To help your business reach it’s true potential, a clear marketing strategy is crucial. As Beth Comstock once said, ‘Marketing’s job is never done. It’s about perpetual motion. We must continue to innovate every day.’
On one hand, that sounds incredibly exhausting. Reasearch by Fractl and Buzzstream found that 21% of social media users surveyed unfollowed brands for posting repetitive or boring content. Don't get me started on how fast they expected a response on social media! That can feel like living on the hamster wheel of hustle - which I certainly don't advocate! But done right, marketing can evolve naturally because you've got automation and feedback loops built in. If you're looking for tools to improve your marketing strategies, these digital tools might be a good solution for you delegate without growing your team:
1 . Landing pages
Instead of dragging your heels on launching your opt-in or selling your offer, a landing page acts like a one-page website to help you grow your audience and sell your offers more easily. Landing pages have become afast and easy way to increase conversions and generate traffic without a full-blown website. Hubspot and SamCart have simple interfaces and drag-and-drop functionality to help you quickly create landing pages that help you grow your list or sell your stuff without having to know a lick of code.
2. Email automation
Primarily an email service provider, ConvertKit also has built-in ways for you to sell your offers directly in email, collecting payments, and even landing pages that all work together seamlessly. You can also tag and segment your subscribers based on actions they take in your email, products they buy, or other behaviors that you define. MailChimp is also a tool I've used and recommend. Customizing email makes it feel more personal to the reader, which generally increases engagement that leads to more sales.
3. Ad automation
If you're running lots of ads regularly, Google Ads automation scripts for your marketing can help you automate any type of Google Ads workflow. There's also automation tools for facebook ads, for those of you playing in that arena. These are really meant for people running lots of ads, to streamline the editing process, but when the time is right, this can be a big time saver for you.
4. Online 'listening station'
It's not just enough to watch for retweets or comments when you've been tagged. As your business starts to serve more people, it's important to know what's going on when people are talking about you, and you're NOT expressly tagged online. With your best clients, it's even more important to be proactively listening to what's going on with them in order to be responsive to their needs. Developing your listening station goes a long way towards doing that.
Tools like AgoraPulse can help you consolidate messages from different accounts, and include analytics to increase your engagement, share your brand story, and increase your sales. You can also build your own dashboard on a spreadsheet with tools like Google Alerts and zapier.
5. Graphic templates
Whether it's your social media, your marketing materials, or other promo graphics, a few on-brand templates can go a long way toward making your visual content easier to create. While sites like Canva offer a slew of templates and customizable options, it was worth the investment for me to hire a designer to create custom templates for my social media and my webinars/presentations. Having something that is on-brand, looks unique, but is also easy to modify means we can crank out our visual content faster and more easily. It literally saved me thousands of dollars in time and effort!
These are just a few of the tools that can enhance your online marketing without costing you more time and energy. Some are free, and some require some investment, but the overall savings of time and energy often make it worth it.