If you’re looking to build your brand and ramp up customer engagement, you need a marketing strategy.
But how do you know which tools are right for you? Should you use email automation? Or SMS? Will social media ads grow your audience? Or will influencer marketing take your brand to new heights?
To help you answer these questions and more, we’ve put together a go-to guide for choosing the best marketing tools for merchants.
Best Marketing Tools For Merchants
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is completely free software that provides valuable insights into who is visiting your website and how they engage with it.
It’s best paired with Google Search Console – another free digital marketing tool that helps you to identify any problems on your site and optimize it for traffic.
Some of the data points that Google Analytics makes available to you include:
- The number of visitors to your site by day, week, month, or any time period you choose
- Where these visitors are coming from – referrals from other website, organic search, ads, social, or direct
- The keywords people are using in Google to find your site
- The demographics and interests of your users
- How long each user spends on your site and which pages they visit
All this information is interesting, but it’s also vital knowledge that can help you to optimize your website and marketing campaigns (while keeping your SEO efforts low cost).
For example, you might notice through Search Console or Analytics that you’re getting a lot of traffic from a keyword that you lack content covering. Write a blog post optimized for that keyword and watch your traffic and engagement levels rocket.
Getting loads of visitors from Facebook but none from Twitter? Maybe this is a sign you should concentrate your marketing efforts on your main channel.
It’s all about the insights – not just the analytics.
2. Mailchimp
Mailchimp
No matter how large or small your business is, email marketing should definitely be a part of your overall strategy.
When a customer signs up to your mailing list, they’re inviting you straight into their inbox. That’s why email marketing on average offers a higher ROI than any other marketing activity.
To get started with email marketing, you need a service that will enable you to capture emails, manage your lists, send out emails automatically or on a schedule, and analyze engagement.
Mailchimp is an ideal choice if you’re just starting out or if you are running a small business. Mailchimp’s basic service is free until your list hits 2,000 subscribers. It offers the main functionality you need without making managing your email marketing too complex.
Plus, Mailchimp now offers a slew of features and digital marketing tools (some under paid plans):
- Segmentation and personalization
- Landing page builders
- Form builders
- Audience insights
- CRM tools
- Predictive insights
3. Hootsuite
Hootsuite
There’s no question. You must maintain a presence on social media to remain competitive in the marketplace. You also probably already know that social media can be a huge time sink, even if you’re using it purely for marketing purposes rather than endlessly scrolling.
Luckily, you have digital marketing tools available to cut down on this time inefficiency, like Hootsuite.
Hootsuite provides a central management platform for all your social media channels and allows you to schedule posts in advance so you can get all your social media content for the coming weeks or months ready in one session.
You also get advanced reporting tools to see which of your social media campaigns are working most effectively and use this data to calculate ROI.
You can also track mentions of your brand and manage responses, all in one dashboard.
Hootsuite also offers tools for promoting your social media posts through the platform now as well.
4. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo
Your content strategy shouldn’t consist of wild stabs in the dark as you cover topics you think your audience will engage with.
That’s why 60% of B2B brands with the most successful content marketing have a documented strategy. Meanwhile, only 21% of the brands with the least successful content say they have a documented strategy.
To be successful in content marketing, you need to do your research properly, and this is why BuzzSumo is one of my favorite content marketing tools.
BuzzSumo shows content that is trending across social media based on searched topics. Following your search, you can analyze the results that are returned to see what’s so appealing about them and to get ideas of subjects to write about.
But BuzzSumo is moving beyond just basic content research and viral posts. Today, BuzzSumo offers tons of digital marketing tools like:
- Keyword research
- Influencer search
- Topic-based social media feeds
- Content analysis
- Crisis management
- Brand monitoring tools
5. KWFinder
KWFinder
SEO is a fundamental of online marketing and it’s important to get right. Not only should you make sure your site is structured properly and optimized for mobile, the content you produce must also contain relevant keywords that you have a good chance of ranking for in search results.
You need a special digital marketing tool to find those relevant keywords and start your search. You have several options available from the free Google Keyword Planner, to more complex suites of tools like SECockpit.
The more advanced digital marketing tools get quite expensive, with monthly subscription fees starting at $100 or more. However, options like KWFinder offer affordable, accurate, and useful insights at a perfect price point for small businesses.
Just put in a seed keyword and the tool will come back with hundreds of suggestions, search volume data, trends, and a ranking difficulty score for each word or phrase.
Mangools, the brand behind KWFinder, offers plans for individual tools or its full suite which includes a backlink tool, website analysis, SERP watchers, and more inside each one – along with a nice browser extension.
6 tools of marketing
HubSpot
HubSpot is a set of essential software tools that help businesses grow through inbound marketing. It can help your small business get organized, capture qualified leads, identify which prospects are likely to buy, and increase sales.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a complete social media management tools. You can connect accounts from all the major social media platforms. Features include scheduling posts, content curation, analytics, and team management.
Sendible
Sendible was designed for agencies needing to manage multiple clients as a team from one dashboard. It lets you schedule posts, monitor results, and generate professional looking reports.
Social Oomph
Social Oomph is primarily designed to schedule posts on Twitter. However, it can also be used to schedule posts on other networks like Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
SocialPilot
SocialPilot is an all-in-one social media management tool on a budget. It’s built for social media marketers and agencies to manage their accounts. You can work as a team to schedule posts in bulk, curate content, and analyze the results.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is best known for its visual user interface. It’s easy to see engagement or tracking results at a glance through charts and tables. You can schedule posts and reply to them from within the tool.
Conclusion
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