The evolution of technology has brought forth a colossal number of tools at the disposal of marketers today. More precisely, technology stacks have become extensions of the modern marketer’s hand. It enables them to do what they do best, with the added accuracy of data-driven results.
As a marketer, possessing a technology stack that best suits your business’s needs can help you accomplish organizational goals and targets with a great deal of ease. Further, using appropriate tools allows you to narrow down marketing efforts and targets towards realistic data-backed opportunities. The last thing you want to be doing is leaving the outcomes of your efforts to chance.
In our previous segment, we defined what technology stacks are and why they are so important. Technology stacks tailored to your organization’s requirements can give you the cutting edge that differentiates your business from its competition. In this article, we’ll take you through 7 types of tools that are an absolute necessity for every marketer.
7 Types Of Marketing Tools That Will Redefine Your Definition Of Success (2020)
1. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Conversion Rate Optimization is a process that involves the optimization of your website and its content to best attract converting visitors and boost their propensity to take a desired action. Delegating your CRO needs to a specialist that can cost you big bucks. You’d be better off employing an inexpensive CRO tool that can get the job done for you with little effort and expertise on your part.
Different CRO tools may address different components of your site and its content. Each CRO tool may address a specific variable that affects your site’s conversion rate. For example, some tools address page speed issues while others might help you improve your content to help boost conversions. The following are a few types of CRO tools that can help cut out your work for you.
Google Analytics
A versatile tool with a ton of capabilities, the free version of Google Analytics gives you access to integral insights. These include content engagement, scroll tracking, average time spent, returning visitors. Learning how to use Google Analytics is an essential for any marketer. By helping you better understand your audience, your job as a marketer becomes so much easier. The tool gives you indicators on how to transform your site and its content to boost conversions.
You can use Google Analytics for advanced segmentation, diagnosing and troubleshooting site issues, tracking data, events and goals among other CRO operations. The premium version unlocks more features that help you improve the design and structure your website and its content. A worthy alternative: Heap
HotJar
HotJar is a comprehensive CRO tool that provides detailed insights into user behavior and psychology. It uses heat maps, session and survey data to show you exactly what, where and how you need to optimize. HotJar provides you with actionable qualitative data that can be extremely valuable to any marketer. A worthy alternative: Mixpanel.
Optimizely
An A/B testing CRO tool, Optimizely allows you to test different strategies, interfaces and experiences across different audiences based on their behavior in real-time. This allows you to gather crucial data about which strategy, interface or experience is the most effective for your audience. A worthy alternative: Google Optimize.
Google PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights is a nifty CRO tool that analyzes page speeds. The tool gives you detailed insights about specific page element optimizations. CSS issues, image optimizations and other elements that affect your page speeds and user experience can be diagnosed using the tool. This enables you to create a smoother user experience for visitors. A worthy alternative: Pingdom
2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Keeping your customers happy and ensuring it stays that way is an integral part of any marketer’s strategy. Thanks to technology, managing customer interactions and relationships has never been easier.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools enable your business to manage and record interactions and maintain relationships with its customers on-the-go. Keeping track of your customer interactions and maintaining a central list of information about customers and leads can be extremely handy when formulating market strategies. This also makes it easy when dealing with customers in the future.
Modern CRM tools have gone beyond merely managing customer relationships. With increasing functionalities, it has become an extremely comprehensive tool today. As a result, CRMs have become a must-have for every marketer out there.
CRM tools allow you to create vast databases containing crucial real-time customer information. This serves as a helping hand for marketers to develop potent inbound strategies.
HubSpot CRM
By popular choice, HubSpot CRM happens to be the go-to CRM tool for a lot of businesses today. This is due it’s easy yet versatile set of functionalities, making managing customer relationships a breeze. HubSpot CRM also allows you to automate those painstakingly boring tasks while giving you a clear view of your entire sales funnel, showing you exactly what needs tinkering.
With reports on productivity, companies, sales and individual performance you’ll no longer have the burden of messy excel sheets or manually updated reports. Worthy alternatives: Salesforce, Zoho CRM.
3. Marketing Automation
As technological capability expands, so does the complexity of our job as marketers. As a result, we’ve grown to increasingly rely on the growing capabilities of marketing tools to keep us on top of our game.
