Marketing is a major part of the business world, and it’s important to keep in mind that marketing isn’t just a single entity. It’s made up of a lot of different tools and techniques, which you can use to promote your brand, your products, and your services. Which is why we’ve collected them all here for you. Some of these might seem familiar to you, some might seem new or strange. But trust us: if you want to be successful in the business world, you’re going to have to learn how to use all of these techniques.**So let’s get started!
Table of Contents
List Of Marketing Tools And Techniques
Marketing experts study data collection and analysis, consumer behavior, supply and demand and other technical aspects of marketing theory and implementation. Small business owners without this training can still benefit from the best practices of this discipline by using basic tools and techniques to help plan marketing activities before they execute them. Review your products, prices, brand and distribution to help create better advertising, public relations and promotions that build your business.
The Four Ps
- Marketing students learn about the “Four Ps” — product, price, position and place — and use this knowledge the rest of their careers. This technique for evaluating your selling strategy requires you to perform certain steps: examine your product to see whether it satisfies consumer demand; evaluate your price to determine whether changing it will affect your sales; create a brand that clearly positions you in the minds of consumers; and consider whether your selling locations support your brand and maximize your revenue opportunities. Selling a high-end product in big-box store, for example might damage your brand. Raising your price might increase sales because customers perceive that it must be superior to the competition.
Research
- Bringing together a group of consumers to have a frank discussion of your product or service, prices, position and selling locations provides invaluable information. Ask specific yes-or-no and multiple-choice questions during a focus group session, as well as open-ended questions that let your customers volunteer information you hadn’t considered. Ask them why they buy your product, what they think of your competitors and what you can do to get them to buy more often. Hold one or two informal meetings with six to eight customers and offer refreshments and a gift for their time. Surveys are invaluable in generating data that helps you understand your customers and the marketplace. Ask open-ended discussions during phone surveys conducted by your staff or use online surveys that gather short answers or multiple-choice and true-false answers. Websites such as SurveyMonkey let you create and use free online surveys which provide data to your desktop. Whichever method you use, survey all of the participants using the same questions so you can spot trends and consistent feedback.
Repetition
- Advertising doesn’t often result in a consumer stopping what they are doing to buy your product. A key tenet of successful advertising is that repetition eventually leads to sales. Consumers will buy when they have a need or impulse, and your advertising should attempt to stick in their head so that when they are ready to buy, you come to mind. Budget advertising campaigns in such a way that audiences see your ad at least three times. It might be better to advertise in two magazines three times each than to advertise in six different magazines once. You might reach more people advertising in six magazines, but you will have less of an impact on each.
Branding
- Companies that create a brand, or image, in the marketplace increase consumer preference and loyalty. A brand tells consumers that your product has a specific benefit, such as quality, affordability, status or some other intrinsic value. Some footwear companies make only women’s shoes to communicate to women that the business is expert in the female footwear category. Some companies price their products higher than the industry average so they can send a message of high quality. Ask your employees and customers what your brand is — if they can’t answer, you haven’t properly positioned yourself in your marketplace.
Social Media
- Social media gets your customers to promote your products and services by recommending them to their friends. Add Facebook Like buttons to your website pages so the public can share them easily with their friends. Create a Facebook business page for a more powerful marketing tool than a personal page. Business pages let you track more data about your customers and website. Twitter allows you to send regular messages to customers and allows you to respond quickly to important events.
6 tools of marketing
1.HUBSPOT
Think content marketing and you probably think HubSpot. The company has long been a leader in the industry, and the team practices what they preach with some of the most helpful, actionable content available online.
HubSpot is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes. Launched in 2006, this software is designed to help businesses use content marketing to increase website traffic and convert those visitors into leads.
Why Use HubSpot?
The HubSpot website builder makes it easy for you to update your website without the need to hire a designer or developer. The drag-and-drop technology means even the most technically challenged business owner or marketer can personalize content for all visitors.
If you’ve launched an inbound marketing strategy, it’s likely that blogging is a key part of this strategy. The HubSpot software makes creating and publishing blog posts a snap. It also helps you attract new visitors by suggesting recommended keywords.
For businesses using ads, HubSpot can measure clicks, impressions, customers, leads, and the ROI for each campaign. You can also use HubSpot to analyze your CTAs, manage and segment your lead lists, automate your social media efforts, and more.
HubSpot Pricing
HubSpot has a number of packages in different hubs. These include the Free HubSpot CRM, the Marketing Hub, the Sales Hub, and the Service Hub.
In the Marketing Hub, a free account allows you to begin capturing leads so you can see what they’re doing on your site. From there, the Starter account is $50 per month, the Basic account is $200 per month, and the Professional account is $800 per month. Obviously, each upgrade includes more features, but you’ll want to consider what you truly need before choosing a level.
2. Moz
SEO is a massive part of any inbound marketing strategy, and Moz is a comprehensive SEO tool with a variety of analytics and insights to help you increase your search engine rankings. Why? A higher ranking for your content means more people see your content—which is pretty helpful when you’re doing content marketing.
Moz was founded by Rand Fishkin in 2004, back when many businesses were still relying on simplistic SEO techniques. Moz managed to distinguish itself by learning how search engines ranked websites and sharing this information with its followers online.
Why Use Moz?
