The Essential Digital Marketing Toolkit for Online Businesses

— May 16, 2018

One of the greatest things about digital marketing is that it is so accessible to businesses of all shapes and sizes. With the plethora of tools available, many of them free or at the very least, affordable, it’s easier than ever to build a powerful and impactful presence online and to market your business in a highly effective way. In this blog post, I’m going to talk about the essential digital marketing toolkit for online businesses.

What types of digital marketing tools do you need as an online business?

Depending on the type of marketing tactics and strategies you use, you’ll benefit from different types of tools. However, some types of tools are pretty much essential:

• Email marketing: email marketing continues to be one of the most effective marketing tactics and presents an easy and cheap way to reach your leads and customers, nurture your leads, and improve loyalty and upsells. Pick an email marketing tool that allows you to not only send newsletters, but also lets you sets up marketing automation so you can nurture more leads
• Social media marketing: social media is an amazing source of website and blog traffic, a great platform for improving brand awareness, and a way for businesses to connect with their audience directly. However, it can also be very time consuming: use social media marketing tools to help you plan your content, schedule your updates, and manage your accounts more efficiently
• Content research: don’t overlook the importance of content research. It can help you understand more about your audience and what their needs and interests are, as well as help you identify social influencers and learn what types of content work best with your target audience, so you can ultimately make the most out of your content marketing strategy
• Content creation tools: content marketing is a cost-effective, extremely productive marketing tactic that can be used by any type of business. Content helps drive traffic, it builds trust and increases user engagement, it helps generate more leads for your business, and it also helps you nurture your leads faster and more effectively so that they can ultimately turn into paying customers
• Task/project management and collaboration tools: one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as a business owner is that good organization is imperative. You need to be able to track all of your tasks and projects (along with the rest of your team) in one place because it will allow you to be more productive and focus on the tasks that matter. Not to mention, if you work with as part of a team, using the same dashboard to track everything will make a world of difference: no more constant back-and-forth emails and texts, trying to find the right documents, or being confused about what each person needs to do.

Here are some of the essential digital marketing tools for your online business:

For content research: Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a content research and influencer marketing tool which is particularly useful for researching your niche and the content being shared in your industry.

Use it to improve your content marketing strategy, to discover the top influencers in your niche posting the most shared content consistently, and to monitor different topics, brands, or direct competitors.

It will allow you to learn:

• What type of content works best for your target audience: what content formats they prefer, which topics interest them, and so on
• What your audience’s needs and interests are: based on the content they prefer to read and share, you can gain a better understanding of what types of needs and interests they might have so you can cover them in your own content strategy
• What your competitors’ content strategy is like, so you can stay one step ahead
• Who the top influencers and sharers in your niche are, so you can find social influencers to collaborate with.

For content creation: vidbuild

Video is one of the most popular forms of content online, with millions of people watching videos every day. Not only that, but video is also particularly great at improving marketing results, including traffic, email click-through rates, engagement and shares, lead generation, and conversions.

And what’s great is that it’s easier than ever to create videos and you don’t need to film anything yourself (or hire someone to do it for you).

vidbuild is a relatively new video builder, but one that’s already rivaling some of the biggest and best video creation tools on the market.

And it does so through their impressive library of videos and images (over 3.5 million video clips to choose from!) and through their very easy to use video builder – you really don’t need any design or editing experience to get started.

So, how does it work?

You first start by looking for videos – you can add all kinds of filters to help narrow down your search, but your best bet is to simply search for videos using relevant keywords. You can then hover over the video to see it – literally – in motion and add it to your builder.

From there, you can keep going and add more clips to your video and edit them, so you can tell your story.

For the next step, you can add music to your video using their library of audio clips, or you can add voiceover if you prefer (perfect for explainer videos and for promotional videos). Add your own content if you like, or just use theirs.

Once done, edit to your liking and easily share it with your social audience or publish it on a webpage.

For email marketing: MailChimp

When it comes to email marketing, MailChimp is one of the most popular options on the market because it’s easy to use and features most of the things you need from an email marketing tool: awesome templates, powerful marketing automation and email triggers, a landing page builder, and email marketing analytics.

Plus, it integrates with a plethora of other tools, including popular social networks, Salesforce, WordPress, and Google.

Use it to:

• Send regular newsletters to your leads to keep them interested and keep them coming back to your website
• Segment your audience so that you can send them highly-targeted emails, which are more likely to move them along the sales funnel
• Nurture your leads with the right content, at the right time, by setting up different triggers and using marketing automation

For social media marketing: ContentCal

In order to be more productive with social media marketing, especially if you work with a team, use a tool that allows you to plan all of your social updates in one place, as well as schedule them out.

One such tool is ContentCal, which was built with teams in mind – but it can be just as useful for a one-man/woman team too.

It works with top social networks – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram – and you can use it to:

• Build a social media team where every person has their roles assigned so they know exactly what they need to do
• Build a content approval scheme for your team so that every post is checked, edited, and approved before being scheduled/published (awesome!)
• Plan your social media updates by creating and storing your drafts to work on later
• And then, simply schedule your updates and sit back – or, rather, use the extra free time to engage with your audience!

Conclusion

Leveraging tools and software can help you not only be more productive and save time, but also help you improve your overall digital marketing results.

What digital marketing tools are most important for you? Which tools do you use on a daily basis?

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