For marketers, doing repetitive manual tasks is a thing of the past thanks to tools that automate laborious marketing processes. Marketing automation tools help marketing teams always keep their foot on the pedal though the automation of unnecessary manual marketing tasks.
While some CRMs do offer automation capabilities, marketing automation tools allow you to specifically manage and automate various marketing processes.
Marketo
Marketo is a great marketing automation solution that allows you to build robust automation workflows. The tool allows you create automations based on conditional logic, 29 sets of actions and 20 different triggers. Email marketing, lead and contact scoring, cross-channel messaging, SMS automations, forms and campaign management are some of the features that Marketo has to offer.
4. Email Marketing
Using a coherent emailing system to deal with leads and customers is a cost-cutting, time-saving and effective measure that every business must have in place. From welcome mails to customer support messages, you can now easily automate and schedule all your emails. Email marketing tools are awesome because they require only a small amount of effort while offering a substantial yield.
MailChimp
Having been in the game since 2001, MailChimp really are the best at what they do. With MailChimp you can easily design, automate and schedule emails in accordance with your business’s needs. MailChimp also offers you crucial insights that can help you tailor your campaigns based on your customers’ needs. Worthy alternatives: GetResponse, Mailjet.
5. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search Engine Optimisation tools provide detailed insights about keyword information, backlink analysis, site and content issues. These insights can help you organically rank higher on search engines. Marketers use these insights to address website and content issues, leading to increased organic traffic on your site.
SEMrush SEO Toolkit
SEMrush SEO Toolkit offers a wide variety of functions that can help you take your content to the next level. Site audits, keyword research, backlink analytics, on page SEO audits, content audits, rank and social media tracking, topic research and traffic analytics are a few features that can help you up your game. Harnessing this data can help you offer visitors the experience they seek. Worthy alternatives: WooRank, MozBar, Aherfs.
6. Chatbots
Chatbots serve as a great resource for visitors on your site. It provides them with a platform to interact with your sales team. Chatbots allow you to create conversational marketing strategies that can boost visitors’ propensity to convert. Businesses that do not utilize chatbots are missing out on a powerful channel of communication with potential customers.
Drift
With impressive integrated AI functionalities, Drift is a great option for interacting with customers. It’s AI function analyzes these interactions and keeps a record of the same. Stored records enable you to better understand the customers position, identifying key leads in the process. You can also customize the flow of conversations with customers and use it to set up meetings or demos. Worthy alternatives: Chatfuel, Collect.chat.
7. Project Collaboration
“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” If Michael Jordan says it, it’s got to be true right? Then be like Michael- treat your job as the championship, your projects as games and your colleagues as teammates.
With project collaboration tools you can now manage projects together as a team, making sure your strategies, projects and content go through all the necessary filters and edits by other members of your team. With real-time liaison, scheduled timelines, collaborative work and design functionalities, you can ensure that what you put out is of only the highest quality.
Trello
With collaborative workspaces in Trello, teams can work together on blog posts and other projects. This ensures that a good amount of filtration takes place. Boards can be set up to include comments, attachments, due dates and can be assigned to team members. It also offers emails and third-party notifications to be sent to respective members.
Trello also allows you to organize content with tags, labels and categories. This enables you to easily find what you need, when you need it. It’s interface is easy on the eyes and the brain and can make your work look a lot more interesting than it actually is. With automations, checklists and app integrations, Trello will transform the way you work. Worthy alternatives: Confluence, Asana.
Conclusion
Just as important as employees are to a business, tools in the modern day are to an employee. By enabling individuals to achieve rates of productivity that would otherwise be considered unrealistic, technology has truly changed the way we work. As a marketer this couldn’t be more true, as choosing the right tools to work with can be the difference between your business’s success and failure.
Whether it’s a simple SEO checking tool or a complex CRO tool, your team’s technology stack should bring about a synergistic relationship between man and technology. The diligent use of technology will not only multiply the productivity of your team but also open up new avenues that you wouldn’t have thought existed. If you haven’t already jumped on the boat of multifaceted business tools and powerful marketing technology, expect to do so sooner rather than later.
Make An Informed Decision!
To get to know the who’s who of marketing tools and obtain more in detail tool comparisons, be sure to check out our free technographics tool.