Moz has a huge selection of research tools. In fact, the options can be daunting. However, the team has provided a number of tutorials to help you understand SEO tactics so you can use these tools effectively.
Just as Google regularly crawls your website, so does Moz. They’ll notify you about issues that could impact performance. Moz also helps ensure that your on-page optimization is on point, with clear instructions so you can improve your website.
One of the biggest benefits of using Moz? The ability to stalk—er, monitor your competitors. You can use the Moz tool to see where your competitors are getting their links, which keywords they’re ranking for, and where they are in the search results. With this information, you can figure out how to adapt your strategies to become more competitive.
Moz Pricing
Moz Pro is the paid Moz tool, and plans range from $99 to $349 per month, depending on the size of your campaign and research needs. You can save 20% by choosing an annual account, and Moz also offers a 30-day free trial so you can see if the tool is right for you.
3.Hootsuite
You probably already know that social media is a crucial part of content marketing, right? With more than 3 billion people using social media every month, you can’t afford not to be active on social.
Unfortunately, it’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole with social media and spend hours on tasks that don’t have a significant impact on your business. That’s where Hootsuite comes in.
Why Use Hootsuite?
Hootsuite is a social media management tool used by more than 10 million people. It integrates with LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and now Pinterest.
One of the biggest benefits of using Hootsuite is being able to automate your social media and monitor multiple channels in one place. Instead of manually posting every day, you can schedule hundreds of posts at a time.
The robust analytics give you excellent insight into what types of posts are getting the most engagement, which times of the day work best for your audience, where your audience is located, your most popular links, and more.
Hootsuite Pricing
Professional plans start from $19 a month and allow one user to schedule unlimited posts on 10 social profiles. A team plan will give you 20 social profiles and 3 users for $99 a month. And a business plan will give you 50 social profiles and 5 users for $499 a month.
Hootsuite offers a free 30-day trial so you can and see if it works for your business.
4. Ahrefs
Data makes the content marketing world go round—something Ahrefs has used to its advantage. The company crawls 6 billion web pages every day and updates its index every 15 minutes. When you’re hoping to outrank your competitors, Ahrefs can give you the insights you need to make it happen.
Why Use Ahrefs?
With Ahrefs, you can easily see how many backlinks you have pointing to your website, how engaged your social media followers are, and which keywords are the most valuable. However, you can also use it to determine which content will be the most successful, letting you use your time effectively and create blog posts that you know will resonate with readers.
While Ahrefs began as a backlink tool, the company soon found a number of ways to use the huge amount of data at its fingertips. The keyword research tool allows you to analyze your competitors, see what keywords they’re using, and know where they’re ranking. The content explorer tool is also particularly helpful since you can see which topics are trending and getting the most shares, traffic, and referrals online.
Ahrefs Pricing
If you’d like to give Ahrefs a try before you commit, a 7-day trial is just $7. Monthly plans start at $99 for a Lite plan, while the Standard plan is $179 per month. An Advanced plan will allow 3 people to use the tool at the same time and will cost you $399. Agencies can pay $999 per month for 5 users at a time and up to 100 campaigns.
If you sign up for annual billing, you can enjoy 2 months free.
5. MailChimp
One of your biggest goals with content marketing? Convincing leads to hand over their email addresses. Then what? Then you use MailChimp to help turn those leads into paying customers.
Why Use MailChimp?
MailChimp customers send more than 1 billion emails every day, and there’s a reason why the software is so popular. Those emails actually get opened. Well, more often than usual, at least.
Have you ever opened an email that made you wonder what the sender was thinking? Maybe it wasn’t optimized for mobile, or the design was confusing? With MailChimp, you can see exactly how your email will look in someone’s inbox and how it will appear when viewed on a variety of devices.
MailChimp gives you access to a huge variety of tools in the one place. You can design your email without needing any coding or HTML knowledge.
You can easily segment your lists to send targeted emails, see who’s clicking your links, and get insights from top-notch analytics. You can to run A/B testing to see which subject lines and designs perform best. And you can tailor your emails specifically for your audience.
MailChimp Pricing
MailChimp plans are scalable, and you can create professional campaigns with a free account. As you grow, you can choose a Growing Business account for $10 a month or a Pro Marketer account for $199 a month.
6.Tend
The vast majority of the time people are not going to buy the first time they visit your site. When they do return to buy, they may come months later by Googling your company name or by typing your site address directly into their browser. That can make it really tricky to see which marketing tactics really drive sales. Tend organizes your data so that you can get a clear picture of which marketing tactics lead to ROI.
Why Use Tend?
Tend tracks individual visitors and shows a full history for each person that visits your site. You can see which websites each person came from, what pages on your site they looked at and what ads they clicked on. Tend tracks, individual users, no matter where they came from or how many times they come back. This makes it possible to know if a tactic worked even when people visit multiple times. Tend has a deep integration with Zapier so you can push sales data, CRM activity or other important actions from other software tools you use without a developer. This makes it easy to see which marketing tactics are driving key user behavior whether it happens on or off your site. The customizable dashboard and flexible search provides an intuitive look at all your data in real time so you can cut out ineffective tactics and double down on tactics that provide positive ROI.
Tend Pricing
Tend’s pricing is $49 a month for up to 5,000 identified contacts. After that, the pricing goes up by $.002 per identified contact per month.
Conclusion
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