deadline work. A good rule of thumb is to outsource work to contractors when its clear that theyre going to do a better job at it than you and when you cant get it done faster. For smaller startups, this often means important but non-core functions like HR, accounting, website design, and copywriting.

You do need to hire employees; you cant run your business as a sole proprietor forever. But do so deliberately and only as mission-critical needs arise that you cant address on your own or with reliable contract labor.

Your employee and contractor onboarding process should be as friction-free as possible. That ensures the relationship gets off to a good start and doesnt bog your team down with logistics that dont directly produce revenue.

On the contractor side, using a digital platform that matches businesses with contract labor is the obvious solution. The platform handles most of the heavy lifting so you can focus on the work.

On the employee side, HR automation is the key. Use a human resources program that handles all the dull legalities digitally and securely, keeping email back-and-forth to a minimum and eliminating physical paper from the equation.

Your digital marketing operation needs to be low-friction as well. Youre probably aware that you can automate email marketing pretty efficiently, but youll also want to make sure you and your team need to pay as little attention as possible to your paid search and social marketing too.

Automated marketing channels can quickly sap your budget if youre not careful. Be sure to set a maximum monthly spending range (with a hard cap that you try to avoid hiding) to keep costs in check.

One way to make your marketing more efficient while controlling costs (the definition of cost-effectiveness) is to work on developing social proof through real-world word-of-mouth networks and online social media communities. You shouldnt have to spend a fortune to get would-be customers to trust your brand. That should come naturally as you deliver actionable, informative content to them and cultivate a brand image that sells itself.

Is bootstrapping (self-funding) really the most efficient way to launch and scale a business?

Self-funding does have obvious trade-offs and could limit your ability to scale as quickly as youd like. But it has some undersold advantages as well. Perhaps most importantly, self-funding is the only way to ensure you dont have to answer to anyone you cant trust, be it a bank or venture capital firm. Eventually, youll need to accept outside investment, but why not bootstrap as long as you can until then?

Its been said before but always bears repeating. As an early-stage entrepreneur, you cant afford to waste any effort.

These seven strategies to start and scale a business more efficiently will reduce the amount of effort you waste as a new business owner. Theyll help you avoid costly duplication of effort and instead allow you to duplicate your companys most precious resource: you.

You have to follow through for these strategies to pay off though. You really do need to keep your physical footprint lean for longer than youd like. You have to be comfortable automating business processes that arent part of your core value proposition. You need to leverage low-cost marketing tactics like word-of-mouth and organic social media even if they dont come naturally.

Do these things and youll find yourself several steps ahead of your competitors. And dont wait; those competitors certainly arent.

Image: Depositphotos

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7 Ways To Be More Efficient When Starting a Business - Small Business Trends

Keeping Up With The Trends: 5 social media marketing blogs you need to know – WV News

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New Report Suggests TikTok Will Surpass 1.5 Billion Users in 2022 – Social Media Today

Despite ongoing challenges from rival platforms, along with regulatory concerns, and even restrictions in some regions, TikTok continues to go from strength to strength. And according to the latest data from App Annie, the apps growth momentum wont be slowing down any time soon.

As per App Annies 2022 Mobile Forecast report, TikTok is set to surpass 1.5 billion users in the next twelve months, as its cultural influence continues to spread around the world.

That would put it well ahead of Instagram, which remains on a billion actives, a number it first reported back in 2018 and hasnt updated since. Which, in itself, is a little strange. Has Instagrams growth simply stopped and if so, what does that mean for the apps broader popularity?

App Annies predictions have been solid in the past too. Last November, App Annie predicted that TikTok would surpass a billion active users in 2021, which it did back in September.

As App Annie notes (above), TikToks growth rate is unprecedented, with the app becoming a cultural force faster than any other platform in history. Some of that, of course, comes on the back of established trends Facebook and Instagram had a harder time reaching their first billion users because they needed to establish new habitual behaviors, which TikTok has benefited from in its rise.

But even so, the apps rapid ascension is significant and this is without India, which, at one stage, was TikToks biggest user market, at 200 million monthly actives. Its fairly safe to assume that had TikTok not been banned in India back in June 2020, that its Indian user base would now be closer to 500 million, which would mean that TikTok would already be at that 1.5 billion user market at this stage.

Its amazing to consider how TikTok has been able to achieve such strong performance in an increasingly crowded social media market. Snapchat once appeared to be set for similar massive growth, till Instagram copied Stories and slowed it right down, which is the same playbook that Instagrams parent company Meta has followed with TikTok, by adding Reels on both Facebook and Instagram in an effort to steal audience share back from a rising potential rival.

But even more than just that, YouTube has also added Shorts, Snapchat added Spotlight, and other apps have tested similar TikTok-like tools. And yet, even with all of these competing tools being pitted against it, TikTok has remained resilient.

Far from slowing it down, if anything, TikTok has only gained more audience as a result of these counter-growth efforts.

How has TikTok been able to keep winning, where others have wilted in the face of the established giants?

The key lies in its algorithm matching, which is still far better than any other platform at providing a never-ending stream of content thats highly attuned to your specific interests.

As anyone whos used TikTok a few times will know, the customized For You feed of videos that youll likely be interested in is very addictive, and very good at quickly aligning with your personal interests.

The advantage that TikTok has over other platforms is its full-screen feed, which means that every action you take when each video is on screen is indicative of your response to that specific clip. Swipe past quickly and that videos content is clearly not of interest, watch the whole thing through and thats a strong signal, while tapping on any element also provides clear response data for its matching.

Instagram doesnt have the same, as there are often several posts on screen, and while Reels can be more specifically attuned in this way, its algorithm is not as good as detecting your interests, with Reels often being overly sensitive to trending content, then showing you more of it without taking into account broader context.

TikToks system is far better at determining more intricate matches in response to your actions, which is why its so addictive to so many, and thats helped it continue to add users, even as other apps have tried to replicate its key features.

Because, really, they cant, or at least they havent been able to as yet. And while it seems like both Meta and YouTube should, at some stage, be able to figure it out, the fact that neither has made significant ground as yet may well point to TikTok simply having better capacity, and better audience understanding, than its rivals, which again points to ongoing success for the app, which is now arguably the cooler place to be for creators either way.

Monetization is the next step, and providing comparative capacity for top stars to make as much money on TikTok as they can in other apps. But that, too, is moving along, with the platforms eCommerce and brand/creator partnership tools evolving quickly, facilitating more opportunities on this front.

If you havent considered TikTok as a potential platform for your marketing efforts, in 2022, it may be time to give it some more thought. Not all brands will thrive on TikTok, and it does require a more dedicated, organic-type approach, so you do need to know the platform-specific trends, or work with creators that are in-tune with such. But the opportunities, for the right brand, with the right approach, can be significant.

And theyre growing more every day, with its growth momentum building. At this rate, TikTok could well have over 2 billion active users by 2023, and even more cultural relevance around the world.

It may not be a platform that comes naturally for your promotions, and it may not be one that you yourself are interested in. But in 2022, its likely worth familiarizing yourself with the latest TikTok trends, and getting a better understanding of the app.

You can download App Annies full 2022 App Predictions report here.

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New Report Suggests TikTok Will Surpass 1.5 Billion Users in 2022 - Social Media Today